How I Eat Healthy #2: The Shopping Trip
To eat healthy now a days takes time, skills and effort! You’ve got to stock up, plan, navigate the supermarket aisles, chop (I do lots of chopping!), prep foods and cook. And if you eat restaurants foods (in or take out), another feat is to put together healthy restaurant meals. Yes, a constant, but rewarding, challenge!
In this blog series, How I Eat Healthy, I’ll share how I, as a mother, wife and chief of shopping, planning and cooking for my busy family, make eating healthy happen every day (or at least most days – no claims of perfection here!). I’ll offer up my time-honed tips and time-saving tactics you can use to set yourself and/or your family to Eat Well, Live Healthy! And please share your tips and tactics on twitter using the hashtag: #howIeathealthy.
#2: The Supermarket Trip: As I said in How I Eat Healthy #1 Stocking Up you’ve got to set your home up for success. Step two in this process is to shop regularly and, even more importantly, shop smart.
How I Eat Healthy: #1 Stocking Up
To eat healthy now a days takes time, skills and effort! You’ve got to stock up, plan, navigate the supermarket aisles, chop (I do lots of chopping!), prep foods and cook. And if you eat restaurants foods (in or take out), another feat is to put together healthy restaurant meals. Yes, a constant, but rewarding, challenge!
In this blog series, How I Eat Healthy, I’ll share how I, as a mother, wife and chief of shopping, planning and cooking for my busy family, make eating healthy happen every day (or at least most days – no claims of perfection here!). I’ll offer up my time-honed tips and time-saving tactics you can use to set yourself and/or your family to Eat Well, Live Healthy! And please share your tips and tactics on twitter using #howIeathealthy.
#1 Stocking Up: To eat healthy day in, day out, you’ve got to set your home up for success. Step one is to regularly stock up on the foods you’ll need.
Why Should Diabetes Advocates Enter This Food Fight?
What’s wrong with these two conflicting realities? And, why should diabetes advocates care (and take action)?
Reality 1: A food fight is raging on Capitol Hill because some members of the House of Representatives want to put the brakes on several requirements for school foods and meals which went into effect with the implementation of the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 (12/13/10). (Read more background below.).
Reality 2: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced updated figures for diabetes in the U.S. Top line: there’s been yet another uptick. Now more than 29 million American are estimated to have diabetes, up from 26 million in 2010. Another 86 million adults – more than one in three U.S. adults – have prediabetes (for more on prediabetes). Fifteen to 30 percent of people with prediabetes will develop type 2 within five years. To stats on the related childhood obesity: one out of every three American children is overweight or obese. Many children, who eat half their calories at school, consume a diet too high in saturated fat, sodium, and sugars, and too low in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
Do Diet Drinks Cause Weight Gain? New Study Repeats NOT LIkely
Are you under the impression, though counter intuitive, that downing diet drinks will add pounds to your hips and scale? The root of this notion stems from several large observational studies, which over the last several years, have fed the media’s hunger for headlines to paint diet beverages and low calorie sweeteners as the dieter’s devil.
Yet, when most experts analyze these observational studies as a group their conclusions, such as those from Pereira, conclude this is “an artifact of reverse causality.”(1) In the case of diet beverages this means that the people in these studies at higher risk for weight gain, obesity and/or type 2 diabetes may be more likely to increase their intake of diet beverages to attempt to reduce their disease risks. It doesn’t prove cause and effect.
Maybe, just maybe, due to one more prospective randomized control study (studies which can test cause and effect) published by Peters, et al., on May 27, 2014, people who wisely count their calories and opt for calorie free vs. calorie and sugar-loaded beverages, will finally be at ease sipping diet beverages.(2)
Diabetes Alert Day 2014 - Help Me Sound the Alarm Louder
Tuesday March 25, 2014 is the American Diabetes Association's Diabetes Alert Day. Though the statistics about the prediabetes and type 2 diabetes epidemics are alarming enough to sound the alarm 365 days a year, Diabetes Alert Day is THE day each year that the American Diabetes Association sets aside to encourage people to TAKE the Risk Test and if need be, TAKE ACTION to diagnose and care for prediabetes or type 2 diabetes NOW. I fully support this effort!
Yes, the stats are downright scary and clearly show the dent diabetes is and will continue to make in our health care system, let alone peoples’ individual lives and livelihood!
