steak salad

This is lunch in my current scheme; target is 500 calories, 37g protein, 20g fat, 42g carbohydrates, leaning toward vegetables. Today I had only crisp greens on hand; the salad readily accommodates starchier root vegetables or beans. Beef is especially protein-dense, and this batch goes a little over. Some of that protein will end up converted to glucose. Poultry suits me better. (Beef was on sale. You can take the boy out of the Midwest...)

french toast

I'm celebrating a decline in blood glucose and a 27-pound weight loss in the last 54 weeks. Here is an example of how I've been eating for the past year.

This is a weekend breakfast, in contrast to my workday oat bran. I was improvising at the end of the food budget month, and missed counting the protein in the bread and the carbs in the cottage cheese, so those values are higher than planned. The current target breakfast is 37g protein, 24g fat, 60g carbohydrates, 600 calories.

I keep my recipes in a spreadsheet, so I can tweak them as I tweak the targets or adjust for ingredients on hand. The snapshot below is a precise record of the somewhat excessive meal shown above.

slip-sliding away

I like to keep my eye on the feeds here. Each has its own value.

Diabetes Self-Management works as a go-to site for the newly-diagnosed and long-term managers alike. I follow it primarily for the regular bloggers, and especially for David Spero's examination of questions not satisfactorily answered by current medical and diabetic orthodoxy. His savaging of the distorted reporting of one phase of the landmark ACCORD drug-treatment trial—including outrageously harmful comments by medical experts—stands as a cautionary tale against believing what you read in even respected sources in the popular press.

What caught my eye today was Eric Lagergren's Intake Accountability. I knew from the title I had to read it.

I've briefly mentioned "backsliding" out of remission, my current attempts to restore self-preservative sanity to my diet, and the need for diabetics to "meter" their food intake as rigorously as they monitor their blood glucose levels. Lagergren nails the process by which this discipline can fall apart. I wish him and all of you success in restoring or maintaining the necessary accountability.

And I remind myself that my own success will depend on more than wishing.

(Thanks to jlesage via Delicious.com for directing me to this invaluable site!)

food

I have a friend who’s got some peculiar ideas about diabetes, which he claims to exhibit acute symptoms of when he doesn’t eat right. He also has what I think of as some peculiar ideas and methods in managing his diet, and yet I have to admit:

• his approach is science-based, even when I can’t follow his conclusions
• the food he prepares is healthy and delicious
• he’s better at weight management than I am.

He and I been talking about food a lot lately. I’m grateful to be able to talk to someone who’s knowledgeable and effective in what he does, and can talk to me about my choices, and even express wondering reservations about them, without seeming to be scolding, or condescending, or conveying the idea that he knows how to “fix“ me—and that it’s his job to do so. (Most recently, our talks helped me to realize that I’d become very lax with my fat intake management.)

So with that prompt and another, I put together some thoughts about what I think and what I do about managing diet these days. This review of principles is partly descriptive and partly a call to myself to return to principles that have worked for me before.
[edit 2011/02/18: This post really has motivated me to be more scrupulous, and apparently that’s been paying off in the latest blood glucose readings.]

Current principles for long-term management of diet

Eat food. As you may have read, food activist Michael Pollan distills human wisdom about diet into seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He goes on to say:

A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by [“Eat food”…There are lots of edible foodlike substances in the supermarket, often] in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. [A] health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

For diabetics, “not too much” has a specific meaning. My body does not respond to food, and particularly to easily soluble carbohydrates (sugars and starches), particularly in large quantities, in a normal way. Just to complicate things,