Hi Maureen, welcome to the forum
🙂 Sorry to hear that you appear to be getting a poor service from your healthcare team, unfortunately it's not uncommon
The first thing to be aware of is that you shouldn't just concern yourself with sugar - diabetes is all about carbohydrates, of which sugar is just one type (others are rice, pasta, potatoes, bread etc.). As a general rule you need to be looking at 150g carbohydrates a day or less, depending on what you can tolerate. There's no reason why you should have to restrict your diet to vegetables and salads, but you do have to be a bit clever about things and find out your personal tolerances for different meals and types of food. For example, some people get along fine with porridge for breakfast, but others find that it sends their blood glucose levels very high. In order to find out your tolerance for things you need to test your blood glucose before, and one or two hours after eating to find out how much the meal raises your levels. Have a read of
Test,Review, Adjust by Alan S to understand what I mean. If you have been put on gliclazide then you should have been prescribed a meter and test strips, as this medication can send your blood glucose levels low - if you drive you must test your levels to ensure you are safe to do so, so if you don't have these, ask your GP or nurse for them (they don't always know about the driving restrictions - even if you don't drive you should insist on the strips as you may need to check if levels are dropping low.)
I would recommend getting a copy of
The GL Diet for Dummies - this is a method of selecting and combining food so that it has a slow and steady impact on your levels. You will see that it includes a wide variety of foodstuffs to choose from, so no need to limit yourself to boring meals!
🙂
As a general guide you can eat anything, as long as it is in moderation and provided you have done the testing to find out how well you tolerate a thing and in what amount. It might seem like a tedious and long-winded process, but once you have established your tolerances for your favourites you won't need to test as often. It's all about tailoring your meals to what your body can cope with well.
Some other things you may like to read are
Jennifer's Advice and
Maggie Davey's letter, and
Type 2 Diabetes: The First Year by Gretchen Becker - these will hopefully give you a much better understanding of your diabetes than that provided by your doctor and nurse - knowledge is power, and knowing why thing happen makes them that much easier to tackle.
Please ask ANY questions you may have, there is always someone here who will be happy to help and there is a lot of experience of all the things you are going through. I look forward to hearing more from you
🙂
