Learn to Count
Carbohydrates
Many people say this is too complicated
and try to guesstimate. This is a bad habit to get into and should
be avoided. Do I guesstimate? Not that often and with eight years
plus of calculating carbohydrates I have gotten fairly adept at doing this.
I do make mistakes, but not that often. I hope that you will find
some tips that you can use.
If you are lucky enough to have a class
with a certified diabetes educator (CDE) or a registered dietitian
(RD) and they cover how to read and understand food labels, absorb
everything they tell you. I did not have either one that knew what
they were doing and labels were to be ignored by them. Therefore, I
had to learn on my own. Lucky for me a neighbor, at the time, was a
nutritionist and she saw me reading labels in the grocery store one
afternoon and asked if she could help. I admitted that I was having
some success and that I would like to make it easier.
Now let me back up and cover a couple
of other things first. Do not go out and buy cookbooks that
have the word diabetic in the title. You will find that most are
written by someone without diabetes and the recipes are overloaded
with carbohydrates. Most are also for foods that few of us can
actually afford some of the ingredients in the recipes.
Do consider buying some of the new
editions of the standard cookbooks, Betty Crocker's and Better Homes
and Gardens that have the nutritional information with each recipe.
They also have the servings per recipe making calculations easier.
Example: the recipe makes 6 servings and there is 28 grams of
carbohydrates per serving, you have the information. Now I would
normally say that it made 12 servings and that would mean I would
have 14 grams of carbohydrates per serving. Granted, I normally
chose servings of four so that I would only have eight servings to
eat since at the time I was living alone.
I did cheat and have a gram scale and
an ounce scale and still do and I use both. I would always weigh the
container in which the food was to be cooked and then I could
subtract that from the total weight or have a tare weight. If I
wanted the recipe to serve six servings, I would weigh the plate
or container to transfer the food to and tare the scale and then I
knew how many ounces to transfer and could compute the carbohydrates.
I could then add so many ounces of vegetables and compute their
carbohydrates.
I do not know what food this label came
from, but I will use it for a brief discussion.
Before going further, I need to point
out that the FDA allows food labels to vary by 20 percent. This is
bad for us with diabetes, but is the reason I always stress that you
need to use your meter to see if the numbers are high or low after
eating. Then you can have a variance of 20 percent with your meter.
Did someone say this is a crap shoot. You may be right, but over
time I have discovered that in general most canned foods are fairly
close to total weight and carbohydrates. Now recipes in any cookbook
with nutritional values may not be as close. There are too many
variables for precise accuracy. To begin with when you purchase the
ingredients, there may be a difference in the quality you purchased
compared to the sample tested to arrive at the figures used in the
cookbook.
This label is still a good example to
use. Each serving has 40 grams of carbohydrates and only 4 grams of
dietary fiber. Since I follow the rule of counting half of the fiber
when fiber is 5 grams or more, I do not subtract any grams for fiber.
This is a point of debate by many and
my former neighbor said only subtract one-half of the fiber if the
total fiber per serving is 5 grams or higher. Some subtract all
fiber regardless and others will subtract one-half of any amounts of
fiber. Unknown on most labels is whether the fiber is water-soluble
or not. The total grams are 275 grams so that if I have a 30-gram
serving, then the carbohydrates would be 5 times 40 grams or 200
grams. Multiply 200 by 30 and divide by 275, which equals 21.8 grams
of carbohydrates. Or, multiply 40 by 30 and divide by 55, which
equals 21.8 grams of carbohydrates.
This is one reason I find the scales so
useful as they can resolve carbohydrates amounts very quickly. So
with the costs of the scales and a hand held calculator, I have
gotten my money out of them many times over. Yes, I do spend a
little more time getting this information, but it does allow me to be
more accurate and know what I need to cover with insulin. Then my
meter reading will confirm this and I will know that the serving size
was correct. For oral medications, the meter becomes even more
important to determine if the serving size was too large, too small,
or just right.
Here are a few tools that you may find
useful. First a book by Gary Scheiner M.S., titled The
Ultimate Guide to Accurate Carb Counting. I have a different
book, but this does come highly recommended. A website that may
interest some is this one that has nutritional values that can be
determined from a recipe. It is my understanding that you need to
join to have access to the information here, and it is free. You may
also get the nutritional value from a list of ingredients. There are
other websites that you may find by using your search engine.
Diabetes
Burnout
Why do people with diabetes have
diabetes burnout? There are probably many reasons, but I think a
majority of people just get tired of managing diabetes 24/7/365 with
no vacation or time off. You test, eat correctly, exercise when
capable, take your medications timely when you should and still
diabetes is there waiting for you to make a mistake so it can gain
the upper hand.
Will Ryan has several blogs and an
introduction that often can help with diabetes burnout. His site
“Joyful Diabetic” is worth reading and it does reflect his
positive attitude. For many a positive attitude with managing your
diabetes can help you through a down time and even burnout.
William H. Polonsky Ph.D., CDE, has
written a book titled Diabetes Burnout: What to Do When You
Can't Take It Anymore. This is one that I will be adding to
my library. It is also available on Kindle.
Series 8 of 12
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