When I was discharged from the hostibule a couple weeks ago, my initial follow-up was with my primary doctor. She got me in that office and practically cackled with glee and screamed “the day is mine!” when she realized I would be homebound for the immediate future; she does not screw around, which is why I keep going to her even though I could go see anyone in the system. So she set up some changes to my diabetic meds and set me up with the pharmacy doc to see what he could do. He set me up with some of my current meds a while back. Good dude.
I’ve had a sensor attached to my arm for the last week and a half, and the pharmacy doc did a data dump last week (it isn’t the really fancy one I can check on a whim; my insurance company wouldn’t go for that one). My blood sugar numbers haven’t been this good in at least five or six years, maybe ten; I’ve gone from perpetually too high to going low at night. The only real spike I had in the last two weeks was because we had pancakes for night food. This is largely thanks to adding two medications and changing the time I take my insulin from morning to night.
Which confirms something I told the doctors in the hostibule repeatedly: I had a medication issue. I know how to eat properly, and screw you for condescendingly suggesting I retake the diabetic nutrition classes because “maybe you need a refresher.”
Short version of how I’m supposed to be eating: I have three meals and 2-3 snacks a day. Each meal is 45-75 grams of carbohydrate, and each snack is 0-30 grams.
When I did the classes ten years ago, the dietician suggested we look up every place we eat out to see just what would fit with those numbers. Naturally this involved getting the book they just happened to sell downstairs. How about no. I know how to use the internet, and restaurants are required by law to post their nutritional information online.
There are also plenty of websites with nutritional information for raw ingredients. So of course I immediately bookmarked a few of these sites and set up a spreadsheet to calculate the numbers for things I cooked. Considering I’ve been using spreadsheets for vehicle design in games for decades, this was simple beyond words. So now when I go to make something I’m likely to make again, especially something I intend to use as a premade lunch, I plug in all the numbers and see where I am. Easy. Is like shooting monkeys in a barrel.
I also went through things I like to eat in general. One of my basic snacks is chips and salsa. Unless you’re doing the fruit-based salsas like mango-peach or pineapple, salsa is essentially zero carb. So if I max out the carbs on a snack, simple math tells me I can have up to forty of the little round chips I like. That’s a pile of chips.
Nuts are pretty low-carb too unless you’re shoveling down big fistfuls of honey roasted peanuts or cashews. The main thing I have to be careful with there is my beloved coconut cashews; I don’t have a bag in front of me, but I make sure to count those out. The upside there is that a bag lasts a good long time when you actually pay attention to the serving size. Takes a bit of the sting out of paying six dollars for them.
When I make my stir-fry, it’s some kind of meat (usually thin-sliced chicken or pork chops), premade sauce, and a pile of vegetables. Not exactly zero carb, but still pretty low depending on the sauce I use. It also makes a big pot, plenty for a full meal and a few lunches. The only problem there is neither Stacie nor my mother in law are huge fans.
A typical breakfast at work is a breakfast croissant, a couple of zero-carb energy drinks, and some milk. All of which I eat over the course of several hours so even if it was a lot of carbs it wouldn’t all be hitting my system at once. For snacks, I typically have cheese, creepy meat, and nuts.
I’m not over here pounding down bags of M&Ms and giant plates of pasta. The one real issue with carbs I have is lunch at work. If I don’t make a batch of something on the weekend, I typically eat a frozen meal. And I really like lasagna. Ask Stacie and she’ll tell you I damn near proposed after she made lasagna for me five years ago.