blood glucose is measured in milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl). If you’re accustomed to millimoles per liter (mmol/L), simply divide mg/dl by 18.
❯❯ Occasionally, I include sidebars, shown in shaded boxes. Some, but not all, of the sidebars provide personal stories that uncover solutions to common diabetes management issues. Feel free to skip sidebars or anything with the Technical Stuff icon, which highlights information that’s interesting but not essential to understanding carb counting and diabetes.
❯❯ Diabetes doesn’t define you, so you will never hear me call you a diabetic. You are a person who has been dealt the diabetes card, but the deck is not stacked against you. Play your cards wisely and chances are you’ll have a winning hand.
❯❯ Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy – just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
When planning the content for this book, I thought critically about who my potential readers would be. I assumed there would be diversity because, for starters, there’s more than one kind of diabetes. Additionally, many people with diabetes are simultaneously trying to manage weight, cholesterol, or blood pressure.
I’ve made the following assumptions about who you might be:
❯❯ You have diabetes: type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, or any other form of glucose dysregulation. You may have been recently diagnosed or you may have had diabetes for years (or decades) and are looking for up-to-date, accurate, and tangible information.
❯❯ You’ve heard that diet, weight control, and exercise are foundational strategies for managing diabetes or preventing prediabetes from progressing to type 2.
❯❯ You may have developed gestational diabetes or be a woman with pre-existing type 1 or type 2 diabetes who is committed to having a safe pregnancy and a healthy baby.
❯❯ You may be a parent of a child with diabetes or have a family member or other loved one with diabetes, and you want to know how you can help.
The four icons used throughout this book identify different kinds of information.
In addition to the content in this book, you can access free companion materials online. Simply navigate to www.dummies.com and search for “Diabetes & Carb Counting For Dummies Cheat Sheet.” From there you’ll be able to read or print several useful articles about choosing carbs wisely, making better food choices, and more.
Please feel free to read this book’s chapters in any order. For Dummies books are not linear, meaning content doesn’t build sequentially. Each chapter develops a core concept and provides usable information that stands alone yet ultimately dovetails with other pieces of the diabetes puzzle. Review the table of contents and see whether any particular chapter is calling your name.
If you aren’t sure where to begin, Chapter 1 provides a glimpse of the key content in the book and directs you to the appropriate chapters where you can find more details on each topic. Chapter 2 is a great place to get an overview on diabetes.
Be sure to read Chapter 4 sooner rather than later. Chapter 4 has concepts and illustrations that are integral to much of the rest of this book. It explains what happens to food after you eat it – how the body processes carbohydrates and then uses, stores, and even creates glucose. It also explains what happens when glucose levels rise too high or fall too low.
Part 1
Getting Started with Carb Counting and Diabetes Management
IN THIS PART …
Understand how diet and diabetes are intimately connected.
Explore why glucose is essential to fuel the brain and body.
Find out how much carb you really need and discover how to balance carb intake with medication doses.
Get a handle on how your food choices affect blood-glucose response.
Take note of the nutrients in carbohydrate foods.
Build your diabetes team and embrace your role in self-care.
Chapter 1
Delving into Diabetes and Carb Counting
IN THIS CHAPTER
❯❯ Understanding how carb choices, portions, and timing affect your health
❯❯ Getting started with carb control and advancing your carb-counting skills
❯❯ Living well with diabetes through self-management education
Diabetes is a disorder that is largely self-managed. You are the one making the daily decisions that affect your health outcomes. That’s a significant responsibility! The thought of taking on diabetes may seem overwhelming, but you can do it.
There’s a learning curve, of course. Being successful at any skill, sport, task, or job takes effort, training, patience, and support. Think about a preschool child who picks up his parent’s paperback novel and stares blankly at the foreign squiggles on the page, wondering how anyone could possibly read it. We’ve each been that child and faced that same challenge. We still encounter words that we don’t recognize from time to time, but we can look them up.
Learning about diabetes is similar. First you tackle the basics, and then you build on that foundation. Learning to manage your own diabetes requires diabetes self-management education. This book is designed to be your companion text in the learning process. The goal is to build knowledge (especially about counting carbs) and foster the skills needed for successful self-management. This chapter introduces you to the world of diabetes and carb counting.
Diabetes is a condition of abnormal blood-glucose regulation. Lack of insulin
