Eating right with gestational diabetes is very important. You are not only caring for your health but also the health of your unborn child. There are some guidelines that you will want to follow when following a gestational diabetes diet.
First of all, you will want to eat several times throughout the day. For example, six small meals throughout the day with a couple of snacks will prove to be beneficial. Make sure that you are regularly monitoring your blood glucose levels and keeping an accurate record for them. This will help to serve as a guide for you and you will begin to notice patterns throughout the day. For example: maybe you are dropping “low” between lunch and dinner, therefore meaning that you may need a snack at this time.
A Healthy Recipe – There are cookbooks that are available on the market today that are strictly for the gestational diabetic. In these cookbooks, you will find healthy, fulfilling recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and even desserts. Another great place to look for gestational diabetes recipes is on the internet.
You don’t necessarily have to follow a recipe that is just for the “pregnant” diabetic as you could use any diabetic cooking recipe. Since gestational diabetes is usually a result of hormones that are produced during pregnancy and resemble Type 2 diabetes, maintaining a healthy diet that is low in sugar, low in sodium, and high in proteins and vitamins is very important.
Once you have been diagnosed with gestational diabetes, your physician will be able to recommend either a dietician to help “teach” you about healthy eating and diabetic cooking or at least they can point you in the right direction and give you some sort of a guideline to follow.
Carbohydrates, when the body breaks them down, turns into sugar.
It would be in your best interest to follow a low carbohydrate diet and watch your carbohydrate consumption. You can find low carbohydrate recipes across the internet as well as cookbooks that are dedicated to the subject. You can still eat carbohydrates; you don’t have to eliminate them completely, just limit your total grams at meal time. For example: at breakfast-consume 30g of carbohydrates, eat a snack that consists of 30g then eat a lunch that has a total of 45g of carbohydrates and so on. Once again, you should consult with your physician and follow his/her recommendation about the diet that you should be following.
Diabetic recipes don’t have to be boring and once you learn what you can eat and how to properly prepare a diabetic meal, you will be well on your way to developing your own diabetic recipes. It may sound complicated and confusing in the beginning, but in actuality once you get used to it, it is actually very simple and really is not much different than how you should have been eating prior to your diagnosis as a gestational diabetic. And don’t forget, nine chances out of ten, you probably already know someone who is a diabetic that can help to teach you the ins and outs of diabetic recipes and diabetic cooking.