303 | Meal Planning for Better Blood Sugars

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You are listening to episode number 303 of Better Blood Sugars with Ghislaine, Maryland. Welcome to Better Blood Sugars with Ghislain MD where you can learn strategies to lower your blood sugars and improve your overall health. I'm your host, Dr. Delaine Vaughn. Ladies, if you know you're capable of doing badass things at work and for your family, but you're confused and frustrated with why you can't seem to stop eating the chocolate cake, this podcast is for you. Let's talk. Hey there and welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad you're taking some time for you today and I'm feeling privileged that you're choosing to spend it with this podcast. This episode is actually a replay of a webinar I actually did, I think one or two years ago. So I think it's really good information as I've reviewed it. It's spot on. It still holds true and I think it's useful for anybody who's trying to improve their blood sugars. I want to make sure that you understand the risks you take if you're changing your diet, so I want to give you the warning that I give on every episode. If you are medicated for your diabetes, you have been medicated for the way you have eaten in the past. If you change the way you eat, you will need to change your meds as well. If you don't, you can end up really sick. The kind of sick that looks like an emergency room visit, hospital, hospitalization, and possibly even death. And that's not why you're making these changes. So what I want you to do is get a very clear line of communication open with the provider who prescribed those medications to you. Let them know you're going to be making some dietary changes. Ask them how they would like you to share your blood sugar logs with them and then get clear on how they intend to share medication changes with you. This helps keep you safe so that you don't end up really sick on medications after making some dietary changes. It's really important for you to do that. I also want to remind you that if you are not sure what to eat, that there is always the 14 day guide to Better Blood Sugars that you can find on my [email protected] better b e t T E R if you've done that 14 day program and you want to talk about what it looks like to do this long term or you have any questions or you didn't see the results that you want, I want you to set up a better blood sugars assessment call. You can do that by accessing my calendar on calendly, that is at calendly.com forward/delainemd and then you can schedule a call by Putting forward/call C-A-L L. So that's calendly C-A L E N D L-Y.com DelaneMD that'S-E-L A N E M D forward/call that gets you access to my calendar. We can schedule a 45 minute Zoom call where you and I hop on the call, talk about what you've done, talk about what results you've gotten, talk about what your next best strategy is to doing this long term. But today I hope you enjoy and you find help in the webinar for meal planning. And certainly if at any point you ever have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected] there are going to be some changes made to the podcast schedule and when they're released, so stay tuned for that. But for today, I hope you enjoy the webinar. All right, talk soon. Bye bye. [00:03:17] Speaker B: Welcome. I am going to talk about meal planning. I do want to know what questions you have specifically regarding meal planning. If you would put those in the Q and A box. Partly this is out of interest for me and partly I want to make sure you are getting the information that you're looking for. So if you pull up the Q and A box, you can go ahead and post those in there. Things that I see here. I don't know what to eat. Many times people know that they need to do something to reverse their type 2 diabetes, but they don't understand what the food is like, how do I eat the food in order to do that? So if that's your question, definitely we're going to answer that today. I don't know how to determine what to eat, meaning I don't know how to evaluate the carbohydrate count or the macronutrient count in my food to determine what to eat. And then the other thing that I see in there a lot is I need easy things. I need to know things that are easy for me that are, you know, I call them easy buttons. And we're going to go through all of those things. So if there's anything else that I haven't mentioned there, let me know because these are the things that we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the causes of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. We're going to talk about that briefly, and then we're going to talk about the strategies to develop a meal plan. Okay. And this is going to be a very superficial level of information. I'm not diving deep into things necessarily. It's going to be pretty superficial. But we are going to give you a number of different strategies. Another in the chat box is combinations of food for best results, and then recommendations for keto, partial or something or question marks. So I will come back to those, because I think, Michelle, you're probably talking about, like, you know, do we eat carbs with protein, carbs with fat? I know that there is a lot of discussion, and I forget, maybe it's the glucose goddess that talks about this, about how we need to eat our food in a certain order. And I do have strategies on that. And we can talk about that a little bit. If I don't come back to it, make sure that you put it back in the chat box. But I'll try to review the chat box, the question and answer box, before we're done with this webinar. So let's talk about what causes type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is always caused by insulin resistance. So insulin resistance develops when we have two things that happen. We have an exposure to a high amount of insulin and high amounts of insulin over a prolonged period of time. Those two things have to happen for ourselves to get resistant to insulin. So the food we eat is what causes our body to release the insulin, and then that insulin will cause insulin resistance in our cells. Okay. And I'm going to describe that a little bit more. That insulin resistance at a cellular level that allows our blood sugars to rise, and then the elevated blood sugar that we see from that is actually what doctors consider diabetes. That's what we look for and pick up on lab findings. Okay. So when you think about what I mean by