My Breakfast Enigma

Something amazing happened yesterday.  Take a look:

(For the American folks, that 5.8 mmol/l is a 104 mg/dl.)

Can anyone guess what I had for breakfast?  I’ll tell you at the end of this post…

This is amazing because every every morning I eat a pretty low carb low GI breakfast, and every every morning I spike within the first two hours and then come down hard.  I’m doing everything I can insulin-wise, including an aggressive bolus (a superbolus, in fact) followed by a major decrease in basal to 0.05 u/hr for the next three hours.  Ideally I’d pre-bolus, but with 2 kids to feed and clothe in the mornings, I’m worried about the impact a delayed (or worse – forgotten!) breakfast would have.  Safety first!

When I was pregnant, I ate balkan yogurt (high protein, high fat) with berries and walnuts for virtually every breakfast, and it worked pretty darn well.  But it also made me pretty darn sick of balkan yogurt and walnuts.  (I’ll eat berries any day, any time!)  So that’s off the table, literally.

Low GI dry cereals are a disaster.  Low GI hot cereals are better, but still far from ideal.

It may be that a further reduction in breakfast carbs is necessary to eliminate that spike and reduce my insulin such that it doesn’t cause a crash, but I’ve been nervous to go below 20g of carbs.  This is partially because I’m breastfeeding and less comfortable with messing around with my nutrient profiles while doing so, but also because I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around how to get over that morning liver dump hump (why does that sound so gross?) with less insulin.  (To be fair, my version of an “aggressive” bolus at breakfast is 2-3 units for 20-30g of carbs, otherwise the mid-morning crash is even bigger.)

Maybe I’m missing something, though.  Maybe I just need to try lower carb.  But what does one eat for an uber-low, or even zero-carb breakfast that will stick with you until lunch but does not contain artificial sweeteners or involve eggs every morning.  I like eggs, but if I eat them every morning, I won’t anymore.  Also not interesting to me is “dinner for breakfast”.  No chicken breasts, thank you.

I’ve even tried a few meal replacement options – drinks and bars.  You know, Martinis and chocolate!  (Kidding.)  To be honest, this is where I’ve had the most luck.  They’re also really quick, which is great!  The downside is that I don’t recognize about 80% of the ingredients in either.  I’ve been able to avoid artificial sweeteners, but it’s hard to say for sure what else I’m not avoiding.

So I’m looking for breakfast options, preferably of the low-carb, low-GI variety.  Something really quick (or make-ahead) and healthy (including low-sodium).  I’d also play around with some zero-carb (or almost zero-carb) ideas…  Anyone?  Suggestions (of either food or food-related resources) are welcome!

So what was the breakfast that gave rise to this lack of a rise?  What perfect food was it that made me almost flatline (in a good way)?

This:

Another Splenda Recipe – Cookies

As promised, I have for you today another Splenda baking experience.

I didn’t include the type of cookies in the title of this post because (a) I don’t like the Splenda website’s title of “Cranchewey Cran-nutty Carrot Cookies” (really, Splenda folks?), and (b) the only other title I could come up with was “Cranberry Carrot Coconut Pineapple Walnut Cookies”, and that was too long.

My past baking experiences from the Splenda website have been delicious and I was so impressed with the recipes that I tried.  Unfortunately this one didn’t exactly follow suit.

I’m not going to re-post the recipe, because you can find it right here.  But I will post this picture of the cookies in progress:

It reminded me a lot of coleslaw.

I found this recipe to be a lot of work.  There was walnut-chopping (mainly because I buy my walnuts halved from Costco and the recipe called for chopped), there was carrot-grating, there was pineapple weighing (I couldn’t find the 8oz can that the recipe called for).  It wasn’t hard work, but it was more labour-intensive than your average batch of cookies.  Or I’m just lazy.  Anyway…

The recipe claimed to make 4 1/2 dozen cookies, but I got quite a few more out of it (about 6 dozen), based on the instruction to use tablespoon-sized scoops.  On one hand this is good because now I have more cookies, each of which is only 6g net carbs (instead of 8g).  On the other hand…my cookies are small.

