What you eat is important

This page may contain affiliate links, which means if you purchase something through one of the links on this page, I may earn a small commission. This is at no extra cost to you, and helps me continue doing what I love.

It never ceases to amaze me how intricately God created our bodies. One area that particularly fascinates me is how our bodies use the food we eat.

I had an appointment last week with a nutritionist. It was a very interesting hour. One thing she did was put me on the diabetic diet. This is not the first time I’ve tried to follow the diet, but at least this time, she gave me more information than my doctor did when I was in college.

Her main concern was that I limit my carb intake. We’ve been trying to do that since October, when my last doctor told me to cut back. This time though, I was given very specific guidelines as to how many grams of carbohydrates per meal I am allowed to eat. Then she gave me forms for me to write down what I eat every day. Every single bite. Wow.

It’s much harder than I expected! In a way, it’s nice, because I can eat some starchier foods that I haven’t eaten in a long time. On the other hand, most of my favorite foods have a lot more carbohydrates in them than I thought they did. Finding out that a small brownie has 20 grams of carbohydrate in it. . .well. . .that’ll keep me from eating too many any more.

Friday night my father in law made me special ice cream. He makes the best homemade ice cream I have EVER had. Period. He made me a special batch, so I ate some. Honestly, I ate too much of it. When I woke up on Saturday morning, my blood sugar was still high. The ice cream tasted incredible, but feeling like I did was a warning that I do need to be more careful.

Right now the absolute hardest thing about it is that I love milk, but I have to count the amount of carbs in it too, so I’m not drinking quite so much anymore. I didn’t realize how much milk I drank until I started keeping track of everything!

In a way, it’s tempting to want to rebel. But it doesn’t pay. I could eat what I want, but the price of doing that would be too-rapid weight gain (for now), and I certainly don’t need to invite diabetes to come any earlier. If I can put that off as long as I can by eating right, than you’d better believe I’m going to try.

So now my biggest challenge is trying to prepare the healthiest meals I can but while still keeping the grocery bill as low as possible. It helps that our garden is producing now, but it’s still a challenge. I do have an old frugal meal list I made out a long time ago, but it has so many high-carbohydrate meals on it that I’m trying to rewrite it. I don’t mind meals like that once in a while, but we can’t have them on a consistent basis. Rachel, that’s why I haven’t posted it yet, but I really haven’t forgotten about it.

I’ve been eating this way for about a week now, and it amazes me how good I feel when I really am careful. So I guess that means that the adventures continue. . .