the food that causes insulin to be released, we have three different macronutrients that we eat. All of our foods are composed of three different macronutrients. They're composed of fat, protein, and carbohydrate. Okay. Those are the three naturally occurring macronutrients. I always say alcohol is a fourth macronutrient, but it's not really natural, and we're not really going to talk about that today. So the three that we deal with are fats. Fats have a very minimal insulin release. There's a very low level insulin release with fat when we eat fat. Protein is one of the other macronutrients. And there's a moderate release of insulin when we eat proteins. And then the third one, of course, is carbohydrates. And we have a huge surge of carbohydrates or of insulin when we eat carbohydrates. There's just a huge surge of it. The surge of insulin that occurs when we eat carrot carbohydrates versus cracker or rice or pasta or bread or cookies or twinkie carbohydrates. That insulin surge with those processed foods is very different than the insulin surge with the carrot carbohydrates. Okay, so those are kind of different. Okay. When we get that huge surge from most of those foods that the majority of the American diet is made up of, when we get a huge surge of that insulin, it goes to our cells and it overwhelms them. It basically just. It's too much for them to manage at once, and they kind of shut down and stop paying attention. What insulin is meant to do is open those cells up and bring the glucose inside so that the cell can burn that as fuel for the cell to do the job that it does. Muscle cells contract, heart cells contract, liver cells detoxify, kidney cells filter. All of those jobs that these cells do need fuel to drive them. Glucose wants to be that fuel. Insulin wants to let that glucose in. But when we've released so much of the insulin, the cells won't open up. They get overwhelmed. And that causes then that glucose outside the cells to rise really high. And that's, of course, what we pick up as type 2 diabetes. So again, what causes us to make insulin? It's the food that we eat. This is a normal physiologic response. This is not a lot of doctors, right? The people that I hang out with, right. They. We want to propose or to promote that this is genetically predis. Predestined. Right? And I want to offer to you this is a normal response that the human body has to eating foods that are not normal or natural to the human body. That's really what this comes down to. The majority of standard American diet, the SAD diet, is made up of foods that are not natural to the human being, and that's what creates insulin resistance. So when I try to describe insulin resistance, I frequently will talk about noise. I've talked about kindergarteners, and maybe you've heard that. But sometimes I think using a concert, being in a loud rock concert is a better example. Before going to a loud rock concert, your ears were. They hear very subtle sounds. And that's a message that comes in that our Ears interpret. They send them to the brain. The brain interprets it, right? There's a message coming in, and we can hear very subtle messages, very, you know, low level noises coming into our ears, and we can interpret those. When we go to a rock concert, our ears get overexposed to noise. It's very loud, and the hearing apparatus inside our ear gets overwhelmed and it no longer picks up those subtle messages. If you think of the noise as the insulin and the cell or the ears as your cell, the noise, the insulin wants to give a message to your cells, and it wants to do it in a very subtle way. But when we overexpose it, it needs to get louder and louder. Kind of like when we overexpose our ears to noise at a rock concert, we can't hear a friend whispering next to us. When we leave the rock concert, we can't even hear our friends whispering at us. They need to yell louder to overcome the resistance that we've developed in our hearing apparatus from being overexposed to noise. This is exactly what happens with insulin resistance. Our cells develop insulin resistance from being overexposed to insulin. When we develop that insulin resistance, then subtle insulin surges. We don't pick up and our cells don't respond. They don't open up, they don't bring the glucose inside. Now the pancreas can yell louder. It can increase the amount of insulin released and give us a higher level of insulin in our system so that our cells will eventually hear that message and open up. But just like with the noise, if we keep yelling in our ears, it just requires a higher and a higher level. It ratchets up the amount of noise that we need in order to overcome the resistance in our ears. The same thing happens with ourselves. Your pancreas can make more insulin so that it overcomes that resistance, but over time, that just ratchets up the amount of insulin that's needed to overcome that resistance. Okay? So when we think about what the fix is, the fix is that we go to with our ears in the concert. You go home and you go to sleep in your quiet bedroom, and you don't have any noise. And that hearing apparatus recovers and it heals so that when you wake up the next day, or maybe even two days later, you can hear people whispering at you again. You can hear those subtle noises. The same thing is true with our cells. Adding more insulin just makes them more insulin resistant. What we need to do is decrease the exposure to insulin in order for us to have our cells heal up and become sensitive Again, to these subtle insulin messages that are trying to come into our body and get our cells to open up. So that's the fix, and that's what we need to be doing with our food. So if you remember back to the three macronutrients, right, fats have a very minimal response, or protein has a very moderate response, but carbohydrates have a huge response with insulin. So there's a huge insulin production with carbohydrates. That's what we're looking to lower so that our cells can become more sensitive to our insulin. So what we need to be doing is eating real food. Okay? And that's what we're going to talk about. You can see in these pictures, there's real food in the background. You can see peppers and blueberries and even pickles and things in jars that have been maybe a little bit seasoned, or there's been some kind of food processing happening, but natural food processing. Things that you can imagine that your grandmother did or your family did at one time or another. Okay. You can see the