A serving is the amount listed on the food label. If your portion is two or three servings, you need to double or triple the calories, carbs, and everything else to estimate the amount you will actually eat. There’s too much error in guessing. Even people who are certain they can’t be fooled find that they also underestimate the amount they eat.
Serving sizes in restaurants, single-serve packages, and even cookbooks have ballooned in recent decades, so most of us have some degree of portion distortion. To get a good handle on the amount of calories you eat, you need to use food labels, a calorie-counting book or website, measuring cups, and a food scale. As an experiment, pour out your usual amount of cereal or scoop out your usual portion of pasta. Then measure it and compare it to the serving size. Do this with all types of foods: chips, fruit, meats, everything. The results will probably surprise you.
Now that you’re eating better, and possibly beginning to lose weight, your body might be handling carbohydrate better than it did before. This is a good thing, but it may put you at greater risk of having low blood glucose (hypoglycemia), especially if you take certain diabetes medications. Hypoglycemia is when your blood glucose level is less than 70 mg/dl. You may or may not experience symptoms, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking you don’t need to check. Not all diabetes medications can cause hypoglycemia. Insulin and some of the diabetes pills can. To see how your new diet affects you, test your blood glucose more often than usual. A list of times to self-monitor your blood glucose (SMBG) is given below. Choose the times and the frequency that give you the information you need. If you usually check twice daily, you may want to start checking at least four times now and whenever you make big changes in diet or exercise. Share your SMBG results with your health care team and ask if your diabetes medications should be changed as you lose weight.
• Before meals and two hours after the start of the meals
• Bedtime
• 3 a.m.
• Before and after exercise
• Whenever you feel shaky, dizzy, nervous, lightheaded, confused, or disoriented (symptoms of hypoglycemia)
WEEK 2 ACTION STEPS
Continue your current goals or rewrite them if necessary. Additionally, select from the following goals or steps, modify them, or create your own. Choose goals from the previous week if applicable. This week I will:
All that healthful eating we’ve been talking about starts with a good breakfast, so this week you’ll learn why it’s so important and how to put one together in no time. We’ll cover more tips to trim calories, build on your walking program, and make use of your food record.
Rush! Hurry! Go! There’s no time for breakfast!
Hey, not so fast! A little planning will help you get a balanced morning meal lickety-split. You may wonder why you should eat breakfast when you’re trying to lose weight. It’s simple; skipping meals causes people to overeat. Eating breakfast is a critical strategy for weight loss and the prevention of weight regain, though many who skip breakfast have the misguided notion that it saves them calories. Many of those who are certain that they are not eating more calories overall when they skip breakfast really are. Among participants in the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR)—a listing of thousands of people who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept if off for at least one year—78% eat breakfast every day. Additionally, eating breakfast is associated with healthier cholesterol levels, better insulin sensitivity, and greater intakes of several vitamins and minerals, including potassium, calcium, iron, and vitamin C.
If you’re worried that eating in the morning will raise your blood glucose, you’ll be delighted to see how eating may actually push those morning numbers down. Morning blood glucose levels are largely regulated by hormonal factors and the actions of your liver. While sleeping, your cells use up the glucose from your dinner or evening snack, so the liver sends more glucose into the blood. Often in type 2 diabetes, the liver doesn’t recognize that there is ample blood glucose available, so
