Diabetes Diet Tips

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Mar 25 2010

Posted at 3:12 pm under Diabetes Diet

Diabetes Diet Tips – The Key Principles of A Healthy Diabetic Diet

A healthy diabetes diet plan should be designed to give you plenty of freedom to decide how you’ll meet your weight loss goal. But that doesn’t mean that the plan can completely unstructured or without guidelines. It is actually based on principles that make intuitive sense and are proven to help people with diabetes.

Over the next few days I’m going to post some simple rules you can follow to ensure your diabetes diet is a healthy one, and actually gives you the results you need.

The good news is that you won’t be given a list of banned foods, because on this plan all foods are allowed, in appropriate portion sizes. So relax (in fact, relaxation is one of the plan’s rules). These are guidelines that will inspire virtually anyone to say, ‘Yes, I can do that.’

Diabetes Diet Tip 1 – Eat More Often

Start your day by eating breakfast, then go no more than five waking hours without a meal or snack.

By keeping food in your system, you avoid wild fluctuations in blood sugar – deep valleys brought on by skipping meals or eating them late and high peaks caused by a surge in glucose when you finally get something in your stomach. Just as important, you keep your appetite under control by not letting hunger build to the point where you’re ravenous.

Eating more often means, for a start, eating breakfast every day. According to several studies, this not only helps to keep your blood sugar levels stable, it also helps you to eat fewer calories throughout the day. What’s more, it boosts your metabolism so you burn more calories throughout the day than you would if you skipped breakfast.

Research suggests that adopting this simple habit can bring striking health benefits. For example, a report presented to the American Heart Association in 2003 found that rates of obesity and metabolic problems such as insulin resistance were 35 to 50 per cent lower in those who ate breakfast.

In terms of what you eat the rest of the day, if you’re planning a late lunch or dinner, you’ll need to have a snack in between. That’s right, you need to snack. Again, the aim is to keep your blood sugar levels steady and make sure you never become too hungry. You’ll learn how to master your meal timing in an upcoming article, but for now, work this rule into your diabetes diet and make sure you start to follow it – starting today.

Diabetes Diet Tip 2