Managing Your Diabetes & Diet

Contrary to common expectation, people diagnosed with diabetes can enjoy the same tasty, healthy, “normal” foods we all eat. The key to eating healthfully and managing your blood sugar levels is balance. All foods can be part of a healthy, diabetes-friendly diet, so long as you eat a proportioned, varied range of foods overall, and spread them out throughout your day to give your body a consistent source of healthy fuel.

Exchanging Less-Healthy For More-Healthy

Ideally, a person who is newly diagnosed with diabetes will visit their Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE), typically a dietitian or nurse, to learn about an eating plan called diabetes exchanges. The diabetic exchange system assigns foods into a variety of categories, such as starches, carbohydrates, vegetables, fats, and proteins.

Your CDE then teaches you how common foods fit into the different categories. You’ll learn how many of each of these categories you should eat each day to best manage your blood sugar levels. Then you get to decide how you want to spread out those exchanges throughout your typical day.

Diabetes-friendly Diet To Meet Your Needs

When you can, you should always do your best to use the diabetes exchange system to manage your food choices. But when real life throws a curveball and you’re forced to pull together a quick meal or snack without the time to sort through the exchanges—fear not! Just make sure that you only have the amount of carbohydrates, protein & and fat below.

We assume a 2,200-calories as the amount that a moderately-active, average adult eats on a typical day, and divided these calories into carbohydrate, protein, and fat, as follows:

- 50 to 55% from carbohydrates
- 15 to 20% from protein
- No more than 30% from fat

Since most people don’t think in percentages, you can roughly translate them into these approximate amounts each day:

- 275 to 300 grams of carbohydrate
- 83 to 110 gram of protein
- No more than 73 gram of fat

Next we made sure your diabetes-friendly recipes meet basic guidelines for good health in terms of the amount of sodium, fiber, and saturated fat:

- Eating no more than 2,300 mg (2.3 g) of sodium per day
- Making sure to get at least 21 to 38 grams of fiber each day; the more total calories you eat, the more fiber you need
- Eating no more than 7% of total calories, or about 17 grams, of saturated fat per day
 

Finally, just divided these basic daily goals into three meals and two to three snacks per day.

Tools You Can Use For Real Life

People with diabetes have the same nutritional needs as people without diabetes. Following basic healthy-eating principles will help you improve your overall health and your ability to manage your blood sugar. Some important things to consider when choosing healthy meals are:

Eat more fibre by:

- Choosing whole grains like brown rice, quinoa, or whole-wheat pasta instead of processed or refined grains
- Eating lots of fruits and vegetables. Focus on the non-starchy vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, and spinach
- Eating dried beans like pinto or black beans and lentils
 

Lower your fat intake and choose healthier fats by:

- Eating lean meats, such as loin cuts and skinless poultry
- Choosing non-fat dairy
- Eating fish two to three times a week to get adequate amounts of “healthy fats”
- Cooking with liquid oils instead of solid fats like lard, margarine, or butter
- Choosing fresh fruit for dessert instead of high calorie biscuits, cakes, and ice cream
 

Pay attention to how many calories you eat in a day by:

- Opting for water or zero-calorie drinks instead of regular soda, juice, other drinks that contain a lot of added or natural sugar
- Watching your portion sizes of all foods, even the healthy ones
- And don’t forget to count the calories in any alcoholic drinks you may drink

Now that you understand a bit about how to eat healthfully to best manage diabetes, you can be comfortable knowing that the phrase “diabetes diet” has nothing to do with a lifetime of deprivation and special diet foods. Eating well with diabetes means eating what you love and balancing it with what you need.