Meal planning with Diabetes.

Planning meals is both easy and tricky. What I mean by that, it's easy when we're at home. I like to cook. My wife likes to cook. So when we are cooking at home, it's quite easy. We know exactly what goes into the food. From that, I will know exactly how much carbohydrates I will be consuming, how much protein, how much fat, and that helps. The reason why, to me, that's important because something that I'm sure healthcare professionals know, but I've noticed that the amount of fat versus carbohydrate versus protein will have an impact on glycemic index of the food, so how quickly my blood sugar rises and falls. So we do take that into account. So when we're planning food, we try to get something that's healthy. And it's not just healthy for me, it's healthy for everyone. It's the right balance of carbohydrate, protein and fat. Planning meals when we are using partially prepared products or going to a restaurant is a lot harder because you're not really planning them, people are preparing them for you. But it's more random. it's much harder to estimate what you're getting and how quickly it would impact my blood sugar. And this is where pump and CGM help because I can see after I've eaten, if it's going up too quickly or something, I can adjust it one way or another. Perfect example for this would be pizza. So eating pizza for a type one diabetic is an ordeal. is an ordeal. And it's not just me, I've spoken to some of my friends who are type ones as well and they, everybody, when you say pizza, they'll go, yeah, pizza, right? So the reason for that is that pizza is a lot of carbohydrate and a lot of fat and some protein thrown in. So what I find is that it may take a while for the blood sugar to rise and then suddenly shoots up and it's quite difficult to manage. I do make pizza at home. I can manage that to be better. And again, having a pump is amazing for it because you have different programs, how you, instead of giving yourself all insulin at once, you can have a dual program or more steady over time. Pump is amazing for that. But if you go to a restaurant, it is completely random. You don't, it's very hard to predict how it will behave. So that is more of a challenge. So what we end up doing these days, and especially obviously during lockdown is prepare food at home from scratch. And then we can properly plan, produce healthy food, no diabetes specialist food. It's healthy for everyone, healthy for me, for my family and produces the best results.