roasted vegetables in the plate with the chicken. You can see the growing of foods. I think growing food, our own food, is a really cool thing. I haven't mastered it, so I don't know that I ever promote doing it. But I think the growing of our own food is a lost art. And relying on other things and other places to make our food I think does add to us being sick. So I think that that's something that's we should be doing more of. Again, I haven't mastered it, but. So the things that we need to be doing are eating real foods, foods that we can imagine, how they were grown in the earth. So let's start on developing that meal plan with that in mind. Like, how do we reverse that insulin resistance? Let's start on developing that meal plan. So I want you. And you can put this in the question and answer box if you have some examples. I want you to write down meals that you have had frequently over the last seven days. Just think back off the cuff. It doesn't have to be a perfect thing. If you had chicken pot pie, if you had a salad and chicken, if that one night, you know, you had pizza, if last night you went and had, you know, a nacho plate plate at a Mexican restaurant, whatever it was. What are those meals that are your typical go tos? Okay. If you're curious about a meal, I want you to put it in the question and answer box. Okay. Some of these things might sound like, you know, I had a homemade roast with, you know, roasted veggies. Maybe I had a roll with it. Maybe it was pizza out with your family. Maybe it was burgers and fries out with your family. Maybe, you know, you have a salad every day at lunch. Maybe it's pizza. Whatever it is, I want you to just list out and try to get seven or so five to seven meals that you are eating on a regular basis. I'm going to give you a few minutes and I'm taking a drink. Okay. And then what you're going to need to do with that list is to get the carb count of that list. So there is a website that I use and it's called Nutrition X. And I'm going to try to give you. I'm going to try to pull up the. The website for you to use, but I'm not sure that it's going to. Let me. Hold on just one moment. Okay. So that you can see on that slide, that is the website that it looks like. So It's NutritionX. It's www.nutritionx.com. and I am going to copy it and put that in the chat for everybody. So you will have access to that and you can just pull it up from the chat box and then you can, like bookmark it before we hop off of this. So let me get my slides back up because now I've changed my thing. So nutritionx.com I love this website because you can put anything in there. You can literally put chicken Marsala and chicken Marsala will come up. Now, is it the chicken Marsala that you made? Maybe, maybe not. Is it perfect? Maybe, maybe not. Is it the exact chicken Marsala from the Olive Garden? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe very similar or very close. Maybe it's not. But it will definitely give you a good ballpark figure of how many carbs you're getting in whatever the meal is that you're eating. Okay. So I love this website and it puts it the same way that your nutrition label on the back of any box of food that you get at the grocery store will. It will have it in that same format. So you can see it. Tuna pasta salad. Yeah, that would be a great one to put in. And again, you're gonna get a basic ballpark estimate. Now, if you don't want a ballpark estimate or if it doesn't seem quite right, like say you put in tuna pasta salad into the Nutrition X search bar and it brings you up that there's 14 grams of carbohydrates and say your fasting blood sugar is 120. And before your meals, you've checked it, so you know you dropped down to 105 after you're fasting. So before your meals, you're like at 105 and you eat your tuna pasta salad and your blood Sugars jump to 185. If that happens, it's probably not consistent with that moderate amount of carbohydrates that nutrition just gave to you. Okay. So it might be wise at that time to calculate it out yourself. So look at it. Oh, I use a half a cup. Most servings that I get have about a half a cup of pasta noodles in it. Okay. How much carbs? How many carbs are in a half a cup of these pasta noodles? How many carbs are in the dressing, the mayonnaise, which should be no carbs, but if you're using something else, you're going to want to put that in there. Or if it's some other salad dressing, a creamy Italian. I don't know. I don't eat pasta salad. I'm sorry. When I did eat pasta salad, my cooking skills are tragic at best, dangerous at worst. So I just made the simplest pasta salad that you could find. Okay. So it was usually like an Italian dressing or maybe a creamy Italian dressing. And those are going to have like 3 grams of carbs. If you're adding a bunch of veggies to it, that may drive up the carbohydrate count, but again, probably not something that's going to shoot your blood sugar that high afterwards. So if you're checking your blood sugar after you're eating this meal and it doesn't match the carbohydrate count that you have estimated, or that ball, you're going to need to go through and actually add each component. So you're going to use nutrition X and you're going to look up spiral pasta and you're going to measure. It's going to say in a quarter cup and a half cup and a full cup, there's 40 grams of carbohydrates. And then you're going to calculate how many cups of that pasta you're having in your tuna pasta salad. Tuna has zero carbs. Again, depending on the dressing, you're going to have to look that up and calculate depending on the veggies that you might put in there. If you're putting carrots in there, if you're putting cucumbers in there, how much are you getting in a serving? And then calculate that out. And that's going to Give you a clear calculation. I do want to offer that as you start doing this, you start to realize that there's a lot of time involved. There's an initial, like upfront time investment for you to realize these foods are good. Like, these foods work for me. Not that they're good or bad value. Like they're good bad foods or they're bad foods. Not that. But these foods. Foods give me the results that I want and these foods don't. So you start compiling a list of foods that work for your body. Okay. After you get that the carb count, then you start to realize, like, where are adjustments that I need to make? So that's the next thing that I recommend, is that you take those carb counts and then