Diabetes impacts millions of Americans daily lives and can make living a healthy lifestyle challenging. Changing one’s diet can help manage blood sugar levels; however, this is the most challenging aspect of diabetes self-management. Changing your eating habits can seem like an overwhelming, daunting task, but these eight simple tips can help ease that stress.
1. Eating a variety of foods is especially important when it comes to diabetes self-management. You should choose foods from each food group and try new foods every day!
2. Make half your plate fruits and vegetables. Consuming fruit may be able to satisfy a craving for something sweet while also providing dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Try to include non-starchy vegetables like leafy greens, broccoli, and even carrots.
3. Choose whole grains. When choosing grains for your diet, you should make at least half of your grains whole-grain foods. These whole-grain foods will provide a good source of dietary fiber! Foods such as whole-grain cereals, barley, and oats are good sources of fiber.
4. Focus on unsaturated fats. Limit sources of saturated fats and choose low-fat or fat-free dairy products. When cooking, choose good sources of healthy unsaturated fat, choose lean meat, poultry, and fish, and lastly, bake, broil, roast, grill, boil, or steam foods rather than frying them.
5. Cut the salt. While this may seem challenging, reducing salt can help control high blood pressure. Try substituting salt with pepper, herbs, or other seasonings.
6. Avoid skipping meals. For this tip, it is important to remember that eating patterns are personalized, so it is important to find a healthy eating pattern that you can stick to. Having an unhealthy eating pattern can cause you to skip meals. Skipping meals can make you hungrier, moody, and even unable to focus.
7. Focus on your food. It is important to focus on what you are eating and how much you are eating. Eating while doing other things can lead to either overconsumption or even underconsumption.
8. Watch your portions. Read food labels and pay attention to the portion sizes. More importantly, watch for carbohydrate content! Cutting out carbohydrate-rich foods is not necessary; however, it is important to eat a balance of these carbohydrate-rich foods and spread them throughout your day.
Reaching out to a registered dietitian nutritionist can help those struggling with diabetes self-management. A registered dietitian nutritionist can help develop personalized eating plans that ensure the proper amount of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats are incorporated into the diet.
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