Three Little Things to Help Your Blood Sugar.. and keep you weight down

Anything you do that keeps your blood sugar low is likely to help you control your weight, too.  Here are some useful changes you can easily make.

1.  Drink Water
The best drink for us humans is water.  We need about 64 ounces a day.. 8 glasses.. 1/2 gallon.  Many of the things we drink instead of water load us with calorie and take water out of our bodies.  A example is beer.. lots of carbohydrates and calories.  The alcohol has a diuretic effect.  It extracts water from our tissue.  Drinking soda loads us with carbohydrates and calories, too.  Fruit juice comes from fruit, but it .. you guessed it.. carbohydrates and calories.  Coffe and tea, black, have no carbs or calories, but do have a mild diuretic effect.  Eliminate liquid carbs and calories.  Drink water, lots of it.

2.  Fiber Up
Most of us are getting between 10 and 15 grams of fiber per day.  We need more.  Fiber helps keep blood sugar low and a few other important things.  Fiber keeps our bowels moving.  It helps lower cholesterol.  Whole grains, vegetables and fruit are our best sources.   Oatmeal, made from quick cooking or steel cut oats, not instant oats, are a great source of fiber.  So is fruit.  With both, be sure to limit your quantity, because they are carb rich.

3.  Walk More
A daily walk does wonders for your health in many way.  20 to 25 minutes of walking burns about 100 calories.  Walking also helps your muscles utilize the glucose in your blood stream more efficiently.

Diabetes and the Blues

Many of us use food for comfort and most comfort foods are high carbohydrate, like mashed potatoes and gravy.  Ice cream and cheesecake are favorites for many people when the blues hover over us.  Chocolate, too, is a favored comfort food.  All of them are dangerous for diabetics.  When you have the blues, a spoonful of ice cream will not sooth.  It will intensify the yearning and make the blues worse.

Getting depressed, even mildly, is dangerous to our glucose control.  Most of us who have good control live a daily life feeling restricted and deprived of food pleasure.  We may be proud that we can keep ourselves healthy, but still.. we know we go without.  When we yearn for a little comforting indulgence, we know we will hurt ourselves to give in.

So, what can we do when we want to curl up with some comfort food?  The mainstream advice is to have whatever you want, just control your portion size.  Easy to say, hard to do even under the best of circumstances.  When the blues move in, a controlled port just feels like more deprivation.

I like soup.  Soups with unthickened broth, filled with tasty vegetables and chunks of chicken, fish or beef, give a warming satisfying feel.  A hot mug of bouillon can be a comfort, too.

Chocolate gives a lift to moods, its a natural antidepressant.  It works in your brain and in your mouth.  Dark chocolate is a good choice, if you must have something.  Sugar-free hot chocolate can bring a nice soothing comfort, just make it with water instead of milk.

There is no substitute for cheesecake or ice cream.  Even the no sugar added forms of ice cream have carbohydrates from milk and loads of fat.  Wish I could come up with something here.  Homemade cheesecake, made with sugar substitutes can be very tasty, but still are a load of carbohydrates.

And that's why diabetics get the blues.

It's working.  Getting my carbohydrates from vegetables is allowing me more satisfying meals.  I learned that I can eat a little bread without spiking my blood sugar.   

Here's how to find out what works for you.  Test your blood sugar 2-2 1/2 hours after eating to see what your food has done to you blood sugar levels. 

Remember, over 200 dl/mg, glucose is damaging nerves and organs.  Anything that spikes your blood sugar over 200 is dangerous.  Rice and white potatoes are in my "no eat" zone because carb for carb they send my blood sugar higher that foods of equal carbs.

Develop your personal "no eat" zone.  Test your blood sugar several times a day.  A dietitian's advice can help, but only you can personalize your food choices to fit the way your body uses carbohydrate.

Tofu, Good Food for People Living with Type 2 Diabetes

Tofu delivers high quality protein from a vegetable source, soy beans.  One half-cup serving of firm tofu, about 4 ounces or 1/3 of an average 14 ounces package, contains 10.1 grams of protein.   The recommended daily intake of protein is roughly 56 grams for men and 46 grams for women.

