I love breakfast! It is my favorite meal of the day. No matter how busy I’m going to be that day, I always take the time to enjoy it. I’ll pick up the pace a little later, but at breakfast time I want to relax and savor my tea and food. But how are we to keep breakfast beautiful in the blood-sugar arena too?
When we first wake up in the morning our blood sugar is at its lowest level. For many of us it will never drop this low again until the next morning. The last thing we want to do is spoil this beautiful low blood sugar by stuffing ourselves with cinnamon rolls, bagels, bananas, and then washing them down with sugary orange juice. If we can eat reasonably we’ll be on a roll—we’ll continue to have low blood sugar at least until lunchtime, provided we avoid a high-carb mid-morning snack.
Americans have for whatever reasons designated some foods as breakfast foods and others as definitely non-breakfast. No one is forcing us to do this, but most of us are such creatures of habit we have a hard time breaking out of the mold. In this step toward low blood sugar let us focus on the traditional breakfast foods, and note the good, the bad, and the terrible.
When you think about breakfast, you can hardly avoid thinking about eggs. This is good news for the diabetic! Eggs have virtually no carbs. You can eat one egg or ten eggs and the effect on your blood sugar won’t be much different. For years health experts have solemnly warned us about the evil of eggs, with their high cholesterol content. Surely they will raise your cholesterol through the roof, lead to a massive heart attack, and you’ll be dead before you’re 50.
The only problem with this advice is that research keeps contradicting it and proving it to be flat wrong. Eating eggs, meats, and other foods high in cholesterol does not lead to high cholesterol of itself. The problem is eating these foods while stuffing ourselves with carbs and keeping the insulin level elevated in our bodies. This can indeed be a problem. But in the context of a low-carb diet, eggs are a great choice. A plate of several eggs and bacon is going to have almost no effect on your blood sugar, and on top of that will taste awesome. So enjoy your eggs fried, scrambled, over easy, over hard, or hardly over!
Another favorite breakfast food is cereal, which is not such good news. Many folks think they can overcome the problem with cereal by choosing the healthy cereals. “I’ll skip the Trix and the Frosted Flakes, and choose the Wheaties or the Shredded Wheat.” But hold on a minute. Have you checked the carb count on those cereals? You’ll be surprised that they are just about as bad. And remember, to your body a carb is a carb. Whether it comes from a healthy-looking cereal like Wheaties or a blatantly sugarfied cereal like Lucky Charms, your body will hardly know the difference. There are low-carb cereals you can order online, but they are somewhat expensive by the time you pay for the product plus shipping. Best to order several boxes at once if you go this route.
Now let me recommend two of my favorite breakfasts that will treat your pancreas kindly and avoid the hazards of cereal. Eat and enjoy!
The “continental breakfast” is one of the worst breakfasts for someone watching their blood sugar. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go down to look over the complimentary breakfast and be dismayed to see it is “continental.” What this means is you can eat as many cinnamon rolls, bagels, or bowls of cereal as you like. They’ll usually throw in some bananas as well. When I see these kinds of foods laid out, I say to myself, “Carbs, carbs, carbs.” Then I go back to my room and munch on snacks I have brought with me, or else go to a real restaurant and order a decent breakfast.
Favorite #1: The first breakfast idea revolves around a bagel—yes, I said bagel. But not just any bagel. Normally the bagel is one of the worst offenders you can find in carb content. But amazingly there are some pretty great low-carb bagels around. They manage this by jacking the fiber content way up, which reduces the net carb content tremendously. Check your grocery-store shelves, and if you can’t find them there, order several packages online and freeze what you don’t plan to use for a while.
Fry one egg and one slice of ham. Melt a slice of cheese on one half of a low-carb bagel. Then place the fried egg on it and top the egg with the fried slice of ham. This simple concoction takes almost no time to make, tastes great, and is pretty filling. Notice I do not put the other half of the bagel on top. Most of the low-carb bagels have about 9 net grams of carbs per half. I don’t find any need to double this number by eating the other half, although even 18 grams wouldn’t be too bad, since the other ingredients’ carbs are so negligible. Fix yourself some tea and enjoy a breakfast that will do very little to raise your blood sugar.
Favorite #2. When I first realized I would have to eat low-carb for the rest of my life, one of the most depressing things I had to face was that pancakes were going to have to go. Since my early adulthood it has almost been my “theology” to have pancakes every Saturday morning. But of course a stack of white-flour pancakes drenched in sugary syrup spells blood-sugar disaster. Guess what? The pancakes have resurfaced in my life in an altered form and they taste as good as ever.
The pancake recipe I share with you in this section is terrific. These pancakes make a great breakfast, and I have found that I can eat two or three of them with a touch of sugar-free syrup, a few blueberries mashed on top, and the whole thing covered with some whipped cream—and it barely budges my blood-sugar levels. If someone were to see me eating this delightful breakfast, they would surely think I couldn’t be serious about watching my blood sugar. But they would be wrong. With these pancakes, you can still enjoy an amazing breakfast. Add a couple of sausages (virtually no carbs there) and you have a meal fit for a…happy diabetic!
The pancakes use a combination of soy flour and heavy whipped cream, both of which are great tools. Soy flour is God’s gift to diabetics. Whereas white wheat flour contains about 95 grams of carbs in a cup, soy flour has about 30 grams. This can make a colossal difference when you are reading those black numbers on your blood-sugar meter. There are a few unfortunate individuals who find soy disagrees with them, but as long as you aren’t one of them, you will find soy to be a great friend to you for the rest of your days.
Ingredients:
3 eggs
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup soy flour
3 tablespoons sugar substitute (recommended: stevia or Splenda)
1 heaping tablespoon wheat (or oat) bran
1/3 teaspoon baking powder
In a blender mix all the ingredients. Then cook in a pan or on an electric griddle just as you would wheat pancakes. Feel free to butter them, put a dab of sugar-free syrup on them, mash a few blueberries and place on top, and then cover them with a light coating of whipped cream. These are so good you won’t miss the old-style pancakes at all, and if you serve them to friends who don’t know what they’re getting, they’ll never guess they are eating low-carb!
Another option for a low-carb breakfast is a couple of waffles. I like to have these with my hot cereal. In most cases, waffles and hot cereals are terrors for diabetics. But here are a couple of recipes that you should be able to eat and enjoy without seeing a significant rise in your blood sugar:
Simple Waffles
Blend (a personal mini-blender is perfect for this):
1 egg
1/3 cup soy flour
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup water
1 packet of stevia (or Splenda)
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon oat bran
Makes 2 waffles.
My waffle maker takes about five minutes to cook these. These waffles aren’t quite up to the kind you would get at Waffle House, but they are so much better for you, and with a little butter and some sugar-free syrup, they are really nice.
Low-Carb Hot Cereal
1 cup flaxseed meal (ground flaxseeds)
1 cup protein powder (I use Jillian Michael’s Whey Protein—just don’t use the sweetened kind—check the labels!)
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/4 cup oat bran
Combine the ingredients. You can store the remainder for later use, preferably in the refrigerator. To prepare one serving, pour one cup of water in a pot and bring it to a boil, then lower the heat slightly and start adding the mix gradually, stirring vigorously. When it gets to the proper consistency, put it in a bowl, pour a little heavy whipping cream over the top, sprinkle some sunflower seeds over it if you like, and top it with a packet of stevia.
This makes a really nice hot cereal that is ridiculously low in carbs and easy on your blood sugar.