When I was younger I used to LOVE the Liberty Medical commercials with Wilford Brimley warning us to, "check your blood sugar, and check it often. There's just no reason not to." He made diabetes sound manageable, inexpensive, and fun! He made me want to be a diabetic.
Yeah, not so much.
I had a sneaking suspicion that I would end up with gestational diabetes (GD) because I have a significant family history of diabetes. My sister also had diabetes with both of her pregnancies. Now, I didn't lay around in wait for "diabeetus" to rear its ugly head. I was mindful on most occasions about what I put in my mouth but, like many pregnant women, I would have cravings and in a moment of weakness I'd eat an entire sleeve of Oreos and wash it down with a gallon of whole milk. What?
Now, I must preface this with:
there wasn't anything I did to CAUSE gestational diabetes. There wasn't anything I could have done to PREVENT gestational diabetes. My doctors told me umpteen times that
this wasn't my fault. They did make it very clear, however, that going forward it was my responsibility to maintain GD. I needed to quit the carbs.
Okay, cool. I can live with that. I will do
anything to keep myself and my son healthy.
Yeah... not as easy as I thought it was going to be. Here's a news-flash, there are carbs in EVERYTHING!!! Milk, yogurt, and fruit even! Basically I'm allowed to have 12 carb choices per day. Sounds simple, right? Negative. Not simple. 12 carb choices boil down to 180 grams of carbs per day. Need it broken down further? One 8 oz. glass of milk has about 15g carbs in it. As a pregnant woman, I need three milk servings daily... now I have 135 carbs left to spend. I think you're beginning to see it now.
So, I've narrowed it down to things like:
17 grapes.
10 Doritos
2 slices of lite whole wheat bread (that are about the size of a postage stamp)
1/2 of an English muffin
most veggies are "free" and protein is strongly encouraged and doesn't really "count." (I did lose the argument with my nutritionist that even though Reese's peanut butter cups contain protein they
do count against me. That conversation was the reason I don't carry a gun or a switchblade. Don't mess with a pregnant lady's peanut butter cups!)
So, gone are slices of drippy, cheesy pizza, fries, cookies, cakes, pasta and everything else that makes me salivate. But, on the bright side, with the exception of unyielding hunger (I think it's purely psychosomatic because I'm consuming the appropriate number of calories for my height, weight, activity level and baby) I feel SO MUCH better. I had NO IDEA how badly I felt until I completely changed my diet and started feeling so much better. And I've lost about 6.5 pounds! I guess that's what happens when you stop eating a gallon of ice cream every night. ;)
It has also raised our awareness as to how disgustingly, we as humans, eat. Our portions are way out of control. Did you know there are 39g of carbs in one can of Coke ? That's a quarter of my daily allowance (I don't drink Coke but that puts it into perspective for you.)
Going forward we are truly going to be more mindful of what we put in our mouth (and what I put in my child's mouth) According to most authorities on the subject, the average child or adult should not consume more than 130g of carbs per day; a cheeseburger happy meal
without a drink is 50g of carbs! Holy Wilford Brimley!!
Aaron has been watching what he eats along with me (or he faces the risk of me staring longingly at his food... following his fork from his plate to his mouth like a pathetic dog) and he has even dropped a few pounds. It's really amazing what scaling back on our beloved carbs does to one's weight.
So, for now, I'm checking my blood sugar, and checking it often. I'm pretty proud to say that since my diagnosis I haven't "cheated" once and have been trying my darnedest to maintain my blood sugar; I really don't want to go on insulin during the last several weeks of my pregnancy. We've started to cook and shop even healthier. Although we were fairly healthy shoppers to begin with, our portions were just too embarrassing to even talk about.
It has been almost a month now and the diet is getting pretty boring. In a moment of pure desperation I went to Barnes and Noble over the weekend to get a low carb/diabetic cookbook. My diet of hard-boiled eggs, string cheese, cucumbers and 17 grapes just wasn't doing it for me and I needed more variety. I must say it was really difficult to find a cookbook that supported the life of an 8 month pregnant woman who is still working 3 jobs and remodeling her house. By difficult I mean finding
realistic recipes I could integrate into my life over the next 8 weeks (and hopefully beyond) that didn't require hours of preparation or exotic ingredients like the oil suppressed from the anal glands of a newt. I wanted 3-5 ingredients that I
already had in my kitchen, could pronounce, and could whip up while standing on swollen feet after a 10 hour work day battling hunger pains.
Leave it to Betty Crocker. She hooked me up and she even has a recipe for STUFFED FRENCH TOAST!
So my meals went from this:
(This was in Alaska, by the way)
To this:
And yes, I've started drinking out of a measuring cup. I have to keep a sense of humor or I'll cry myself to sleep.
