Newly Diagnosed: What Can I Eat?

Dear Gretchen,

Excellent advice! The key, I think, is not to let the diagnosis of diabetes overwhelm you. At first, we have so much to learn about how our bodies respond to different foods, exercise, stress, illness, and so forth that we have enough challenges not to argue with our doctor and any other members of the health care team that we might have. Only later, as we learn what our bodies need and if it's different from what our health care team thinks what we need, we might get a new team.

My own journey through the diet jungles in the 15 years since I learned that I have type 2 diabetes has taken me through all of the diets that you mention here and more. Someday I will write about this trip through the diet jungles, as I still remember that you have encouraged me to do.

Meanwhile, we have to remember that nutrition is a science that is barely emerging from the dark ages. Everybody has his or her theories. Believing in any of these theories without testing the effects on your body can be dangerous. I'm reminded of this quotation from Mark Twain:

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."

On the other hand, George Bernard Shaw had a more positive message:

"The secret to good health is to get a chronic disease and take good care of it."

Best regards,

David

another quickie primer is the importance of not skipping meals- i have had many patients who purposefully skip meals in order to lose weight, only to stumble upon the paradox: 'i only eat one meal a day, why the heck can't i lose weight?!'- skipping meals is a double whammy for diabetics, where the GLC swings will be accentuated- my advice is, if you have to skip a meal for convenience, at least try to incorporate (high protein) snacks- this will help spread out the GLC load and will help to modulate appetite/binging (which i suspect is the problem in the skipped meal paradox)- interestingly, there is research which shows that alternate day eating diets are good for weight loss, but alas, not so good for DM