Who doesn’t love the holidays. Indulging in candies, pumpkin spice lattes and homemade cookies from grandmas house. Once you start eating all the yummy treats it’s hard to stop. Before you know you’re saying yes to every sweet thing in sight!
The barrage of sugar isn’t good for anyone, especially if you struggle with type-2 diabetes. This time of year can be especially challenging.
Did you know more than 30 million American have type-2 diabetes and another 84 million have pre-diabetes, a precursor to the diabetes. That’s close to half the population. Poor blood sugar control is clearly a common problem in this country. The numbers are shocking, but the good news is that you can maintain healthy blood sugar balance with food and supplementation even through the season of indulgence.
Maintaining a healthy blood sugar and balancing macronutrients is key!
The best thing you can do to support healthy blood sugar balance is to make sure that you are eating a lower carb diet. You can do this by shifting the base of your diet from high carbohydrate foods to lower carbohydrate foods. High carb foods include grains, both whole and refined legumes, starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrot, and high glycemic fruits. Lower carb foods include non-starchy vegetables and low glycemic fruits like berries, apples and pears.
I try to make sure most of my carb intake is from the lower carb group. Try eating one to two servings a day from the higher carb group. When you make a shift to a lower carb diet it is proven to maintain stable blood sugar balance. Most people eat an excessive amount of carbohydrates more than our bodies need, or can handle which causes dramatic spikes in glucose and insulin.
Watch your Carbohydrate intake
When you eat grain-based carbs, starchy vegetables or high glycemic fruit, they are rapidly converted to glucose. Our bodies are fine tuned to clear out of the bloodstream, because it can cause major damage to the body. The pancreas released insulin, a hormone that directs the cells to absorb the glucose to burn as energy; but once the cells are full, insulin tells the body to convert and story the excess glucose as fat when you are constantly filling up on a lot of starchy vegetables, grain based carbs and or high glycemic fruits.
Developing Full blown type 2 diabetes
The pancreas continues to pump out insulin, but cells that are already overloaded with glucose start to become resistant to insulin’s signal. Therefore, the glucose remains in the bloodstream, causing even more insulin to be released making cells even more insulin resistant. In addition, to having excess circulation blood glucose, you also have high levels of insulin, damaging in its own right. If you don’t break this dietary patter then you can eventually develop full blown type 2 diabetes.
