The Healthy One Rants About Diabetes

The Healthy One

I don’t have Diabetes but I cook and eat as if I were one. The man in my life is a Diabetic. I love dancing with him and I want him to be able to dance for as long as possible.

After 25 years of mostly oral drugs my husband was recently been taken off of the oral medications and placed on insulin injections. He has a bad heart and a very tired pancreas that his doctors are trying to rest. The injections have been so effective in gaining good control that his doctor has just put him on a pump.

Throughout the years I have been by his side at Diabetes Education classes and at his office visits with his physicians. I have downloaded the USDA listings of calories and carbohydrates and printed it off. It’s kept in a loose leaf file for easy reference. I have a kitchen scale in my cabinet and it gets used at every meal I cook. I read labels at the grocery store. I subscribe to several Diabetes magazines, cookbooks and groups on the Internet to get information for him. He’s not very computer literate. His PhD is in Special Education.

We eat a low carbohydrate, low fat diet with plenty of fiber. Most of our carbohydrates come from vegetables, fruit and skimmed milk. Very few come from starches but some come from legumes. Since potatoes are his very favorite food, we do small amounts of red potatoes that have been chilled in the fridge after cooking. They are supposed to be less “carby” that way and he would rather have potato salad than sex. Our fats come from olive oil, nuts and avocados. Our proteins come from lean meats, fish and eggs. We don’t do fad diets which means that we have not gone low carb only to go high fat. High fat meals bring along their own special blood glucose control challenges for a Diabetic.
We do eat in restaurants. It’s not difficult to find grilled meat, chicken or fish. It’s easy to order double vegetables instead of a huge baked potato or even an extra salad. If I feel like a sugary treat, that’s when I’ll have it, but I don’t seem to crave sweets as much as I once did. When we travel on vacation we are most likely to do it in our motorhome where we can control what we are eating. We do enjoy cruising and I have enough knowledge of cooking techniques to decipher the menu for him to make his calculations. Since I’m the assertive one in the family, I will be the one who will ask the waiter to query the cook as to the ingredients of a dish.

I plan our meals. I calculate his carbs so that he can bolus. I look at his blood glucose records and I carry his meter in my purse. I carry the glucose tabs and a juice box of orange juice, too.

Rather than being resentful of not being able to cook or eat like a “normal” person, I am keeping my weight down as well as my cholesterol. I’m probably staving off a family tendency towards Type 2 Diabetes as well.

There are things about Diabetes that irk me. I hate reading a recipe in a magazine that is supposed to be “diabetic friendly” only to find that one teeny serving of a desert contains more carbs than he, or most Diabetics, can handle in an entire meal. I am also impatient with advertisements from Diabetes product providers who have a grossly overweight man as their spokesperson. If Wilfred Brimley tests so often, why the heck isn’t he thinner? What is he doing with his test results? Then there are the sugar-free foods like sugar-free pudding. It’s composed of corn starch. It’s made with milk. True it’s lower in carbs than it’s sugar-sweetened counterpart, but it’s not really good food for a Type 2 Diabetic who is trying to maintain good control. I detest it when a recipe claims to be good for a Diabetic just because it has replaced sugar with a non-caloric sweetener and lowered the fats. Don’t these people know about carbohydrates?!

The other thing that bugs me are the so-called professionals. The Family physicians who diagnose some senior citizen as a Diabetic, gives them a prescription for an oral drug, an incomprehensible “exchange” diet that was issued by the American Diabetes Association in the year one and tells them to come back in 3 months. What those people need more than anything is education. It’s available, but most newly diagnosed Diabetics don’t get it. I’ve met people who test their blood glucose but haven’t a clue why they do it or what it means.

Then there are the Dieticians in hospitals. The curriculum in their courses is in dire need of updating. They are prescribing carb-heavy meals for people who need, more than anything, to keep their blood glucose levels down so that their bodies can heal. No Diabetic is going to heal well after surgery when they are feeding him or her white bread, mashed potatoes, macaroni, milk and ice cream all at the same time. Whenever my husband has been hospitalized, I have asked to see the dietician. I present him or her with what my husband’s standard meal plan requirements are and ask that they be adhered to. I would rather be known as “the wife from hell” than the “little widow” If I annoy them, then they probably need to be annoyed.

Please do not think of me as one of those Atkins “Carb-Nazis” I am certainly not. I believe in good nutrition, not mumbo-jumbo nutrition. I have too many friends who found themselves at the wrong end of a serum cholesterol test after subscribing to such a high-fat diet. I am constantly searching for flavorful recipes and innovative foodstuffs that will work for my darling husband.