How to Make a Healthy Meal Plan
By: Rosemarie Dainelli Perrin Source: Living with Diabetes Date Posted: 2007
For people with diabetes, there are many ways to plan healthy meals. Two common methods are carbohydrate counting and food exchanges. For those who need to lose weight, it may be necessary to count calories as well. Work with your health care team to find the method (or mix of methods) that works best for you. Your team will also instruct you about how to time meals and check your blood-sugar levels.
Counting Carbs
Carbohydrate counting means keeping track of the total amount of carbohydrates you eat at each meal or snack and staying within the limits you and your health care provider have determined are right for you. This method is particularly valuable if you take insulin or other diabetes medications and must monitor your blood-sugar levels meal by meal. You can use food labels to count grams of carbohydrates. For foods that lack nutrition labels (such as fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats and other unpackaged foods), you can consult books and other sources of information that list their carbohydrate content.
Food Exchanges
Food exchanges are another popular way to make food choices within a healthy meal plan. Once you’ve established targets or limits with your health care team, you can “exchange” one food for another so long as you stay within a group of foods that have similar amounts of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and calories. Using food exchanges works well with unlabeled foods.
Calories
The American Diabetes Association suggests that overweight people with diabetes moderately restrict calories. With your dietitian, determine how many calories you need each day to maintain your weight. Now subtract 250 from that number and confine your daily caloric intake to the result; you will shed a little more than half a pound every 10 days. (One pound of fat contains about 4,000 calories.) Cutting calories like this plus exercising should allow you to lose even more.
Timing Meals
There are two important points about timing your meals. First, it is better to eat small meals more often than big meals less often. This pattern requires less insulin and helps you lose weight. Second, when you eat at the same times every day, you set a pattern that helps keep your blood-sugar level within good limits.
Here are some tips for developing healthy meal patterns:
• Spread the carbohydrates you eat throughout the day. Try to eat more carbohydrates when you are physically active.
• Establish an appropriate amount of carbohydrates for each meal and snack you eat, and stick to that quantity every day.
• Eat several smaller meals a day rather than two or three larger meals.
• Do not skip meals.
Checking Your Blood Sugar
Some people with diabetes—especially those with type 1 diabetes and those with type 2 who take insulin or other diabetes medications—monitor their blood-sugar levels regularly, several times a day. Even if you won’t eventually have to be quite so rigorous, it helps to monitor your level at different times of the day as you begin your new diet so that you can see how different foods affect your blood sugar. This is the best way to determine whether a certain food might be appropriate or not in your diet. For example, if your blood-glucose level is high two to three hours after you eat a given food, you should reduce the portion of that food in the future. If, by contrast, your glucose is at a reasonable level after you eat a certain food, you can be reasonably sure that you are practicing wise portion control.
Your health care provider will work with you to explain how often and when to check your blood glucose and what your target ranges should be at different times of the day.
Balance Your Meals
Talk to your health care provider to learn how to balance your meals and how much of each food type to eat. Healthy eating means consuming a variety of foods. Try to plan your meals around whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. Limit meat and other fatty foods.
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