Now that you know some basics about calories and several balanced meal plans, you’ll learn a few guidelines for planning your meals, how food labels can help you stay on track, and how your blood glucose might change with your new diet. But first, you’ll pick a weight-loss goal.
To get healthier you don’t need to lose tons of weight. Dropping as little as 5–10% of your starting weight is a big plus. Losing just a little can significantly lower your LDL (bad) cholesterol, reduce your risk for certain cancers, lower blood pressure, and may help you control your blood glucose with fewer medications or lower doses. If needed, start with a goal to lose 10% of your starting weight (see the table below). Once you hit that mark, in say, 3–6 months, decide if you want to work toward an additional 5–10%. Beginning with a small goal, such as losing 5 pounds in the first month, is a good idea.
Eating healthfully shouldn’t be complicated. It’s not easy in our fast-paced, fast food society, but a healthful nutrition prescription shouldn’t be difficult to understand or be filled with lists of strict or tricky rules. Unfortunately most diet plans found on the Internet and promoted on TV are complicated, unbalanced, or both. Many have long lists of foods to eat and longer lists of foods that you shouldn’t eat. Some require that you avoid carbohydrates or eat them only at certain hours. Others forbid fats. Some require combining one food group with another. All of this is more complicated than necessary, and it doesn’t usually lead to good nutrition or lasting weight loss. Often individuals who follow a plan like this eventually return to old eating habits and regain all of the lost weight plus more!
Refer to any of the five meal patterns discussed in Week 1 and the Appendix for descriptions of healthful eating, or simply get started with these guidelines for uncomplicated nutritious eating.
• Spread your food out over the day. Eat at least three meals daily.
• Include the foods you love, but be smart about how often you eat them and about portion sizes.
• Eat more foods derived from plants than from animals—this means more fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, and beans than meats and cheese.
• Choose foods as close to their natural state as possible. Limit highly processed foods.
• Aim for three or more food groups per meal.
• Eat a variety of food groups and a variety within each food group.
• Limit added sugars, solid fats, animal fats, and excess sodium.
By following these guidelines, you’ll know what to put in your grocery cart and what to prepare for dinner. You’ll come home from the supermarket with wholesome fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, and low-fat dairy. Most of these foods will look as nature provided them rather than like they came from a food processing plant. You don’t have to avoid them completely, but you’ll limit foods like cookies, candy, chips, stick margarine, boxed macaroni and cheese, seasoned rice mixes, instant soups, sodas, processed meats, and more. Take inspiration from the 7-day menus in the Appendix. Don’t feel that you need to follow these menus exactly. They couldn’t possibly meet the preferences and schedules of all readers. Rather, they are here as one more tool to offer you guidance and motivation.
Perhaps the simplest meal planning strategy at home is the Plate Method, which guides both your choices and your portions. Start with a 9-inch plate. Draw an imaginary line down the middle, and fill half the plate with non-starchy vegetables like broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, and green beans. Divide the other half between a small portion of lean meat, such as chicken, fish, or beef, and a small portion of a starchy food, such as pasta, rice, bread, or starchy vegetables like peas. Add a cup of low-fat milk and a small piece of fruit for dessert and your meal is complete. You can use the same principles for breakfast, though you might omit the vegetables. You could also keep the vegetables by having a breakfast pizza or by topping your egg and toast with jarred salsa. See the Appendix for a Weekly Plate Method Planner.
Decipher a Food Label: Portion vs. Serving Size
Food labels are packed with information to help you control your weight and blood glucose. Unfortunately, many people underestimate the calories, saturated fat, sodium, and carbohydrate they eat, even when they look at food labels. The reason? Too much food is piled on the plate. Portion sizes and serving sizes are not the same thing. A portion of food is the amount we eat. 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:
Continue the following goals: ______________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Aim to lose 1–2 pounds.
Record my food intake and activity every day.
Use the Plate Method for meals.
Use a dinner plate no larger than 9 inches.
Use measuring cups whenever I eat cereal, rice, pasta, potatoes, and other starches.
Use measuring cups whenever I eat the following types of food:_______________________________________________________.
Read labels for every food I eat.
Eat at least two fruits and three vegetables every day.
Use food labels and other tools to help me with my calories and portions.
Decrease my calorie intake in the following ways:_____________________________________.
Check my blood glucose at least ___________ times each day.
Not skip any meals.
Take a 10-minute walk at least twice a day.
Add 1,000 steps to my daily step goal.
Other:_____________________________________________________________