you start to make carbohydrate cuts out of them, right? So if you're having a burger, you're going to do something like a bunless burger. Okay. You're going to do a lettuce wrap. If you're having a sandwich and you're like, oh, there's all these carbs in the sandwich and the bread. I always help my clients, I tell them to cut the bread out and then just do meat and cheese roll ups or meat and cheese and veggie roll ups. However that looks. Whatever it is that you like, you try to keep the part that you like about it and remove the carbohydrate component. If you're having, you know, a Chinese dish and the rice, of course, has tons of carbohydrates in it, at that point you're gonna either use cauliflower or you're going to remove the rice component altogether and then just eat the. You're going to add veggies, you're going to like bolster up, make it more robust with veggies and, and have the meat and have the taste that you still like with it, but without the carbohydrates. If you're having pasta using veggie noodles for me, I love the taste of pasta sauce. I don't, I just don't eat it without the veggies. So I make a very robust meat sauce. So it's more like a stew. And I will cover it with like mozzarella and a little bit of seasoning and I almost make it up. Like, almost like you would have. I don't know, I think it's French onion that they have. Like the cheese. I don't know, maybe it's not that, but I just make it like a big rich stew. Instead of having the pasta with it. But there are, you know, there's, there's veggie noodles. There is a noodle, it's called heart of palm. That's the thing that I found that is most like typical pasta noodles. I don't. They maybe have a tangy sauce with them, but you're supposed to soak them to pull that tangy sauce out or that tangy sauce. They have a tangy flavor with them. But if you soak sometimes you can get that out. I like the tangy flavor. It's almost like the tang that goes with like artichokes or, I don't know, olives I guess might be the other thing that have that tangy flavor. So that's something else you can look for. These low carb options. I would warn everyone that using low carb flour substitutes makes it challenging. Okay. So if you're using almond flour, even though it has less carbohydrates than wheat flour, it still has a lot of carbohydrates. If you're using chickpea noodles, so they've pulverized chickpeas and they've made it into a flour and they've made it into a noodle, it still has a lot of carbs. Staying away from those grain or legume based noodle replacements because they still have a ton of carbs in them. Okay. Some people can have them and they're better or they don't have blood sugar responses. Lots of my clients find that even when they make those substitutions, that they have a huge blood sugar spike with it and that that makes it challenging. So you may have to make some compromises on things like texture with these foods or, you know, you might in your head, associate feeling full with the carbohydrate component. I would encourage you to continue to bolster and make more of the veggies. And I know that the veggies definitely bring carbohydrates, but the way that vegetables bring carbohydrates when they're bound to fiber, your body absorbs those slower. So that spike in insulin is much lower. Okay. It's just a different way that your body processes that kind of carbohydrate versus processed carbohydrate. So the insulin response is a little different. But recognize there may be some compromises that you're going to have to make in order to maintain the taste that you like, which is really the important part. You want to maintain the taste that you love and let go of the things that are making you sick is really what it comes down to Michelle, I see that you have in here cottage cheese, 1/2 almonds, 20 grams, turkey sausage, black bean, 31 grams. Also added, premier protein drink with 30 grams. I've been using skinny pasta, 2 grams per carbs made with cognac plant. Yes. And I have heard that cognac plant works out well. Michelle, let me know if you have specific questions about. About, like, is it pulling out carbs? Because I'm adding this up. And even if you did an entire day, 30 grams, 4 grams, 2 times a day now. So that's 8. I'm doing math here. Well, bear with me. 23, 48, 78, 79. So even if you put everything that you have in this list except for the skinny pasta, that might be included in one of them. But even if not, it still keeps you definitely below 100. And really, you know, between that 50 and 100 range. Many times I tell women they need to cut down to 100 grams of carbs because I know that Most women at 100 grams of carbs every day for 6 to 12 weeks are going to be able to reverse their type 2 diabetes. Many women can tolerate more than that, so I don't. If you have a specific question about that meal plan, Michelle, please make sure to put it in there. Lastly, everybody always asks me about pizza. And pizza is hard. I love pizza. And we. I lived in Chicago until I was 10 years old, so we ate pizza. We are not even messing around. We ate pizza. We want it on like a loaf of bread. We want our pasta and our cheese on a loaf of bread. Okay? I like deep dish pizza and I. [00:26:31] Speaker A: Get it. [00:26:33] Speaker B: Day to day. My strategy, if I run into pizza, pizza ends up in my life. Which honestly, there has never been a time where I haven't made the choice to have pizza in my life. Nobody has ever come to me and tried to beat me down and shove pizza in my mouth. But if you're with your family and everybody's having pizza and, and it's a time where you're like, this is my time to eat. And I want to have that in my life, but I don't want it to spike my blood sugar if that's the reality that you find yourself in. I. My strategy for that is to scrape the tops off the pizza. I just eat the cheese and the veggie. I don't typically have sausage. Not that there's anything wrong with sausage. I just don't react well with sausage and those kinds of meats. So that would be my recommendation. And if you're going to order like a personal pan. I would get all the toppings you can on it and just eat the toppings off of it. Pair that with a salad and you're probably going to be pretty satisfied with that. Am I ever going to tell you that this is a strategy for healthy food? No, I'm not telling you that. Please don't hear that from me. But do recognize by avoiding that crust, you are going to avoid spiking your blood sugars. Okay? Really, the simple