As it’s summer and it’s hot (we often hover in the upper 30sC), we eat mostly salads at the moment. But it doesn’t have to be boring, there are a lot of combinations you can use.
First, breakfast and the traditional eggs.
During the morning I took my blood pressure and it was 117/81. Pretty decent given that I had high blood pressure at the start of my diabetes.
Then at lunch time, I had the first salad of the day. Mostly red cabbage, tomatoes, yellow peppers, cucumber, and some seeds.
Then for dinner, I had the second salad of the day. This time, it was cucumber, avocado, red peppers, onions, and mozzarella.
As expected, this sort of food is mild on the system.
Hi, Do you have estimated calorie consumption or breakdown of carb/fat/proteins? Do you use salad dressing? Great content.
Hi there,
No I don’t count calories. I’ve been on calorie restrictive diets a lot of my childhood and they just turned food into punishment. So I eat things I know are low carbs (mostly vegetables, no fruit) and lowish calories, but that’s as far as I go. So I don’t know what the breakdown is.
It’s not too important to spend a lot of time on details. It’s always tempting to try to find small miracle things and count everything to try t get to some perfect balance. But that’s not effective in the long term. What you need as a diabetic is find the diet that works for you and that you can sustain for as long as you need it. As long as you lower the carbs as much as you can and you’re not hungry all the time (it’s ok to be hungry just before a meal), then you’ll go in the right direction.
Studies such as DiRECT have used a shake-based 800 calories diet, but it was medically supervised and a lot of the participants found it very hard. You don’t need to lose 15kg in 8 weeks like they did. As soon as you switch to lower carbs, you’ll see your glycaemia drop (for me it took less than 3 days to get down to near normal blood sugar) and you’ll start losing weight (exercise certainly helps). It will just take a bit longer (it took me 3 months to lose the first 20kgs, but I was taking Metformin at the time).
For salad dressing, we usually use homemade vinaigrette: some oil, lots of vinagre, maybe a bit of mustard. We don’t buy any ready-made food at all.
Thanks for reading.