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Diabetic Diet
Diabetic Diet Meal Plan  A proper meal plan can help you manage your
diabetes and blood sugar
levels. Your plan should include scheduling and establishing
a routine for eating your meals. You should focus on eating
about the same amount of carbs each day and meal. Having consistency in your meal plans and carbohydrate and calorie intake can help control blood glucose levels. Consuming too many carbs or calories at any given time or a given day can cause fluctuations and make it more difficult to manage your diabetes. Secondly your meal plan should plan out portion sizes of the foods you eat. By eating smaller meals more often you are helping keep your blood sugar under control. You should have about 50% - 55% of calories from carbs, 30% from fats and about 10% to 15% from proteins. Lastly your meal plan should include food selections. The key to managing diabetes is choosing the right foods especially your carbohydrates. You want to focus on complex carbohydrates versus simple carbs. Simple carbs are primarily sugars and offer very little nutritional value. On the other hand, complex carbs are starchy foods that break down into sugars slowly so the blood sugar levels rise gradually. For diabetics, the body is able to manage complex carbs easier even with insulin resistance. Selecting Healthy Foods for a Diabetic Diet
Adding veggies, fruits and protein to every meal is yet another way to use some common sense and eat healthy. Carbohydrates can sometimes be more difficult in what to select. The American Diabetes Association has created the Diabetes Food Pyramid to make it easier for you to the right choices and build your diabetic diet. Diabetes Food Pyramid For Your Diabetic Diet  This food pyramid is divided into 6 food groups
with each group varying
in size. The bottom of the pyramid (largest group) represents the foods that you can have the most servings whereas the top of the pyramid (smallest group) represents the foods that you should limit servings.
Fruits Fruits like vegetables offer lots of nutritional value and are generally considered a healthy food. Experts say to get 2 – 4 servings of fruit a day. These include berries, cantaloupe, oranges, apples, pears, bananas, etc. Most fruits are low on the glyecimic index but watermelon is high and mangos, apricots, raisins and pineapple are a medium GI fruits. Milk This is the next food group in the diabetes food pyramid. Milk products offer lots of vitamins, calcium and protein. When selecting your milk products make them low fat or fat free to minimize saturated fats. You should try to get 2 – 3 servings per day from this group. A typical serving size is 1 cup of milk or 1 cup of yogurt. Meat and Meat Substitutes This group includes your meats like chicken, beef, turkey, and pork. This group also includes other sources of protein like eggs, peanut butter, fish, tofu, cheese, cottage cheese and dried beans. For your diabetic diet, your protein servings should be spread out amongst all your meals and you should get about 4 – 6 ounces a day. A 3 ounce serving is about the size of a deck of cards so be careful not to get all your servings in just one meal. Other serving sizes are ¼ cup cottage cheese, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon peanut butter and ½ cup tofu. Fats, Sweets and Oils This last group is the smallest group for your diabetic diet and should be saved for those special occasions. Foods in this group include potato chips, cookies, candy, cakes and fried foods. These foods contain a lot of sugar and/or fat. Many of these foods offer little or no nutritional value. Keep your portions small like ½ cup ice cream, 2 cookies or 1 small cupcake. In this group is also alcohol as alcohol contains a lot of sugar. So avoid drinking alcoholic drinks as much as possible. When building your diabetic diet, work with your doctor and nutritionist and use the diabetes food pyramid as a good guide for selecting the right foods. If you want to monitor and select your carbohydrates using the glycemic index, use this link to search their database - glycemicindex.com. On this page, just select the link to their database and type in the food item you want to find. Should you Count Carbs or Calories?
If you learn to eat healthier foods, watch your portions and manage when you eat, you may not need to count either calories or carbohydrates. However, until you have fully adjusted to eating healthier you should probably count one or the other until you get a feel for what your meal plans should be. Although counting either carbs or calories, or both, can seem like a pain and extra work, it is a great way to get control of what foods you are eating. Knowing just how many calories, carbohydrates, fats, etc. you eat will help you adjust and learn to eat healthy. If you want to track the foods you eat, just use this excel spreadsheet to track calories, fats, protein, carbohydrates and net carbs. This file will even calculate the Weight Watcher points value if you are a Weight Watchers member. If you do not have Microsoft Excel, visit the weight loss tools for a link to a free, compatible software that will open this file. Diabetic Diet Food Tracker To save this file to your computer, simply right mouse click on the link and select "save as". Find out more about the different types of diabetes and symptoms. Related Articles Stress and Diabetes Find out how managing stress can help manage your blood glucose levels. Exercise and Diabetes Exercise has many medical benefits for everyone but can also be especially beneficial for diabetics in order to manage blood sugar levels.
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