Also, they really don’t look like I expected them to.

This is the picture from the Splenda website:

These are my cookies:

Mine look a lot less tasty and a lot more healthy.  Frankly, they taste healthy too.  I do enjoy them, but they’re not quite the sweet treat I was hoping for.

The final verdict (by me, who is not an expert, but more along the lines of Average-Betty-Baker):  Not bad, but not really worth the work.

“Sugarfree”

I had a real “Oh Shit!” moment this week, which some of you may have already read about on Facebook.  If you didn’t (or if you did and want a refresher), here’s what happened.

I love Starbucks soy lattés.  My “usual” is the grande decaf soy latté with sugarfree caramel.  Decaf because I’m a caffeine wuss (pregnant or not – that much caffeine does not do this body any good), soy because it tastes good and raises my bloodsugar more slowly than milk, and sugarfree caramel because…well..you know, the whole diabetes thing.  This drink has 13g of carbs in it, with the aforementioned slow rise, so it’s generally very manageable from a D-standpoint.

Normally I get my latté after breakfast.  (To be clear, this is about a once-a-week thing – not daily.  I’m not made of money!)  Part of the reason for this timing is that the walk to/from Starbucks, paired with a fresh breakfast bolus (I drop fast with exercise after breakfast), means I often don’t even need to bolus for those 13g of slow-rise carbs.  It’s one of those beautiful diabetes moments. 🙂

But this Wednesday was different.  I ran into a friend on the way in to work, and we decided to go for coffee immediately.  I dropped off my coat/bag/etc. in my office – including my breakfast, which I always eat first thing upon getting settled at my desk – and headed to Starbucks.

At this point I did not have my breakfast bolus hard at work.  In fact, I likely had some stubborn dawn phenomenon still kicking around and pulling my bloodsugar up instead of down.  This is one of the things that should have occurred to me, but didn’t.

When we got to Starbucks, I started to think about how nice it would be to get one of their special holiday drinks, so I asked the barista whether they made any of them in a decaf-soy-sugarfree version.  She said, “Yes, we can do the peppermint mocha for you.”

“Great!”  I thought, and ordered it – no whip or chocolate shavings.

Spoiler alert: As it turns out, “mocha” isn’t sugarfree.  This is the other thing that should have occurred to me, but didn’t.

So I walked away, happily drinking my holiday drink…got back to my desk…ate my breakfast (25g of low-GI carbs)…finished my coffee…and thought, “That sure was sticky for sugarfree.”

As I tossed my empty cup in the garbage, it occurred to me that maybe I should see if I could find the nutritional information for my new drink online – just to see how it compared to my “usual”.  I didn’t find the information I was looking for (re: their holiday drinks) on the Starbucks website, but did manage to rebuild my drink using the Starbucks app for iPhone.  As I built it, it became clear that the peppermint syrup was sugarfree, the soy milk had its usual carbs…and the mocha syrup was not even pretending to be sugarfree (nor decaf, for that matter).

This was the “Oh Shit” moment.

My rebuilt drink had 64g of carbs in it!  (My friend managed to make it add up to 56g, but I’m still not sure how…and either way, it was still way too much!)

With my breakfast, I had ingested 89g of carbs.

My normal morning involves 25g-30g.

My morning is the spikiest time of my day.

Oh, and I’m pregnant…and my endo wants me to try to avoid spikes over 8.0 mmol/l (144 mg/dl).

Knowing that my breakfast was low GI, and that there was a lot of protein in the drink, I didn’t want to just hit myself with a massive bolus all at once in case I bottomed out.  Plus I had no idea how much it was going to take to get me to a normal level, since I never ever have that many carbs in the morning.

I started testing every half hour an bolusing as needed, but quit bolusing as soon as I started to see my levels going back down.

My peak: 9.9 mmol/l (178 mg/dl).

An hour later I was 7.2 mmol/l (130 mg/dl), and by lunch (after a bit more walking as well) I was down to 3.7 mmol/l (67 mg/dl).

I didn’t stay under 8.0, but I’d call this a successful recovery, not to mention a well-protected bun in my oven.