strategy is that you take the foods that you enjoy and you like, you remove the carbs, you maintain the taste that you enjoy because most people find that, like. Although we like the texture of carbohydrates in our mouth and we like the fullness maybe in our belly, there's not a lot of taste to some of these foods. When we add butter to bread, the butter actually brings the flavor. And maybe we do enjoy the bread. But in the end, we're going to have to make some hard decisions. Continuing to eat those foods are making us sad, sick. Making a meal plan where you can reverse your diabetes and then add those foods back in in a way that don't make you sick is really going to be the strategy for long term reversal of your type 2 diabetes. Homemade meals, you're going to do a lot of trial and error with that. Okay. We're going to, you know, taking the meals that you just looked at, those list of five or seven meals that you have eaten in the last week, removing those carbohydrate components and that homemade meal, and then how do you make it robust enough to be a quote unquote meal to where you feel like it's a meal? Okay, so some things that I've done over the years, certainly the spaghetti sauce stew is one thing that I do, but the other thing that I've done with spaghetti sauce is pairing it with veggies. Typically I do it with rich green veggies. So either I'll saute spinach and I'll put it on top of spinach. I think that that's so tasty, you know, just cooking the spinach until it's wilted. The other thing that I've done at restaurants is I'll ask for my chicken parmesan and I, you know, hope to get it not breaded. If the restaurant makes it breaded, I usually will order a chicken marsala and I'll just say, don't bring me the noodles. Instead, if you could bring me some steamed broccoli. And so I'll Have a half a plate of meat and a half a plate of steamed veggies. And it's very, very tasty. I enjoy that recognize again, there are going to have to be some compromises here. If you're going to look to enjoy your meal as much as you enjoyed all the foods that have gotten you to be sick, it's the equivalent of a cigarette smoker wanting to enjoy like I want to enjoy not smoking as much as I enjoyed smoking. And if that was the case, it wouldn't be so hard to stop. So the recognition that we let go of the cigarettes because they make us sick, the same thing has to happen with the food. The recognition that those foods are making me sick and I'm going to have to make some compromises. How can I eat in a way that doesn't make me sick? And that's going to involve letting go of some of those foods. You'll also find new meals, looking for new recipes. I don't have any great website for online recipes. When I look for a recipe, I Google, I'm trying to think of what recently I did. I've looked up, like barbecue sauces because I like barbecue. But if you've never heard me say this barbecue is really just meat syrup, barbecue sauce. I call it meat syrup. It is high fructose corn syrup. Almost always. That's a primary, one of the primary ingredients in barbecue sauce. It is meat syrup. That's all it is. Okay. So for me, I had to find the seasoning that makes the sauce that makes the flavor that I like without the sweetness. Sometimes I will add a small amount, a teaspoon, maybe a tablespoon of like molasses syrup or maple syrup or honey. Right. I'll add some sweetness, but just a touch. It will not be the primary ingredient in the barbecue sauce that I make. Okay? So looking online, finding the recipe, removing the carbs, and then this trial and error process of making the dish in a way that doesn't make you sick in the group. We always talk about these being plates of disappointment because you should expect there are going to be some plates of disappointment. You are going to have some meals and some recipes that you are not in love with. And either you're going to scratch them and go to what we're going to talk about next, which is kind of how we manage restaurants and how we manage easy buttons and make our meals easy. We're going to talk about that. So you may scrap some of these meals because they're just too horrible. You cannot possibly choke them. Down. Or you may eat them and realize, oh, next time I need to add more of this. Next time I need to find a way to manage this thing that's not great about that meal. Maybe the flavor is great, but the consistency's off. Or maybe, you know, it needs a little more of this or a little less of that. You're going, I did that once with a barbecue sauce. I ended up with too much tomato paste and it tasted too much like tomatoes. So you're going to figure out through trial and error what to do. And you're going to have to accept that as you're learning how to do this. You're going to have to be patient, and they're going to be plates of disappointment that you're going to have to decide what to do with. Okay, so let's talk about restaurants before we talk about Easy Bucks. So restaurants, I want you to list here, and you can list them out if you're not sure. And I know sometimes we have mom and pop restaurants that we love that are local to us, and sometimes finding the information about what they have made for you can be hard. So we can talk about that. But if you have any questions about restaurants, make sure you put it in the Q and A box if there's anything specific. But I want you to list out five restaurants that you go to frequently. Already they're already your favorite restaurants. Your kids like it, your spouse likes it, whatever it is, they're already your go to restaurants. I want you to list out five of them. And then you're going to need to give yourself the opportunity to spend about 10 minutes online researching the nutritional information on their menus. If it's Chick Fil A, you're going to find that easily. If it's Olive Garden, you're going to find that easily. And you're going to be able to calculate what their information, what their nutri, their carbohydrate count is. Okay. If there is a, like you put in Red Robin and you get the nutritional information for their burger, and you're like, well, I want to get the burger, but I want to get it without the bun. I know Red Robin actually on their nutritional information has a bunless version where they will talk, they will give the nutritional information on a bunless burger. But if it's someplace where you can't pull the rice out or you can't pull the pasta out, at that point you are going to figure you're going to have to