No time to be diabetic!

[Pink Rose]

Hi

I know it sounds crazy, but my situation is that I have no time to be diabetic.... What I mean is that I've been diagnosed a few months ago and I still haven't had the time to invest in proper food measuring and weighing for carbohydrates counting. (I'm a very busy Mom with a nursing 18 month toddler and another 5 kids living at home) So I just do roughly by eye and I do a pretty bad job - judging from my bg fluctuations (can go anywhere between 8 - in the very best case - and 23 in the worst case....) Ideally I would want to cook and bake for myself in bulk, divide into portions and work out the carb content of each portion write it on the container and freeze. It's so time consuming to work out when I cook for the whole family how much of everything I've put in and how much of it I will eat (e.g. how much of each of the vegetables I've put into the soup and how much does 1 bowl of soup come out to....)
Any advice/tricks on easier carb counting? (I use the book Carbs & Cals) or on super easy low carb meals ? Or on anything else that can make life with diabetes easier? (Sorry I'm sounding a little low at the moment....)

 

[Inka]

I know exactly what you mean @Pink Rose ! I’m a busy mum too, just got a new job - and the Type 1, being a full-time job too, is a pain in the behind!

What helped me was reading Think Like A Pancreas. Not only does it have practical advice, it really helped me to see that the author considered Type 1 a full-time job too, and it wasn’t just me being a bit rubbish.

Yes, the carb counting is annoying, but if you do a few things now you’ll be saving time in future. I jot the carbs in pencil in my recipe books. Yes, you have to work it out the first time but thereafter it’s there waiting for you. I also add notes eg serve with X amount of rice equals 50g carbs or whatever. This reminds me what made a proper, satisfactory meal for me.

I also kept a notebook that I could flick through for pre-carb counted meal ideas. Over the years I’ve also done Meal Plans for the week.

Get some good digital scales. Weigh your cereal. Weigh raw pasta, cook yours separately. Then when it’s cooked, drain and weigh it. That way you’ll know the carbs of the cooked weight and so in future you won’t have to cook yours separately because you can just weigh out the right cooked amount and know the carbs. I usually have the same amount of pasta just to save any calculations.

 

[JJay]

I know just where you're coming from. It was one of the first things I said to my DSN in the early days!

You might find the Nutracheck app helpful. You can get carb/calorie/other nutrient counts for a wide variety of fresh and processed foods and save them as favourites and it has an option to create your own recipes which are then ready counted for you whenever you want. It costs, but you can get a 7-day free trial to see if it suits.

 

[Drummer]

If you make the main part of the meal low carb and then add a measured out known value of a high carb food it is far easier.
I only had the two children, but did not have much spare time when I was working, so I just came at the problem from the other side. That was long before diabetes, but I was eating low carb whenever I could get away with it and following a diet sheet when the GP dictated, and the diet sheet cooking took far far longer to do and it didn't work either.
A set of electronic scales, where you just put the part filled plate on and can return it to zero so you can weight out portions is really handy.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

You are not alone @Pink Rose !

And I think it can be especially irritating / faffy / time consuming / generally impossible (!) in the early years, partly because you are still building your mental ‘ready reckoner guestimation database’, and also because for some people the early years/months can have a bit of stop/start ‘help’ from your flagging pancreas.

Have you been recommended ‘Carbs and Cals’? It’s a visual guide to loads of foods with photos of various portion sizes and their carb counts. Might give you a bit of a hand?

 

[Thebearcametoo]

Do you have a notebook or notes app that you use? We’re creatures of habit and tend to eat similar meals on a regular rotation so having a notebook with your records in means you don’t have to keep doing maths or that if you’re guessing it can help you to fine tune it without requiring brain space to remember. Breakfast tends to be the most fixed meal in terms of what we eat so start working out the carbs for that and slowly build a note of your regular meals. Weighing or measuring your portion will help you to eventually be able to eyeball it (or you’ll have built the habit of weighing your meal). A set of digital scales is all you need. Don’t worry about doing the calculations for each recipe just work with the finished item - Carbs and Cals is useful for giving you portions both visually and by weight. Most supermarkets have clear carb info for foods so if in doubt look at the per 100g count for tinned soup or ready made shepherds pie or whatever you’re eating and use that as the basis. If you know what carbs you’ve allocated to a portion then it helps to be able to decide if that was close enough or not (for example the package carbs count for a bagel is 45g but I if I allow that for my kid it will guarantee a hypo so we always count it as 35g). Rope in a kid to weigh for you if it helps. We used a notebook a lot to begin with. Mostly now I can do it from memory or we only have to look up something in C&C for carbs/100g