Sunday, November 9, 2008

A Repast of Vegetables

The numbers don't lie. Bread kills. Me. After weeks of monitoring, on Saturday morning I get a "good morning" number - 5.4 mmol/l. What did I do differently? I ended my evening with a crisp and nutritious vegetable stir-fry. Flavored with ginger, honey, and chillies (no salt), it bursts across the palate. This is now my favorite way to serve sweet potato. It filled, it satisfied, and it was a meal without bread.

(Added November 13, 2008 - well, I'm fresh back from diabetic training and it turns out I was only half right. The nurse told me the culprit was FAT. Fat gets processed the slowest, so it will stay in my system, being broken down and stored, for over 24 hours. The list of food "good guys" gets shorter and shorter....)

This morning, I wake up to one of my worst morning numbers, 8.0 mmol/l. What did I do differently? Hubby and I indulged in a large pizza with bread sticks last evening. I ate the equivalent of five servings of bread in a single sitting.

The numbers don't lie. Bread kills. Me.

I mustn't give up carbohydrates altogether, of course. The stir fry was nearly all carbohydrates, too. But they were at their most complex. There was nothing complex about that pizza. I can all the toppings I want, it is still a very, very simple answer to my cravings (fat, salt, and bread).

It is obvious there is more work to be done in our family to change our eating habits and our preferences. I have an image of me in a monk's cowl, sitting down to a plain meal of vegetables and barley or perhaps a little soup, parsimonious in my sips, withering to a shadow of my former self, a veritable living prune...