Happy Mother's Day

Today being Mother's Day, Ted is taking me out for brunch at a favorite French Quarter restaurant.  It's a perfect opportunity to talk about navigating a restaurant menu. 

Remember, menus are the restaurant's sales instrument.  Everything about it is designed to make you want to indulge.. eat everything.  You know that feeling when you can't make up your mind because everything looks so good.  Inducing that feeling is the menu's job. 

Everything about a restaurant is designed to tempt.  Restaurant decor has qualities that arouse desire, enhance your mind's perception of the food, urge you to eat more, and ease you into spending more money.  Fast food chains have it down to a science proven to work.  Let's take color for an example of  a design element that encourages restaurant patrons to eat.  Researchers found that certain colors, like shades of red, orange or yellow, jazz up your appetite.  Complex colors, like peach, aqua, and burgundy, make you perceive the food as more delicious.   Some colors, like blue and white, minimize excitement about food.  When you see a white tablecloth, you will always see colorful flowers to counterbalance the effect of the whiteness.  Often you will see wooden items or baskets or green accents to keep the white from being boring or dampening your excitement for the food.   Red tablecloths make people eat faster.

The restaurant's tactics tempt us.  They also add to our pleasure in eating out.  We enjoy our food more when restaurants uses all the tricks.  It's why we eat out, to enjoy the food.  We will choose the restaurant that gives us the most pleasurable experience.

Resisting Restaurant Temptations  For someone living with T2D, the alluring offerings can seduce us to make some dangerous choices. With temptation enticing us to stray from our diets, we need strategies to help us keep our resolve. I've devised a few that I'd like to share.

Bread  I love bread especially dense bread like sourdough French or crusty Italian.  I struggle to resist them.  If my dining companions agree, I'll ask the wait staff to take it away.  If I'm eating with someone who loves bread, I ask them to keep the bread on their side of the table.  If the bread smells good, and I get a whiff, I'm in trouble.  I will allow myself a very small piece, just to taste.  With practice, I trained myself to limit myself when I must taste and only when I must.  Mostly I avoid.

When sandwiches are the order of the day.  Eat the filling and give the bread to your companion.  Most sandwiches can be turned into lettuce wraps, a yummy alternative to a sandwich.  Restaurants will bring you lettuce leaves if you ask them.  They will also serve the sandwich filling on a salad.  If you must have a sandwich, have it open faced.

Potato I love potatoes, too.  Who doesn't?  French fried, mashed, baked, hash brown.   Potato salad, Lyonaise, scalloped, potato chips and home fries.  Yummy and dangerous to our blood sugar.   I haven't been successful with training myself  to limit myself to a taste. 

I usually ask for the potato to be replaced by extra vegetables.  Restaurants will happily do that for you.

Rice I learned from testing my blood sugar that rice, even in small quantities, sends my blood sugar skyrocketing, a quirk of my particular metabolism not necessarily present for other people living with T2D.  Testing yourself 2 1/2 hours after eating will tell you which foods will shoot your blood sugar up.  Rice is one of my nemeses.  So,  I avoid rice. 

Other people find brown rice, because it has some fiber, has less impact on their blood sugar than white rice.  Full meal servings of dishes like fried rice and paella are far too much.  Limit such dishes to a 1/2 cup side portion.

Starchy Vegetables Corn, sweet potato, winter squash and peas get treated like vegetables, but we with T2D need to think of them as starches like potatoes and bread.  They are sources of fiber that can help with cholesterol, but they are high in carbohydrate, the substance that balloons our blood sugar.  If you have a starchy vegetable, skip the bread, potato or rice because you have gotten your meal's quota of carbs in your vegetables.

Vegetables: Leafy, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red Here's where we can indulge.  Cucumbers, spinach, cauliflower, summer squashes (yellow crook-neck, zucchini, patty pan) have so little carbohydrate we can eat lots.  Broccoli, green beans, peppers, onion, cabbage are good-for-you choices.  You can always order a steamed vegetable plate, even when its not on the menu.

We can eat salads with abandon, as long as we exercise caution with the dressing and toppings.  Dressing on the side is the best strategy.  Dip your fork into the dressing then into your salad.  You get the taste of the dressing with the vegetables.  Skip the croutons.  Keep fruit like pears, apples or dried cherries to a minimum.  They add unwanted carbs.  

Pancakes, Waffles, and French Toast Pass them by entirely. Choose something else. For controlling carbohydrate intake, eggs are a better choice. Eggs Benedict without the English muffin is quite good. Of course, you need to balance that with your cholesterol restrictions.

Cereal, Oatmeal Most people like a big bowl of cereal and milk.. about 3 servings worth.  1/4 to 1/2 cup of cereal and a little milk is a serving.  Take less if you are adding fruit.  Nuts make a more T2D friendly topping.  Raisins?  Only 6 itty-bitty raisins.  They are concentrated carb capsules.
Fruit Oh, it looks so harmless!  We have lots of ways to rationalize indulging in fruit.  It's natural, we say.  It has fiber, we say.  In truth, many fruits are sugar bombs.  One fruit serving should be 15 grams of carbohydrate.  Most of the time, we eat far more than a serving.   When we eat a nice big apple, we are getting 2-3 servings in one piece of fruit.  Half of a banana is one serving.  Six to eight grapes, 1/2 cup of berries, one skinny slice of melon, one half of a small grapefruit each represent one serving.  Not much to eat before you cross over into too much.   Eat dried fruit cautiously, especially when it is sugared.

Eating fruit whole is far better than drinking the juice.  The whole fruit has fiber, which helps your body handle carbohydrates.  Dr. Melvin, my endocrinologist, when I first began working with him said, "No fruit juice.  Ever."  For me, that was one of the easiest restrictions to follow.  I prefer water over juice anyway.

Beverages Water, Adam's Ale, is the best drink of all.  With a squeeze of lemon, a very pleasant drink with dinner.  You already know what to avoid:  sweetened ice tea; sugar or corn syrup sweetened soda; beer; fruit-juiced based or sugared cocktails; sweet wines and liqueurs; sugar in your coffee or tea; non-dairy creamers in your coffee.  Milk has some carbs, about 8 ounces is a serving.  Wine and spirits have little or no carbohydrate.  There are three cautions about alcoholic beverages:  1)  they might lower your blood sugar too much; 2) alcohol can cloud your judgement and lead to some unhealthy choices; 3)  alcohol taxes your liver.

Desert Skipping it entirely is best.  Sharing it with someone else is good; the more people sharing, the better.  Ted and I love to sample every restaurant's creme brulee.  I have two teaspoons and he eats the rest.  It works for us.

Rules of Thumb To summarize:  1) Avoid  high carb foods if you can.  If you cannot, allow yourself a taste; 2) Exercise portion control.  Keep serving sizes small, usually half of a restaurant portion is a healthy serving size; 3) Indulge in green, yellow, red vegetables watching for dressings and toppings that add unwanted carbs; 4) Drink water; 5) Enjoy the experience.