Posted on August 20, 2007
If you have diabetes, eating healthy meals or healthy diabetes diet plan helps you get over the problems you may face with diabetes. Good nutrition helps in proper growth, and also to reach and maintain the right weight for your height. But proper planning of meals helps you keep your blood sugar levels on track, which is very important for people with diabetes.
Eating well also helps prevent diabetic problems that may occur later in life, like heart diseases. People with diabetes need not follow strict diets, but they have to pay attention to when and what they are eating.
Diet Tips for Diabetes Patients
People with diabetes need to have a diabetes diet with a good balance of nutrition and taste. Here we give some estimates for over the course of a day:
Take Dietician’s Help
Your diabetes health care dietician tells you the meal planning guidelines. Your diet plan will not tell you the specific foods to eat, but it suggests mealtimes, food groups to select from, and amounts to eat from these food groups.
There’s no fun and happiness in having a boring diet you don’t like. Your dietician helps build the meal plan based on the foods you usually like to eat. To find out what you like to eat, your dietician may ask you to keep a food diary or write down what you eat and drink for three days to get a better idea of your tastes.
Your meal plan probably looks different from others’ because it is designed based on your needs and health goals. For example, if you have to lose weight, then your dietician helps you focus on controlling the number of calories and fat grams you eat.
Diabetic Meal Plan
Some people with diabetes, especially those who’ve just developed it use a program called “exchange meal plan” as a guide for what they eat each day. This is very useful for people with diabetes who are overweight and who have to pay attention to balancing of calories and nutrients they eat each day. For this meal plan, foods are divided into six groups: starch, fruit, milk, fat, vegetable, and meat. In this plan a serving size or amount for foods in each group is set. And there is a similar amount of calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat in each serving. It allows some flexibility in planning meals because one can exchange, or substitute, choices from a food list. The number of servings from each food group decided for each meal and snack will be based on total number of calories that a person needs each day.
There are another two types of meal plans that help make sure that amount of carbohydrates that a person’s eating matches up with the insulin or other diabetes medicines he or she takes. More focus should be on carbohydrate intake because they are mainly responsible for the rise in blood sugar levels. With the “constant carbohydrate meal plan”, the person takes a certain amount of carbohydrates in each meal and snack. Then, he or she takes insulin or other diabetes medicines at the same times and in the same amounts each day. It is very useful and easy to follow for people who normally eat and exercise about the same amount from day to day.
Another planning option is “carbohydrate counting meal plan”. Many people with diabetes use ‘carb counting’ to find out the amount of carbohydrates in the foods they eat at each meal or snack. Then they match their insulin dosage to that carb amount. This plan really works well for people who take a dose of insulin with each meal. It also works well for those who need more flexibility, because the person takes insulin when actually eating, rather than at a set time each day.
» Filed Under Obesity Related Diseases
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