At first I was frustrated with the barista for telling me this drink was “sugarfree” when it wasn’t.  But, in all honesty, I don’t expect everyone who serves me food/drinks to understand the ins and outs of “carbs” vs. “sugar”, or to fully understand the nutritional information of everything they serve.  I don’t expect every Starbucks barista to know what it means for me to experience a mistake in the realm of 50g of carbs – especially when pregnant.  If she just thinks “which holiday drink has sugarfree syrup in it” when I ask for sugarfree, I don’t blame her.

My diabetes is my responsibility.  It’s up to me to do my due diligence in a case like this – whether it means asking more questions (e.g. “So what all is in the drink?”  “Is the mocha sugarfree?”) or checking nutritional information before ingesting delicious holiday treats.  It’s on me to do this.

Lesson learned.

Pregnant Cravings and Baking with Splenda

During my last pregnancy I was fortunate enough to crave healthy food like fruit, salmon and eggs.  During this pregnancy I haven’t been so lucky.  I’ve still craved fruit, so that’s been good at least, but I have been having major cravings for sweets, which has been really challenging.

Also during my last pregnancy I tried to avoid artificial sweeteners for the most part.  Not because it’s recommended (as long as the sweeteners are in low quantities and the safe varieties, I’m told that they’re fine), but just because I felt better eating more natural foods while pregnant.

This time my sweet cravings have overtaken my desire to avoid artificial sweeteners.  I’m still not willing to deal with the bloodsugar spikes that invariably come with eating “real” sweets (for me, anyway), so I finally turned to Splenda and to the recipes on their website.

And I’m so glad I did!  Typically I’ve found Splenda-baking to taste like…well…Splenda.  But these two recipes I recently tried definitely rival their higher carb counterparts.  They’re delicious!

(First off, I apologize that I don’t have higher quality pictures.  I was going for quick practical over fancy and artsy.  If you want to see professional shots of these goodies, click on the Splenda website links below.)

The first one I made was their Classic Cheesecake.  At 9g net carbs per slice, with the high fat and high protein from the cream cheese, this one gave me almost no spike.  The serving sizes (16 pieces) seem small at first, but they’re heavy, so one small piece is plenty.  I will definitely be making this one again.

Next I made their Chocolate Cake Brownies.  These are lower in fat and protein than the cheesecake, and also only 6g net carbs per brownie (1/16th of the recipe).  They’re somewhere in between the crumbly, cakey brownies and the fudgy gooey ones, but probably closer to the cakey type (as the name suggests).  Again – love ’em!

Since I don’t normally eat a lot of sweets (even fake ones) when I’m not pregnant, I”m still trying to keep my junk-food intake under control while I am pregnant, but it’s nice to know that I do have options.  If I find any more tasty low(er) carb recipes for baked goods like these, I’ll be sure to pass them on.  (Maybe even with better pictures next time.)

Some Randoms

I haven’t done a random list of unrelated (or partially related) stuff for a while, so here’s one for you….

1. This was my lunch today.  It was a-maz-ing.  Two slices of Weight Watchers 100% whole wheat bread, a bit of light Miracle Whip, sliced grilled seasoned chicken, grated marble cheddar cheese, and some italian seasoning…..toasted to perfection in my toaster oven.  My husband always makes this delicious sandwich, and today it was my turn.  With my special bread, it was only 15g (net) of carbs (that’s 20g CHO less 5g fibre)…plus maybe 1/2 a gram for the Miracle Whip (I only use a bit).  YES!!!

2. I was recently introduced to almond milk by another woman with diabetes that I know.  (This is a different brand than she recommended, but the only one I could find in unsweetened.)  Cow’s milk tends to spike my bloodsugar a lot, so I tend to avoid it in drinking quantities.  This stuff (unsweetened) has only 3g of CHO and 1g of fibre for 2g net CHO per cup.  And if it’s not sweet enough for ya…add a bit of Splenda!  It’s not bad for a milk substitute.

