Type 2 Diabetes

Not just diabetics, but all of us could benefit from limiting simple sugars and processed food from our diet and really focusing more on healthy whole foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, healthy sources of protein like beans and nuts.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about 15 years ago. When people who are not familiar with diabetes, they think mostly that you just need to avoid sugars. Though that is a part of it, any carbohydrate will break down into sugars, and so the effect is the same if you're eating a heavy-laden carbohydrate dish, such as a heavy pasta, as if you were eating sugar itself directly. So it's more complex than just simply avoiding sugar. So the carbohydrates should be limited. Carbohydrates are the things that taste so good often, and so it becomes a lesson in self-restraint to be able to eat in order to preserve health the best.

The biggest thing that we learned to avoid with type 2 diabetes was carbohydrates, which are things that are in rice, bread, flour, noodles, things like that. It wasn't eliminate all of them, it was to count your carbohydrates. Ours, for example, we tried to avoid not going over 75. So we read the back of the package, how many carbohydrates or something and measure according to the serving size. You don't want to cut everything out because your body needs those, they just need less of those. And your biggest tool is to measure, count, and keep your self-accountability with some type of log.