Easy Diabetic Meals

easy diabetic meals

If you have diabetes you should follow a special diet. Here’s a sample diabetic meal plan that is about 1,600 calories and 220 grams of carbohydrates. Remember to drink two 8-ounce glasses of water with each meal.

In today’s busy world, it’s difficult enough for most of us to get a meal on the table at all—let alone follow a healthy meal plan every day. When you are in a rush, it’s easy to forget about eating right or even eating at all. In our haste, we do not always make the best food choices.

But it is possible to meet the demands of your day and still eat in a healthy way. The secret?

Plan ahead. Just half an hour of planning can give you a week’s worth of healthy and tasty meals and snacks.

Breakfast

(360 calories, 52.5 grams carbohydrate)

1 slice toasted whole wheat bread with 1 teaspoon margarine
1/4 cup egg substitute or cottage cheese
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/2 cup skim milk
1/2 small banana

Lunch

(535 calories, 75 grams carbohydrate)

1 cup vegetable soup with 4-6 crackers
1 turkey sandwich (2 slices whole wheat bread, 1 ounce turkey and 1 ounce low-fat cheese, 1 teaspoon mayonnaise)
1 small apple

Dinner

(635 calories, 65 grams carbohydrate)

4 ounces broiled chicken breast with basil and oregano sprinkled on top
2/3 cup cooked brown rice
1/2 cup cooked carrots
1 small whole grain dinner roll with 1 teaspoon margarine
Tossed salad with 2 tablespoons low-fat salad dressing
4 unsweetened canned apricot halves or 1 small slice of angel food cake

Snacks

(Each has 60 calories or 15 grams carbohydrate. Pick two per day.)

16 fat-free tortilla chips with salsa
1/2 cup artificially sweetened chocolate pudding
1 ounce string cheese plus one small piece of fruit
3 cups light popcorn

Diet Plans For Diabetics

When you have diabetes, your body does not produce or correctly use the hormone, insulin. Insulin is important to your health, because it helps your body to convert sugar and starch into the energy you need to live. Some people are predisposed genetically to get diabetes, but for many people, diabetes is a weight related issue. For those people careful attention to diets for diabetics is necessary.

Diabetic diet plans are designed to improve the eating habits of people suffering from diabetes to help control diabetes you need to have a healthy lifestyle and a well controlled diet. Help control your diabetes by producing a diet plan it does not have to be full of foods you don’t like, foods that are boring and dull there are thousands of foods out their, recipes for diabetics that will suite you. You just need to read the information, buy the guides the eBooks and then you can eat well and remain healthy.

It is better to choose the diet that is full of fruits, vegetables, lean proteins and whole grain in the right proportions. Balancing the meals in the right proportion enables the diabetics to keep the level of blood sugar in the normal range.

The diabetics must select the food items that have a low glycemic index. It is the best tool that helps you to pick those carbohydrates that have the least effect on blood glucose level. The proteins must also be of the lean cuts. Plant based proteins like beans and legumes are even better.

The rule of thumb that applies on the diabetic diet planning is to fill the plate with

  • ¼ carbohydrates
  • ¼ proteins
  • ½ vegetables
Some people have even been able to successfully reverse the disease simply by eating a diet rich in primal foods. Instead of trying to observe a strict diabetic exchange diet that is a lot of work to calculate and maintain, many diabetics find that by choosing a healthy eating plan full of primal foods, they not only lose weight, but heal from diabetes.

Diabetic Diet Foods

Diabetic diet foods

Prone to diabetes, it is essential that the diabetic patients learn to follow a meal plan of diabetic diet foods to avoid and foods to eat for control of sugar in the bloodstream. It is a dreadful disease for those who are ignoring the importance of restriction in diet after recognizing signs and symptoms of diabetes. However, it is simply a maladjusted or retrograde functioning of pancreas owing to various reasons.

If diabetes could be managed carefully, the numbers could be lessened. One way is through making healthy food choices. A well-balanced diet composed of healthy foods along with regular exercise is necessary. Consultation with doctors and registered dietitians may help you create an effective meal plan.

By giving priority for right diabetic foods, one can manage the disease without allowing it to aggravate. It is not surprising that the nutrition specialists claim that there are no specific diet foods stipulated for diabetics. The timings and the quantum of food intake contribute a lot to control blood glucose levels.

Here is the diabetic diet plan for the sugar patients to follow. If they pay attention to the diabetic foods to avoid and foods to eat, the agonizing ailment can easily be managed.

  • Eat foods with high fiber and low fat. Such foods including fresh vegetables help regulating the digestion system and simultaneously they reduce blood glucose without much straining of the various internal organs of the body.
  • Regarding vegetables, you have the general information that colored vegetables can help you lower blood sugar.
  • You are permitted to consume lean meat and all fish varieties for protein as you like. But, consuming red meat and processed animal fats should be totally avoided.
  • Oatmeal and wheat are the best diabetic diet foods as they find a place in the list of low carb diet foods which help reduce the sugar in the blood stream. It will be safe if you avoid milk products with high fat contents.
  • Wine prepared from red grapes may be consumed in less volume. But, excess consumption of alcohol is not at all recommended for diabetic patients.