3. Okay, this isn’t 12 of 12, so no more pictures.  The last time I was pregnant I craved things like salmon and eggs.  I was lucky.  What pregnant woman has healthy cravings like that – let alone one with diabetes?!  This time I haven’t been so lucky.  For a while it was salt, and I was managing okay, but lately it’s been all the worst NSFD (not suitable for diabetes) sweets – lemon meringue pie, chocolate fudge, massive bakery muffins, donuts….aaaaaaahhhh!!!!  I haven’t given in yet because I’m too scared of the impact on my bloodsugar.  So today I’m trying to appease my cravings in two ways: (a) really thin pieces of really dark chocolate (b) these low-carb lemon poppyseed muffins that I’m about to make.  I haven’t made them yet, or you’d have another picture here.  (My dietitian assures me that baking quantities of Splenda are still safe during pregnancy.  Whew!)

4. On to something other than food…. I recently had to have my Contour USB meter replaced because it was acting up on me.  Every now and then, after counting down to zero, it would stall out on me and then give me an error message instead of a bloodsugar reading.  Bayer was great in replacing my meter and also giving me some extra test strips to make up for the wasted ones.  But now, no more than a week after starting the new one…it’s not working either!  When I put the test strip in, there’s a funny click and it doesn’t turn on like it’s supposed to.  Sometimes it still does, but most of the time it doesn’t.  (The battery is fully charged.  It’s not that.)  So it looks like I’ll be replacing this one now too!  Disappointing.

5. This pregnancy is making me more tired than I ever remember being with the last one.  So tired.  I need about 10 hours of sleep per night to be fully functional – and that’s completely impossible during the week.  I don’t have anything else to say about that.

6. This past week I had the pleasure of sitting down for lunch with a woman who works for the same company as me who is a diabetes veteran and has retinopathy.  I hadn’t actually met her before, so she joked when we met up that we were having a “blind date” (LOL…retinopathy humour).  It’s typically been pretty easy for me to find people with diabetes around me to connect with, but I have to be honest that connecting with someone else with diabetic retinopathy is really something special.  Not to downplay diabetes at all, but to be able to talk to someone who truly understands what it’s like to have that first retinal haemorrhage, and truly understands the fear of more bleeds, more lasers, more proliferation, and more vision loss (temporary or permanent), is sadly comforting.  I’ve been lucky enough to meet other people like this online – through forums and through this blog – but this is the first time I’ve been able to meet one of these people in person.  Hopefully some day I can have some more “blind dates”.  🙂

All for now.  I have an appointment with Dr. Ophtho this week, so I’ll probably have some more on the topic of retinopathy for you before long.

Recommendation: Kozy Shack

I’ve recently discovered Kozy Shack’s no-sugar-added puddings, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

So now I’m recommending them to you!  (Yes, you.)

The only two varieties available at my grocery store are the Chocolate and the Rice Pudding, but both are really tasty!  They’re both low in carbs and fat, and they’re both gluten-free.  They each have only 1g of fat per serving.  The Chocolate has 10g of carbs and 4g of fibre and the Rice Pudding has 11g of carbs and 3g of fibre.  Plus, they have 3g and 4g of protein, respectively.

Their website shows other NSA varieties too (e.g. tapioca, cherries jubilee, black forest, and apple pie a la mode), but so far I haven’t been able to find them in any of my grocery stores.  Maybe some of you folks will have better luck.

Give them a try!  And let me know what you think of them!

Another A1C Update and Some Randoms

This past week was my Month 2 A1C test with my CDE.  (That is, my 2nd month of really trying to tighten control to possibly prepare myself for possibly having another baby…possibly.)  Last month’s A1C was 6.6 – a significant improvement over the previous month.  I felt that this month had been pretty good, in spite of a few ups and downs, so I expected to see another drop this time.  

As it turned out, I was 6.6 again.  In all honesty, I’m a bit disappointed.  I know a 6.6 is really a fantastic A1C, a big improvement over a few months ago, and a HUGE improvement over the control I’ve had for most of my life.  It’s just that I was trying so hard….and it didn’t move. 

*sigh* 

I’m totally fine with a 6.6 A1C pre-conception, and I’m sure my endo will be too, but I really want it to be lower during pregnancy, and this makes me doubt my ability to do that – particularly with the majorly fluctuating hormones that go with pregnancy.