Interview with Susan Weiner, co-author The Complete Diabetes Organizer
Diabetes, whether type 1 or 2, is a personally very demanding disease. That’s an understatement! The day-to-day management of diabetes is done by the beholder and/or their caregivers, not the person’s healthcare provider(s). As healthcare providers we spend time teaching people about managing diabetes, from medications to food, exercise, preventing complications and more. It would be great if we had endless time to help give people practical ideas and strategies for fitting their diabetes into everyday life, but we generally and unfortunately, don’t.
That’s THE BIG reason I’m pleased to see this new book come along, The Complete Diabetes Organizer. This all-in-one guidebook, written by diabetes nutrition educator, Susan Weiner and organization guru, Leslie Josel, offers up plenty of practical tips, products, apps and more to help people with diabetes better organize their diabetes into their real (and busy) lives.
Dialoging about Diabetes: PWDs Offer Ways to Improve Communication and Care #9 Kerri Sparling, author Balancing Diabetes and six
As a diabetes educator/healthcare provider (DHCP) I’m observing that the rapidly growing world of the Diabetes Online Community, the DOC for short, is helping people with diabetes (PWD) and their loved ones find support and feel supported. People and their caregivers are connecting, building relationships and feeling more positive about the challenges of managing their diabetes. I’m delighted to see this trend!
As a DHCP I’ve long realized that I can’t walk a mile in a PWD shoes. I can’t know what it is like day in, day out to deal with this challenging and relentless disease. But, what I do know is that we can learn from each other to change the dialog between providers and PWD to be more positive, more supportive.
Goal one with these Dialoging about Diabetes interviews with diabetes activists is to help make living with diabetes…just a bit easier. Goal two is to enhance the two-way street – to help more PWD get connected and encourage more DHCPs to open the doors of social networking to PWD.
Here’s my dialog with Kerri Sparling, who’s had type 1 diabetes (T1D) for 27 years. Kerri jumped into the diabetes social networking world early on, in May of 2005 with her blog Six Until Me. She regularly contributes her personal thoughts in her column SUM Musings in the D-newsletter diatribe. She’s been an active member of the ever-expanding Diabetes Online Community (aka The DOC) and a diabetes advocate. Now Kerri has authored a book, Balancing Diabetes. Kerri’s book offers her account and the accounts of others, mainly those with T1D, who work to balance diabetes everyday through all the ins and outs of daily life.
Book Review: I Hate to Exercise Book for People with Diabetes
This is one in a series of book reviews. You may find these books beneficial if you: manage prediabetes or diabetes, follow a diabetes meal plan and/or try to eat healthy to live well. These book reviews also appear on amazon.com and these books can be found in my amazon a-store. This book is also available from American Diabetes Association's book store. Please check out these books and consider a purchase.
Let’s face it: we know exercise is important, especially in managing diabetes. But sometimes it’s just hard to put exercise into practice nearly every day (as you’ve been told it should be done). Plenty of people have gotten the exercise bug and it’s ingrained in their daily lives. Other people, and you may be one, just plain hate to exercise.
In the 3rd edition of The “I Hate to Exercise” Book for People with Diabetes, authored by registered dietitian, certified diabetes educator and exercise specialist, Charlotte Hayes, MMSc, MS, RD, CDE, exercise detesters get an ADA published and approved resource to turn to for sneaky ways to move more.
Book Review: Diabetes Weight Loss Week by Week
This is one in a series of book reviews. You may find these books beneficial if you: manage prediabetes or diabetes, want and need to lose weight, follow a diabetes meal plan and/or try to eat healthy to live well. These book reviews also appear on amazon.com and the books can be found in my amazon a-store. Please check out these books and consider a purchase.
You know all too well there are diet books a dozen to help you manage your health and eating plan with diabetes. But, there are very few that walk the fine balance between healthy eating and blood glucose control. In the book, Diabetes Weight Loss Week by Week, recently published by American Diabetes Association, registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator Jill Weisenberger, MS, RD, CDE, accomplishes just that!
Look AHEAD Results: Please Read Beyond the Headlines
“The Look AHEAD trial showed no benefit in glucose control." "The Look AHEAD study didn't demonstrate a delay in progression of disease in type 2 diabetes." I heard these two statements while attending the Joslin Diabetes Innovation 2013 in Washington DC, October 3-5. One statement was made by a healthcare provider, the other by a marketing person who does outreach with physicians.
They echo the doom and gloom statements summarizing the Look AHEAD study that simply baffle me. But then I remember that the New England Journal of Medicine, in their social media push to publicize the first publication about Look AHEAD (June 27, 2013) since the study was halted about two years early in October 2012, offered up this negative conclusion. This Debbie downer headline then reveberated and snowballed through social media venues for the next 24 hours.