Guide to Healthy Fast-Food Eating. Hope S. Warshaw
of foods you need based on your specific situation, consider consulting with a dietitian expert in diabetes care.
Everybody Sings the Same Song
ADA recommendations for healthy eating echo the recommendations from health organizations and government agencies. Whether it’s the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, or the United States Department of Health and Human Services, they’re all singing the same tune.
This means that as a person with diabetes, you don’t need to stick out like a sore thumb because you strive to eat healthfully. There will be times that you’ll feel like a fish swimming upstream because it’s challenging to eat healthy restaurant meals and reasonable portions. It’s not easy to eat healthfully. This is particularly true when it comes to restaurant foods—whether you are eating in or taking out.
How Much Should You Eat?
In order to make the long-term changes in your eating habits that will get and keep you healthy, you’ll want to continue to eat at least some of the foods you have enjoyed for years, albeit in smaller quantities. The quantities of food you eat and when you eat need to match your lifestyle and schedule. Another critical element is to determine what foods and times for meals and snacks work best to help you keep your blood glucose, blood lipids, and blood pressure in control. Lastly, what’s best for your diabetes is what allows you to feel good day to day and what helps prevent or slow down the development of diabetes problems.
No set number of calories or amount of foods or nutrients is right for everyone with diabetes. Your needs depend on many factors. A few of them are your height, your age, your current weight, and whether you want to lose weight or are at a healthy weight, whether you have a hard or easy time losing weight, your daily activity level, the type of physical activity you do, and more.
To develop an individualized eating plan and/or set healthy eating goals to make lifestyle changes, you may want to work with a registered dietitian (RD) with diabetes expertise, such as a certified diabetes educator (CDE). A dietitian can help support your efforts to change your eating habits over time.
Several books on the topic of food, nutrition, and meal planning published by the ADA give more indepth information about how much and what you should eat (To order a book from ADA’s extensive library of titles, visit http://store.diabetes.org).
Help Is Nearby
Whether you have just found out you have diabetes or you have been doing the diabetes balancing act for years, you can always learn more and benefit from a supportive diabetes educator. Get to know a diabetes educator. A diabetes educator will most likely be a nurse or dietitian but could be a pharmacist or exercise physiologist. Many diabetes educators have obtained the Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) credential. A diabetes educator can help you tailor your diabetes management plan and offer tips for dealing with diabetes. The following resources are a good start to link you up with quality diabetes care:
It’s now easier than ever for you to take advantage of the services of a diabetes educator or diabetes self-management education (DSME) as well as medical nutrition therapy (MNT) services from an RD under Part B Medicare services. Medicare has been covering DSME and MNT since the early 2000s for people with diabetes. Also, in nearly all states across the country, private insurers and managed care organizations that are regulated by the state must cover DSME and MNT. It’s best to check with both the health care provider from whom you want to receive these services and your health care plan to determine the details on this coverage and ask if you need a referral.
Restaurant Pitfalls and Strategies for Self-Defense
Eating out healthfully is no easy task. It’s downright challenging! You need willpower and perseverance. It’s tough enough to eat healthfully in your own house, but even more challenges confront you when you are not able to control the portions or the condiments. You can’t march into a restaurant’s kitchen and hold the cook’s hand while they ladle on more butter, slather on more mayonnaise, or shake more salt onto your once healthy foods.
Healthy restaurant eating is a challenge because of numerous pitfalls—from huge portions to the use of large quantities of fats, oils, sugar, and salt. Don’t despair. You can learn to choose to eat healthfully in 99% of restaurants. To help make it easier on you, it’s important to learn the pitfalls of restaurant eating. You’ll find these discussed below. Next, you’ll want to become well versed on healthy eating strategies. As you thumb though the tips and tactics in the pages ahead, you’ll note that these strategies emerge repeatedly.
Pitfalls of Restaurant Eating