So even though I probably shouldn’t be, I’m a bit disappointed.

Anyway…that’s the A1C update.  On to the randoms:

1. I see my endo next week.  I was supposed to see her during the last week of April, but she had to change the appointment date, so now I see her this week.  Since I got my bloodwork for the appointment done yesterday, I guess there’s not much more I can do to tighten control before seeing her.  All I can do is log.  Log log log.  Blech.

2. Closely related to #1 above, I’m having a log-block.  I’m already getting VERY sick of it.  The breaks I take from it are, unfortunately, only serving to make my logs look like swiss cheese – with big holes in what should be trends.  It makes for a lot more guesswork.  But seriously – if I have a log burnout already, how can I possibly keep it going during a pregnancy that may not even start for months yet…..?  It’s going to be a balance between optimal logging and realistic logging, I guess.  I feel like I need to make a log joke here, but I can only think of lame ones, like how I have enough logs already to build a cabin or something like that….so let’s skip it. 

3.  For a long time now I’ve been using Arrowhead Mills corn spaghetti (gluten-free) in place of  “real” pasta.  But last week, while making a delicious casserole, I realized that Catelli Smart Pasta actually has virtually the same amount of carbs and fibre…but also has more protein than the Arrowhead Mills type.  Since I’m not eating gluten-free anymore, I think I’m going to make the switch.  I have yet to find any truly low-carb pasta here in Canada (let me know when Dreamfields gets here…or should I just bite the bullet and order it online?), so it seems that Catelli Smart Pasta in small portions is my best bet for now.

4. On a less positive note, lately my blog stats are showing more and more people finding me through search engine queries like this: will I go blind with retinopathy?  It makes me sad – people looking for some comfort while they send answerless questions into cyberspace.  I don’t know, folks.  I really don’t.  I’m sorry.  All I can say is take care of what you have, and do it now.

5.  Just because I hate to leave with such a sombre tone, here’s a non-D random for you.  I’m really liking The Black Keys lately…especially this song.  Give it a listen!

Gluten-Free….Free?

In my 2010 recap, I mentioned that I may have given up on the whole gluten-free thing.  Today’s post is a bit of a better explanation of that comment.

First, the backstory.

Early in 2010 I started eating low-carb.  I stuck with mostly natural foods because I wasn’t interested in ingesting a lot of artificial sweetener.  On a diet of largely meat, fruit, veggies, yogurt, cheese and nuts I felt GREAT!  It got me wondering what it was that I had eliminated that had been “the problem”.  Not that there was a large problem, but I definitely did not feel that good (digestively-speaking) with my previous diet.

Because diabetes and caeliac disease are so closely tied together, I wondered if maybe gluten was the issue.  My new diet consisted of little to no gluten, other than on Cheat Days.  When I did cheat, I typically felt like crap afterwards, and this started to solidify my thoughts about me and gluten – i.e. we don’t get along.

Little by little I started to buy products labelled “gluten-free”.  I still kept my consumption of them in check from a carb standpoint, but I did start to eat gluten-free bread, cookies, pasta, etc. from time to time.  And then from more time to more time.  Still in small quantities, but more and more often.

After a while I noticed that my digestive health wasn’t as good as it was earlier in the year.  Again, no significant problems, but my stomach and guts started to complain occasionally again.

By the end of the year I was pretty much fed up with eating gluten-free.  Over the Christmas break I was sick and I was at family gatherings and I wanted comfort food and carbs and GLUTEN!  So I did it.  I ate a cookie…I ate a square…I ate a pancake…I ate homemade toast.  And guess what?  As long as I didn’t overdo the “treat” type food (or throw my bloodsugar out of whack), my stomach felt fine! 

Without getting tested for caeliac I can’t know for sure that I don’t have it, I guess, and even if I don’t have caeliac it’s still possible that I have a “gluten sensitivity” I suppose.  A lot of people do and don’t realize it.  But it’s terribly hard to eat gluten-free and even harder to eat gluten-free and low(ish)-carb.  So I’m scrapping it.  Done.  Gluten-free-free.

