That’s happened in several different ways, and not all of them have been my doing.
The most obvious – and easiest – is to make the switch from white to whole-wheat products, be it rice, pasta or bread items. One excellent example is trading out white rice for brown in one of my favorites: a Japanese salad recipe. Would I rather it was made with white rice? Of course, but with the brown rice it doesn’t send Emerson’s blood glucose soaring, so brown it is.
The same can be said for some of the pasta salads that show up on the table, especially during the summer. However, these days I make a much greater effort to measure out everything else that’s going into them so I know exactly how many carbs are making it to the table.
Another secret I’ve found with pasta salads is to cook two servings of pasta, but divide the finished meal into three servings, in effect cutting the amount of pasta and its carbs down to two-thirds of a serving. I’m not sure Emerson even knows I do that, and the servings are still generous (although at one point in our lives they wouldn’t have been).
While that’s a start, it’s certainly not all that can be done. I have a pita recipe we both have enjoyed for several years. It includes chopped chicken, garbanzo beans (chickpeas), green onions and pepper slices seasoned with cumin and mixed with a little lemon juice and olive oil, then topped off with ranch dressing.
We’ve also eaten it in a variety of different pitas, both white and whole-wheat, so ditching the white ones wasn’t any big problem. I just make sure to divide up each batch into three equal servings so each of us is getting only a single serving of garbanzos, with one serving left for Emerson to eat later.
The only problem initially was his numbers remained high. It wasn’t until we looked at the label on the ranch dressing bottle (fat-free, no less) and found extra sugar and carbohydrates that we had our culprit. Fortunately, it wasn’t long after that that a trip to one of the local health food stores turned up Walden Farms® fat-free, sugar-free salad dressings, which are also available at Walmart and have taken care of the problem quite nicely.
As a disclaimer, I should probably note that I’m still using the low-fat, high-carb brand of ranch dressing, and at some point I will write about how I’ve made my peace with low-carb eating.
Sadly, there are some items that can’t be made to work, not matter how much wishful thinking goes into it – on both our parts. For some reason, the soba (buckwheat) noodles Emerson just loves would send his glucose off the charts.
Another miss that we tried early in this process and discarded was hamburger buns made with a combination of whole wheat and oatmeal and sold by a local supermarket. They were delicious, but they just didn’t work at our house.
After some trial and error with different sandwich buns, we finally opted to go to whole-wheat sandwich thins, which are lower in calories and lower in carbs than other options. As Emerson says, eating with pre-diabetes is a giant experiment, and you should go out and try different things before you’ll necessarily find what works.
As a college student, even if cash was running low, it always seemed possible to scrape enough money together for some sort of tomato sauce and a box of pasta, and voila, there’s a satisfying meal large enough to share with others.