think about how much pasta do they put on my plate? Do they put a cup and a half. Do they put two cups? I feel like pasta. Like Italian restaurants put a huge amount of pasta. And then you're going to have to go and look how many carbohydrates on that nutritionist website. You know how many carbohydrates are in two cups of spaghetti. And you're going to want to pull that out of whatever the total is that they gave you. So if Olive garden gives you 64 carbs in their chicken marsala, and you're going to go and say, what's in one cup of the pasta? Because I think the chicken marsala there is usually served with bowtie pasta, but maybe it's linguine or a longer noodle, but either way, one cup of that pasta, and then you're gonna subtract from the 60 some odd carbs that you just looked up that amount of pasta. And then you're gonna have a basic idea for how many carbs you get in the sauce. The chicken is gonna be no carbs. And then you're gonna calculate if I put steamed broccoli. And again, you're gonna have to do some visualization. This is not gonna be a perfect number, but it's going to give you a basic estimate, which is really what you want to kind of give yourself that data. When I eat 75 grams of carbs each day, my blood sugar does this. When I eat chicken marsala and I replace the noodles at the Olive Garden with steamed broccoli, I eat that and my blood sugar does this. That is basic information that you need to know. If your blood Sugar goes to 180 with that, you're going to have to decide, is it the sauce? Maybe that chicken marsala has some sugar in the sauce, and it doesn't work for my body. Now, if you had breadsticks from Olive Garden with that, that would be what shot your blood sugar up. It's not probably the broccoli and the chicken marsala. Okay. So seeing that you want to measure, even if you can't get the perfect number of carbs with that meal, you're going to know this meal does this to my blood sugars. So I need to make some adjustments here. Okay. But do try, do attempt to get a carbohydrate count. The other thing you're doing here is you're looking up a meal, and you may. Panera is classic for this. You'll think, I mean, you're getting a salad at Panera. But if you look up the nutritional information and most of their Salads. Their salads are still incredibly high in carbohydrates. I'm assuming they use a lot of high fructose corn syrup and sugar in their salad dressings. But that's a great example where you think you're doing something healthy and you can't seem to pull your blood sugars down. Well, maybe this isn't that food that you're eating isn't as great as you think it is. This is where ahead of time, looking up that value, that nutritional information ahead of time will provide that information for you in order for you to make a better decision. Okay, so you take your five favorite restaurants, the ones that you go to all the time, spend 10 minutes reviewing their nutritional information, and pick two items from their menu that you know you like and serve your health goals. Those are the two criteria you're going to want for each of those menu items. I held that list in my phone, and that's what I used to eat when we went out to eat. And 80% of the time, it was at the five restaurants that my family likes to go to. That was what I used. I just looked at that list and I used one of those two things, and I knew the nutritional information and I could calculate what it was very quickly from there. Okay, put that list in your phone. Never look at the menu again. It is very rare, even to this day. And my A1C has been normalized for years, and my insulin has been normal for years, and my weight has been where I want it to be for years. Like two to four years on those. I've had all of those results to this day. I very, very rarely ever look at a menu when I'm in the restaurant. I always look ahead of time to make sure I have a good idea of what I'm gonna get. That is one of the most powerful strategies that you can use for managing restaurant eating. Even on the 20% of time that you go somewhere with somebody else, it's not your typical restaurants. Look at that menu online before you go and know what you are going to eat before you get into the restaurant. Okay. That being said, many of us struggle with looking like, I want something more. I know that this is the thing I should eat, but man, that looks so good. Okay, that is where signing up for either reverse your diabetes assessment call, which you can do on Calendly. I'm going to put that link in here. Maybe I'm going to actually write it in and pray it works so you can go to calendly.com where you can have access to the calendar slots that I have available and you can schedule. So I just put that in the chat box. You can find that there. You can also always email me at delaneelaine to set up one of those reverse your diabetes assessment calls. Basically that call. We're going to go through that struggle. If, you know, like, I look at the menu, I know what I should eat. I just can't make that decision. That's a different issue than what do I eat. Okay. And that's stuff we can talk about and that reverse your diabetes assessment call. But I would highly recommend you always know what you're going to eat before you go to the restaurant and you never look at the menu again. There is a question. Did you say 100 grams of carbs daily will reverse your diabetes? It can. I will not say it will. I will say there are some women I've had go down to 50 grams of carbs, and that doesn't do it. They have to cut it even lower. Okay? I don't make up the rules. It's what the biology is, and we have to play by the rules that are given to us. Okay? But usually somewhere between 50 and 100 for probably 75, 80% of the women I work with will get you there. Okay? But remember, guys, it is never going to be 75 grams of Twinkie carbohydrates. That is not going to get you there. That is not going to get you there. It's not going to be 75 grams of carbs in the form of pasta or bread or. Or crackers or cereal or any of those things. That is probably not going to get you there. Okay? 75 to 100 or 100 grams of carbs of those foods aren't going to get you there. 