That said, I really do still want to eat for my bloodsugar (i.e. low(ish) carb) and eat to feel good.  My guess is that I started to feel worse when I started to put back in less natural food.  I think maybe a natural diet is the one I should be one.  But I need to be realistic or it won’t work.

So my new plan for 2011 is to keep my carbs limited and try to eat naturally.  It’s pretty similar to the plan for 2010, but I’m allowing myself a few leniencies that I didn’t back then:

1. Potatoes.  Boiled potatoes in small quantities don’t seem to screw up my bloodsugar too badly.  I’m keeping them.  Plus they’re natural.  And tasty.

2. This gluten-free pasta. 

It’s all corn.  Corn flour and corn meal and that’s all.  I can handle that.  Again, it doesn’t do anything too significant to my bloodsugar if eaten in small quantities (just add lots of meat and veggies!) and it really tastes almost the same as “real pasta”.  It stays.

3. Quinoa.  My massage therapist introduced me to this little grain and I love it!  It’s super high in fibre and protein, and it’s dense and filling so you don’t need much.  It’s a great substitute for rice, but it’s also good in things like salad.  Yum!  It’s going nowhere.

4. Occasional cheats.  I don’t even necessarily mean full-blown Cheat Days or Cheat Meals.  I don’t see myself taking down a half-loaf of garlic bread, full plate of pasta, and then a brownie with ice cream on any kind of regular (or irregular) basis.  I just mean that I might one day have a sandwich – on rye bread (25g of net carbs), or use a chocolate chip cookie to feed a low.  Complete deprivation is just asking for failure, if you ask me.

Anyway, that’s my new plan.  Wish me luck!

Gluten-Free Pizza – Delivered!

Since I’ve been eating low(ish) carb and (mostly) gluten-free, one of the things I have missed most has been pizza.  I love pizza.  Love it!  But it really is a difficult meal from a diabetes standpoint, and then if you add in the gluten-free factor, you’re pretty much out of luck.

I actually tried making my own at home recently, after finding gluten-free pizza crusts in the freezer section of my local grocery store, but they were really thick crusts, and one “personal sized” pizza was about 70g of carbs, so I could only eat half.  It just wasn’t the same.  I need to find gluten-free pitas (the skinny kind) and make GF pita pizzas!  But I digress…

Recently, a local pizza joint (a home-grown franchise that has locations in Manitoba and Alberta) has been advertising gluten-free pizza crusts.  I was skeptical, but finally last night we decided to get delivery and give one a try.

You know what?  It was awesome!  It tasted almost like a regular pizza crust (just a bit “nuttier”) and was a really nice thin crust, so low enough carbs that it didn’t cause a bloodsugar mess!  I actually over-estimated the carbs, took too much insulin and ended up low after a couple of hours (even with an extended bolus), but I didn’t even get a nasty spike later from it.  It was greasy, as most delivery pizza is, but not as greasy as many I’ve had in the past!  My husband even commented on that fact!  (He got the regular crust so I could save the rest of my gluten-free one.)

Anyway, here’s a picture of my new favourite gluten-free and not-even-too-diabetes-unfriendly pizza!

I like pizza!

If you live in Winnipeg, Brandon, Steinbach, Winkler, or Calgary and want to give it a try, you can check them out at www.pizzahotline.ca.   In Winnipeg, they’re the 222-2222 number (yeah, I hate their ads too), but you can also order online!  (Nope, they’re not giving me free pizza for saying this…but if they wanted to, I wouldn’t decline it!) 

Yum!

The Carb Struggle

Sometime around June of this year it occurred to me that I had been eating a low(ish) carb diet for about six months.  It also occurred to me that, if I had gotten used to it and was happy with it after six months, it should be smooth sailing to continue with it.

Not so.

I’m going to be honest with you.  I’m heading down that slippery slope again.  I don’t know if it’s the fact that being back at work makes me busier and makes it harder to do the “proper meal” thing, or if it’s the colder fall weather that makes me want to hibernate and ingest mass quantities of carboliciousness (which doesn’t bode well for the upcoming Winnipeg Winter), but either way this is getting harder and I’m getting worse at it.