Here's how tofu stacks up against other protein sources.
     1/2 cup cow's milk contains 5.1 grams of protein
     one large egg contains 6 grams
     4 oz ground beef contains about 26 grams of protein


Tofu has few calories, 94 per serving.  Compare that to the 4 ounce hamburger patty with 331 calories; the egg, 70 calories; 1/2 cup of 2% milk has 60 calories: and 4 oz of cheese packs 320 calories.  You can think of it this way.  For every 100 calories, tofu gives you 11 grams of protein while ground beef gives you 8.9 grams of protein.  Meat has a little bit better fat to protein ratio than cheese.   100 calories worth of cheese is worth only 6.2 grams of protein.  The differences are in the fat.

Our one half-cup serving of firm tofu contains 5 grams of fat.  Low fat tofu is also commercially available, and contains 1.5 grams of fat per serving.  The fat in tofu is vegetable fat, soybean oil, and it is cholesterol-free.  Our 4 oz beef patty slams us with 15 grams of fat and 113 mg of cholesterol.
Another beautiful thing about tofu:  a half-cup serving of firm tofu contains about 227 mg of calcium or about 22% of the RDA.  Different brands and forms of tofu may have less.  Silken tofu contains approximately 133 mg, again depending on the brand.  Calcium is important for everyone.  For diabetics, it is essential for your body to make best use of blood glucose in your muscles

I Failed My Resolution: Here's Why

Michael Blumenfield, MD, psychiatrist friend, suggested I may have asked too much of myself to commit to blogging everyday.  He was right.  He spoke from experience.  He blogs on psychiatry:  PsychiatryTalk.com; and, with his wife, Susan, on movies:  FilmRap.net. 

Blogging everyday is too often for a busy person.   So, I amending my resolutions to something more realistic:  I will blog once a week, but not limited to once a week.  I can blog more often when I have the time.

Today's blog is really about re-evaluating your demands of yourself.  We all set our sights too high at times and need to learn to adjust when we have been unrealistic.  Our temptation is to accuse ourselves of failing, like I did in my title today.  In reality, the failure was in the original demand we placed on ourselves.  If you ask too much, the failure is in the asking, not in the doing. 

Type II Diabetes Requires Life Changes

Adapting to any chronic health condition forces us to make changes we rather not make.  Type II Diabetes isn't the only disease that is treated by dietary changes, medication management and demands for exercise.  The bright spot in what we must do for ourselves is:  We always wanted to eat healthfully and exercise more, but couldn't get ourselves to do it.  Now, we must. 

Each new year is a chance to have a new beginning

A new beginning means forgiving one's self for the mistakes of the past.  Take the lessons learned from mistakes and start over with a fresh approach to life.

I experimented with food this past year and made some dreadful mistakes that spiked my blood sugar to levels I am embarrassed to say.  What did I learn form these mistakes?  Rice, wheat and corn are dangerous to me.  I love rice, pasta, bread, popcorn, corn on the cob.. but not grits.  I learned that I cannot play with these grains the way I can with fruit.  I learned that a 1/2 cup serving of rice, about 15 carbohydrate grams, will raise my blood sugar higher than a 1/2 of an apple, about 15 carbohydrate grams, or 1/3 cup of chickpeas, also about 15 carbohydrate grams.

For the New Year, I resolve to get my carbohydrates from vegetables and legumes.  

Carolyn A. Weyand, PhD
Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
1307 Antonine St.
New Orleans, LA 70118
504-895-2901

A New Year's Resolution: How to make it work

I've been away.. literally and figuratively.  Spent time in Las Vegas, San Francisco and various points North of the Bay City, New York City, Washington DC, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Xi'an.  (Yes, China, baby!)  Three weeks of teaching and touring.  While traveling, I neglected my blog, I'm sorry to say.

Today I resolve to blog everyday, no matter where I am or whatever excuses I might muster.  With a little imagination, a person can always find a reason to not do something.


Resolution Strategies That Work

For resolutions to work, people must have successes that reinforce their determination.  Here are some pointers for succeeding with your resolution.