50 grams of carbs a day of those foods aren't going to get you there. You cannot eat 50 grams of carbs and rice and chicken. Right? Like you eat just rice and chicken a day and think you're going to get there. That's probably not going to do it. Okay? So there is kind of a trial and error, a testing, and that's certainly what we do in the group to see how many grams of carbs will get you to reversing your type 2 diabetes. The other thing I want to remind everybody, you do have to hold that number. So you cut your carbohydrates and you hold it down until you see your fasting blood sugar consistently drop below 100 once that point happens. So you've cut your carbohydrates here. Maybe at six weeks, you're seeing your fasting blood sugar below 100 every day. You hold that there for two to four weeks. That time period is what the body needs for ourselves to heal up. I don't make up the rules. It is what it is. So that's kind of the strategy that we do in the group just to answer that question. All right, lastly, guys, I want to talk about easy buttons. I love easy buttons. We all love easy buttons. And this is probably one of the main things that I hear from folks that is a challenge. Like, I'm out of time. I need something that's easy. I need something that's quick. Okay, so what I always recommend you figure out what eating establishments are available near your home and near your work and even between home and work. Okay. Because this is when we need an easy button. Right? I'm at work, Something kept me late. I can't get to lunch. I need something easy. I'm coming home from work. I don't have time to make the meal that I'd planned for my family. I need something easy. I'm coming home from work and I'm exhausted and I don't want to clean the kitchen after I make the meal that I planned for my family. This is the stuff that keeps us tripping over that roadblock, that speed bump, essentially. Okay, make easy buttons for yourself. Know what easy buttons are available to you? So I want you to think about the eating establishments that are available to you around work, around home, and in between. Okay? And these things might be restaurants. They might be like, maybe not the sit down restaurants, but maybe a deli or maybe, maybe even a fast food place. They might be like chick fil A. Okay, I want you to sit and think about what are those restaurants between those two spaces that are convenient for you that you like? They might be food trucks, it might be the grocery store, it might be a gas station. If you're traveling for work, that's a reality for you. Like what gas stations? For me, in Kansas, there are quick trips. I don't know if everybody has quick trips in Kansas. We got a quick trip on every corner. Okay, so part of my easy button involves a quick trip. And the reason that it involves a quick trip is because it's always available to me. And I know I can go in there and I can get a couple cheese sticks, a couple little sleeves of nuts of almonds, and maybe some hard boiled eggs. And if I eat that, I am satisfied. I like the taste of them. And it doesn't spike my blood sugar and it makes me satisfied. It gets me through the day. Remember guys, part of the reason that I don't give you a list of foods and a list of no foods is because I don't get to make up the rules about what you like. Okay? I'm not going to tell you you've got to eat cottage cheese and peppers and sunflower seeds. I'm not going to tell you you have to eat cheese sticks and hard boiled eggs. If you hate those foods, that food list is useless to you. So that's why you're going to need to think of the things that you like and how are they available to you in a way that works in your life and what you need to do maybe to adjust them in order to fix, to not have such a carb surge in your body in order to fix your type 2 diabetes. Those little, I think they're like P8, I can't even remember what they're called. They're little protein packs and they have usually nuts and they usually have cheese and maybe they have some meat chunks. Usually they have all of those things in them. Being careful that the nuts a lot of times are like honey roasted, I. E. Their high fructose syrup coated. That's what honey roasted means. Be aware of that. They have a ton of high fructose corn syrup. If you compare regular almonds to honey roasted almonds, regular peanuts, roasted peanuts to honey roasted peanuts, the carbohydrate count in those is very different. And it's all straight sugar and it's usually high fructose corn syrup. If you look at the label, okay, your body responds very differently to that high fructose corn syrup than it does to the peanut without it. Okay? So look at the foods that are available to you when you need the easy button. And you use the same strategy from the restaurant. You look up how many carbs are in them, you look up the nutritional information and you pick two menu items from each of those establishments that you have determined are available to you easily. And then you write them down, you make a list and put it in your phone. And you don't ever make another consideration again. You just choose off that list. So you've made a list of five restaurants. Pizza Hut, Chick Fil, a deli, nearby, the grocery store and a gas station. Okay? Those five food establishments, if you want to call them, okay, you've looked at the Pizza Hut menu. You know you can get a salad, you know you can get chicken there. I don't know if their chicken wings are like, I don't know if they do unbreaded chicken, but I know they do just regular wings that aren't breaded. You could do those. You could get a salad. Okay, you've looked at Chick Fil A. You know that they have roasted chicken, not just breaded chicken. You know, they have salads. They have some healthy options that work for you. Your kids love the Chick Fil A. Maybe it's not your favorite, but everybody, you can order something for everybody. There. This is the thing that you can order for yourself. Same with Pizza Hut. Kids love it, family loves it. You may not love, you know, chicken wings without the chicken syrup on it, but you know, you can get something that doesn't make you sick with it. And that's just the easy button there. Remember, easy buttons are not going to be the most, the greatest, the forever Happy Meal ever. They're not going to be that. But they're going to get you through. And that's really what that's about. You're going to figure out what those restaurants are. You're going to figure out what. At the deli, the deli will make me an open, you know, sandwich. They'll just put it in a carton with no bread. I'll eat that. The kids like this meal. My spouse likes this meal. You're going to figure out. My kids want Red Baron DiGiorno. