Your body may not adopt even best healthy food, because everyone’s body digested differently also your interest in taste varies.
Design Best Diabetes Food
First, keep in mind, what works for someone else may not necessarily work for you—and vice versa.
Whatever the diabetes diet suggested, your body may not adopt even the best one. Because each body is different, the digestion process may vary and the food that interests you varies. Thus, it is a must to individualize your diet with:
- some trial (try different foods),
- testing (measuring blood-glucose level),
- recording (making a log),
- analyzing (processing the data), and
- finalizing a suitable one.
Test diabetes diet
What can diabetes eat? The answer to this controversial question is literally at your fingertip. Test Eat Test…
Testing is the most critical tools in gaining control of the blood-glucose numbers. Mostly, many medical professionals suggest fewer numbers of testing per day. Nevertheless, many well-controlled diabetics have been testing many times until mastering the diets and their blood-glucose relationship. Knowledge is power, so it is advisable to follow those who made it already.
Doctors may suggest different testing times for useful information, but testing blood-glucose before & after 1 or 2 hours of the meal is the information needed for the individualizing diabetic diet.
Next, you should need to know the blood-glucose peak (the highest blood-glucose number after a meal). It also varies from person to person, because each one's digestion and absorption power may vary. So, you have to find what your peak blood-glucose time is? That is the time after your first bite of food. Once you find your peak time, then stick at that time for testing until finalizing your diet.
Health is wealth
Now you may think it is a costly process requiring numerous test strips. Yes, you are correct; you need many testing strips to finalize your diet plan. However, once you master your diet and blood glucose levels, then it can save you many dollars, improves health & wellbeing, and prevent diabetes complications.
How to analyze a diabetes diet?
Now you need below said information to individualize your diet:
- Blood glucose level before the meal.
- After food blood glucose level
- What are the foods you have?
- What is the content; fat, protein & carbohydrate (simple or complex carb & fiber content)
- Level of physical activity
It is time to record all the above information in a diabetes log that helps to finalize and mastered the art of designing a diabetes diet. From the data available in your hand, it is easy to correlate the carbohydrate intake and the respective blood-glucose rise.
You know the stress level, sleep deprivation, and infection can have a huge impact on your blood glucose level.
So if there are unrelated spikes in your blood glucose while finalizing the diet, you should take into account:
- your level of stress
- the quality of sleep the day before, and
- any form of infection that might affect your blood sugar level.
This data helps you understand other blood glucose disturbance other than diet.
If you're before meal blood glucose is too high then reduce the amount of carb in the diet can help to reach the target glucose level.
What should be your blood glucose value?
As per the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the target goal is as below:
- Fasting blood glucose level: 90 to 130 mg/dl (5 to 7.2 mmol/L)
- Postprandial blood-glucose level: Less than 180 (10 mmol/L)
Non-Diabetic has the following reading.
- Fasting blood glucose level: 70 to 100 mg/dl (3.9 to 5.5 mmol/L)
- Postprandial blood-glucose level: 70 to 140 mg/dl (3.9 to 7.7 mmol/L)
Postprandial glucose measurements should be taken every 1 to 2 hours after the beginning of the meal, preferably individualized peak levels in patients with diabetes.
When does food make blood glucose spikes in diabetes?
How soon after eating and how long does it last?
Every individual body is different, and thus, their insulin requirement is distinct; YMMV is an acronym stands for "Your Mileage May Vary." It varies depending on the time of the day, the food you ate, the physical activity you performed, and the medication you take. I know this is not the answer you expect, but no other way.
You should self-monitor your blood glucose at 60, 75, and 90 minutes after food. Additionally, you may also locate spikes at different times after breakfast, lunch, and dinner once you have arrived an individualized most consistent spike time. After that, you can drop these extra tests.
Finalize diabetes diet
During data collection, you may find it challenging to meet target values. Don’t be frustrated?
It is common for a most diabetic; this is a long-term process to the betterment of your diet choice for adequate blood glucose control.
Analyze the diabetes log by yourself or with your dietician and finalize which foods have low or no blood glucose spikes. And which are the foods that disturb your blood glucose control?
Once you mastered this art, then frequent blood tests are not required and follow the testing time suggested by your doctor.
Best wishes for a successful diet modification for better blood sugar control :)