Healthy eating for Pregnant women with Diabetes

So pregnancy and type 2 diabetes is known as gestational diabetes, but there are some women who are living with type 1 diabetes and are pregnant. It's really, really important that you know your carbohydrate foods, you know the amount of carbohydrates you're eating. the main advice we give to women is that to have better management through better carb counting. So knowing how much you're eating, how much carbohydrate is in them, and depending on which treatment you're on. So if we just take women who are living with gestational diabetes, which is type 2 diabetes, the advice would be around generally around healthy eating, eating more fruits and vegetables, eating more green leafy vegetables, more protein foods, reducing the carbohydrate amount, particularly around your meal time. So having less potatoes, rice, pasta can improve that spike of blood glucose after your meals. Checking your blood glucose regularly, making sure that you are in your target range. Doing exercise. Often women are not encouraged enough to do more walking, particularly after meals. Not being afraid of doing home exercises and avoiding any fruit juices. So that's really, really something really that I do talk about is avoiding any fruit juices because we know fruit juices can spike your blood glucose quite quickly. Now for women living with type 1 diabetes, they will have a lot of information around carb counting, having much, much better, tighter carb counting can really improve your targets and achieving those targets that you've been given post meals. We often find that women with type 1 diabetes would like to attend more of the Daphne courses to get a refresher on how to have better carbohydrate counting. So if you are planning a pregnancy, it's really useful to start having better diabetes management and also asking your healthcare professionals to refer you onto another Daphne course so that you can have much better carbohydrate counting knowledge as well.