The Specific Behavior Approach

I've just given an example of a type of New Year's Resolution that has high probability of succeeding:  "I will blog every day."  Its a clear behavior that is possible to achieve.  It is free of provisions or expectations or ideals or moral values or any other baggage.  Its just one thing to do each day, just one thing.  I didn't say how much I have to blog or even what I'll blog about.  (Since Type II Diabetes is a daily presence in my life, it effects everything and everything effects it.  Means everything I might blog about will relate somehow to T2D.)

Choose a particular behavior and be specific.   If you want to decrease your carb intake, for example, you might resolve to drink water instead of drinking soft drinks with sugar in them.  Pick a particular action and be as specific as you can be about your new behavior.  To tell yourself that you will exercise more is a set up for failure.  Your resolution is not specific enough.  Your resolution has to have more details.   How often is more?  What kind of exercise?  When and where?  Do you need equipment? a trainer? an exercise buddy?  What do you like to do?  What if you hate exercise?  Each of these questions is a finger pointing at a loophole in your resolution.  If you have a loophole, you will use it.  It's what people do.

Make the behavior change a small one.   Keeping a resolution requires motivation.  The motivation to keep a resolution doesn't come for your desire for the goal.  If the desire for a goal motivated us enough, we wouldn't need resolutions in the first place.  Keeping a resolution depends on the success a person has with doing what must be done.  If you ask yourself to do something you can do, you will do it.  When you do it, you will feel good about yourself.  When you feel good about yourself, you will stick to your resolution.  When you ask too much of yourself, the doing will be a struggle.  The bad feelings that go with trying too hard will erode any good feelings you might have.  Before long, the resolution is broken and you feel crappy about yourself.  That's how people are.  When you give yourself a small step to take, you are more likely to take it and keep on taking it.

Let's use the exercise example.  You want to exercise more.  A way to do that could be as simple as parking your car in the farthest spot you can and walking whenever you go to the mall, visit your doctor or shop for grocery.  That's a small change in behavior that can be accomplished.  You might decide to swim once a week; go to Jazzercise or Zumba once a week; take a tai chi class (In China, people go to their community park every day to do tai chi together.. young and old.) or a dance class.  Set yourself up to do something small, that you can accomplish.  You are more likely to stick with it.

The Global Change Approach

Another kind of resolution requires only one thing:  a theme.  You choose a theme, like friendships, productivity, or health.  Make your theme your guiding vision throughout the year.  You do things in life that fit with your theme and inhibit actions that contradict your theme.

Think of what you want to change about yourself in general.   Do you want to live healthier?  Do you want to be kinder?  Do you want improve your appearance?  Do you  want to be more productive at work?  Ask yourself, "What aspect of myself do I want to improve?"  Your theme must depend on behaviors that you can control in yourself.

Notice what I am not suggesting.  I am not suggesting you give yourself a goal to work toward.  Goals like loosing weight or getting a promotion or passing an exam cannot be tackled with a resolution.  Goals need a plan of action.  The plan of action is developed from an analysis of the goal's requirements and your resources.  You must do certain things to achieve a goal.  Goals have requirements with criteria like grades, job descriptions, or calorie counts that you cannot control.  They are realities outside yourself that you must adapt to in order to achieve a goal.  The behaviors to achieve goals are complex and many.  Achieving a goal is a great thing, but it is a plan thing, not a resolution thing.

Use your theme to guide your decisions.  Do what fits your theme.  Refrain from anything contrary to your theme.  Back to the exercise example.  You want to exercise more and want to put exercise into your lifestyle.  Unless you are of the jock persuasion, its unlikely unless you use a whip on yourself.  It will work until you balk.  When you can no longer force yourself to abide by the exercise regimen, you will return to the couch.  Being physically active is the theme that might be more useful.   An active version of your everyday activities will fit with your theme: Standing rather than sitting; Sitting rather than lying down; walking rather than riding; going out to a movie instead of watching television.

Addictions
A word of caution, beating an addiction cannot be done by resolution. Addictions require help from others to over come. A mere resolution is not enough to beat something as powerful as addiction. The type of addiction doesn't matter. An addiction to shopping or cigarettes or eating or alcohol or crazy lovers involves complex neural pathways and brain chemicals