Keep track of the carbohydrates that you are taking in. Among the three types of carbohydrates-starches, sugar, and fiber-starches are often most recommended because they take longer to digest than simple sugars, and therefore do not cause fluctuations in the blood sugar. Foods high in starch include starchy vegetables like potatoes, peas, and corn; dried beans and lentils; and grains like oats, barley, and rice.

Diet Soda Diabetes

If you are one of the millions of people who drink diet soda because you think it’s healthier or you think it’s lower in sugar then you need to listen up. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that diet sodas are worse for us than the regular, full sugared varieties.

Soda is not a healthy drink. Regular sodas contain high amounts of sugar, phosphoric acid and the dark ones contain the carcinogen caramel coloring. Nearly every dentist agrees that drinking soda increases the destruction of teeth.

Diet soda and diabetes

Just one regular soda a day can lead to a 24 pound weight gain. For people who will are at risk for diabetes, this is about 40 g of sugars in your system without the benefit of any nutrients.

This is why people think that drinking diet soda is healthier. The lack of sugar means the risk of decaying our teeth goes away, the pounds will go away and the risk of diabetes goes down. That’s not the case. In fact, new studies are showing that people who drink diet soda put on more weight and the risk of diabetes increases.

Most diet sodas contain the chemical aspartame. Aspartame is a chemical that within the human body breaks down to formaldehyde. We all know formaldehyde from our high from school, mostly because it’s banned because it’s too toxic to be around children. Aspartame can cause liver damage and kidney damage.

Aspartame also stimulates the hormone cortisol, which is the hormone in our body that encourages fat storage. People drinking diet sodas for weight loss end up storing more fat than they lose. Since cortisol is also a stress hormone, people who drink diet sodas have an increased risk of stress related health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure and certain psychological issues such as depression.

Perhaps the worst part about sodas is the caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant drug. In small quantities, especially those that come from natural sources such as tea and chocolate, caffeine can help us work better, have clearer minds and reduce the risk of heart disease. Any more caffeine more than a half a can of soda or half a cup of coffee can throw off our body systems.

People who consume too much caffeine in the short-term develop jitteriness, inattentiveness, insomnia and skin problems like flushing. In the long term the excess caffeine can damage our brains, resembling Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, increase high blood pressure and damage the liver. And let’s not forget that caffeine dehydrates the body. You actually need to drink twice the amount of water as soda in order to counteract the dehydrating affects caffeine has on your body.

Since the average teenager consumes 30 to 40 ounces of soda every day, nearly 10 times an acceptable level, we need to get the word out about just how bad these drinks are. As an occasional treat, no more than once a day, a small glass of soda is okay to drink. But any more than that and you’re not doing your body a favor. By

 
 

Reverse Diabetes Diet

reverse diabetes diet

Very Low-Calorie Diet May Reverse Diabetes

A very low-calorie diet of 600 calories a day may be able to reverse type 2 diabetes, preliminary research suggests.

Eleven people who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes within the past four years slashed their calories for eight weeks, sticking to a diet of liquid diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables.

Three months after going off the diet, seven were free of diabetes.

Sound too tough to follow? Don’t worry, the researchers aren’t recommending the low-cal diet as a treatment for diabetes.

“We used the 600-calorie diet to test a hypothesis. What I can tell you definitively is that if people lose substantial weight by normal means, they will lose their diabetes,” says study head Roy Taylor,MD, director of the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre at Newcastle University in England.

The findings were published online by the journal Diabetologia and presented here at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

Low-Calorie Diet Reduces Fat in Pancreas

Nearly 26 million Americans have diabetes, about 95% of whom have type 2 diabetes. It develops when the body does not produce enough insulin and/or the insulin that is produced doesn’t work properly. As a result, blood sugar levels shoot up.

Taylor tells WebMD that the very low-calorie diet reduced the amount of fat in the pancreas and liver, which allowed insulin production and function to return to normal.

After one week on the diet, participants’ fasting blood sugar levels were no longer elevated, he says.

MRI scans showed that the fat levels in the pancreas fell from around 8% — considered high — to a normal 6%.

After eight weeks on the diet, their bodies were once again making sufficient insulin, essentially reversing their diabetes, Taylor says.

“Fat in the pancreas inhibits the action of beta cells in making insulin. The low-calorie diet got rid of this excess fat,” he says.

The men and the women in the study weighed an average of 220 pounds at the start of the study and lost an average of 33 pounds over eight weeks. By three months later, they had regained an average of 6.5 pounds.
Low-Calorie Diets: Permanent Results?

David M. Kendall, MD, chief scientific and medical officer for the ADA, tells WebMD that it’s been known for a while that “substantial calorie reduction can be very effective in rapidly improving diabetic control, especially in people who are obese.

“What is unique about this study is it looked at some of the mechanisms that underlie the rapid improvement,” he says.

More research is needed to determine whether the low-cal diet results in a permanent reversal of diabetes, Taylor says. “We also have to figure out a more practical way for people to get these results — that is, to get fat out of pancreas and keep it out,” he says.