The thing is, I have every reason to continue with it!  Well, three reasons, anyway:

1. Lowering my carb intake, and thus my insulin, has led to a pretty dramatic flattening of my bloodsugars.  The bad highs and lows are virtually non-existant now.  I’m very happy with my improved control of my diabetes!
2. Lowering my carbs has led to my dropping a few sizes.  I wasn’t overweight before and I’m not underweight now, but I have to admit that I’m enjoying my new size.  I have an “ideal weight range” where I want to be, and low-carbing is helping me keep it in that range.  I feel great!
3. In the process of changing my diet, I realized that I feel better if I don’t eat wheat (it’s the gluten, likely) and I feel better if I eat primarily “natural” foods.  I don’t mean specifically “organic”, I just mean “natural” – fruit, veggies, meat/fish/poultry, etc.  I’m eating foods that are naturally low in carbs rather than buying “Atkins granola bars”, etc.  I have some exceptions, of course, but it’s what I’m striving for.  The result is that my stomach feels better than it ever did before!  I didn’t even realize that it was a problem until I discovered how great it felt to feel better!

I’d say those are three pretty good reasons.  So why am I still struggling?

Three words: I love carbs.

I love them and I miss them.  At first I was substituting with foods that were similar to carbs – celery root for mashed potatoes, spaghetti squash for pasta, grated cauliflower for rice.  It worked for a long time (well, not so long with the celery root), but then I just started getting really tired of them!  I can eat pasta day in and day out, and I can eat rice day in and day out, but I cannot eat spaghetti squash, celery root or cauliflower day in and day out.  I can’t.  No matter how much I try, I will never like these poor substitutes as much as the real thing. 

So, Plan B was to eat some of the “real thing”, but only in small quantities, and then fill up on other things like protein or veggies.  This is still easier said than done.  I try to keep to about 30g of carbs at a meal, and since I like to have some fruit and/or yogurt with a meal, it means sticking to about 15g of carbs with the main course. 

Do you know how much rice makes up 15g of carbs?  Do you know how much gluten-free spaghetti makes up 15g of carbs?  Do you know how much of a baked potato makes up 15g of carbs?  I’ll give you a hint: not much. 

The other complicating factor is that most dinner veggies (e.g. corn, carrots, peas, etc.) have more carbs than you might think, so that limits the rest of the meal if I’m working for 30g carbs total.  I think what I may have to do is keep the fruit and yogurt to breakfast and lunch (when I have a salad), so that I can use my full 30g carbs for the main course at suppertime.  Breakfast and lunch aren’t a problem when it comes to sticking to 30g – it’s supper that kills me.

Part of my problem is clearly the combination of low-carb/gluten-free/natural.  That doesn’t sound like it should be a problem, but if you aim to eat a diet that’s low in artificial sweetener and gluten-free, it’s really difficult to add the low-carb aspect to the mix.  The three don’t go well together unless you’re eating mostly meat and vegetables…which is how I started, and what worked, but also what I grew increasingly tired of.

*sigh*

Regardless, while I”m keeping my breakfast and lunch in check pretty well, my suppers are getting a bit out of hand and I need to reign them in.

The other thing getting out of hand is snacking.  I also blame that on the weather and being busy.  Food is comfort for me.  I wish it wasn’t, but it is.  So I crave food a lot.  The challenge is keeping those “appropriate” snacks on hand – nuts, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, veggies, avocados. 

It’s easiest for me when I don’t keep anything in the house that I shouldn’t be eating.  The problem with doing that, though, is that my husband also lives here and I don’t want to force him into eating (or not eating) like I do (or don’t).  He’s a healthy eater, but he needs treats from time to time too! 

The other problem with that scenario is sometims I do need sweet options for treating lows – I don’t always want glucose/dextrose tabs or juice or pop.  I like to stock a bit of “fun” stuff for those low “opportunties”…but then it’s tough to stick to eating them only during lows.

So….as you can see, I’m struggling. 

I’ll let you know when I’ve got it figured out.  (But don’t hold your breath….)