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno. They want a DiGiorno pizza. And that's what I'm willing to buy them. I'm going to get them that. And I'm going to run through the salad bar or go get a bag of salad at the produce department for me. Okay. I'm going to buy a can of tuna fish to put on it or a can of chicken or whatever, or even most chicken I know. My grocery store nearby actually has cooked chicken in the refrigerated section that they cooked in the deli. And they just pull the chicken off the bone so it's already pulled and it's in the deli section. So I can go grab one of those and I can grab a digiorno pizza for my kids. Easy peasy. Okay. If it's a gas station, figure out what's there that serves your needs that you like. Let go of the things that don't. So if you get one of those little protein packs and it has the sugar coated nuts, am I going to skip that and instead buy a small pack of nuts? So I do get the Nuts. I just don't want the sugar that's with it. Okay, this is the strategy for easy buttons. Make that list. It is a gift to yourself to do that. Okay, So I want everybody to try this out. You know, you can always email me with any questions, see how it goes. A lot of times women find that it's not an issue of I don't know what to eat. Most women find that it's an issue of I know what to eat and I seem to make bad decisions. I seem to struggle to implement the plan. So this is where scheduling that reversing your diabetes assessment call is going to be helpful. These assessment calls are 45 minute Zoom calls. You and I discuss what your obstacles are. By the end of it, you're going to know the biggest obstacles that you have and why you haven't been able to overcome it. Okay. We can talk a little bit about what it looks like to work in the program with me, how you can get that one on one support, how you can get that group setting so that you can reverse your type 2 diabetes permanently. Okay. So that is the information I have for you. Will I be discussing a type of diet to follow outside of all the restaurant stuff? Yeah. Hi, Annie. If there is a specific diet that you want to know about, I'm happy to discuss that. Again, that goes back to prescribing food is not helpful if you don't like the food. Okay. If you already know food that you like, figuring out how to keep those foods that you like in your life when they don't make you sick is going to be the strategy that I found most helpful for people so they don't feel deprived and get pissed at the end of eight weeks and be like, I can't live like this. Bring me the pasta and the pizza and the burgers back. Okay. That's what I find. I will offer. You know, if you want to know a type of diet that has a lot of evidence behind it, the Mediterranean diet probably has the most evidence behind it. But understand, if you are already sick with type 2 diabetes, you are going to unlikely be able to eat the bread associated with a typical Mediterranean diet and reverse your diabetes. You're going to have to go through that reversal process first and then see how much of that bread, how much of the, the carbohydrates, the grains, even rice, like, even real natural white rice, you know, wild grain, long grain, I think is what they call it. I am a particular fan of what's called. It's black rice. It's so good. It's got this woody, nutty flavor to it. It's really delicious. But understand any of those grains that you have in your life, you are not going to be able to eat them Chinese food style quantities. Okay? Like you're not going to be able to have a huge plate. None of the humans can have a huge plate of rice. It is not natural to our body to be exposed to that amount of carbohydrates. For those of us I can't eat that much rice in one sitting. It's really truly a quarter cup of rice that I can usually have with my meal. And it's always the slow cook rice. It's never the instant rice that I can have in my body because it spikes my insulin. It's just the way it or it spikes my blood sugar. It's just the way it is. And of course, whenever we spike that blood sugar, then we get this surge of insulin. And that surge of insulin again is what stuns your cells out so they don't function correctly. As far as other things, you know, people frequently will ask me about the keto diet. I just did a spell of keto and it was really, really miserable. Some people feel great in keto, some people don't. I had a headache for about 10 days. It was just a challenge that I was doing and I was very grateful because I was just like, I just have to do this and get into keto and see what I understand. That was the point. It was a challenge I was doing with a group of other people. Some people do love keto though. They love the way that they feel in keto and that's awesome. If you do ketosis, nutritional ketosis, it's a great tool to utilize to bring that insulin level down. But understand there is a lot of compromises and concessions you have to make to do ketosis. Like, fruit has to be gone. Some veggies are too much sometimes. And this is what I came to. I mean, I dropped like four pounds and I'm not interested in dropping weight. I dropped like four pounds in seven days from doing keto and it was just because there was nothing else to eat. Like I'd eaten the stuff that wouldn't cause that like would promote me going into ketosis. And then there was just nothing else to eat because I could not possibly eat any more roasted veggies and I could not possibly eat another nut. And I just couldn't eat any more chicken. I was just like, I just can't eat any more of that food. And there's nothing else to eat. And it did. It caused me to drop weight. So ketosis is another type of diet. And again, I always talk to my clients. There's an exchange to be made for all of these things. You can exchange your health and being sick with type 2 diabetes for continuing to eat pizza and crusted pizza and bread and ice cream and Oreos. Like, that's the exchange. You're going to get this thing in exchange for this thing. Or you can reverse your diabetes and have normal insulin level and have, you know, healthy living. And in exchange, you're going to give up some of these foods that have been really tasty for you. Right? Cigarette smokers do the same thing. Guys, they're dealing like they like their cigarettes. They don't want to go, like, without cigarettes for their life. And sometimes they choose to have copd. That's the exchange they make. They will inevitably end up on oxygen. It is the final common pathway for every cigarette smoker that they will end up on oxygen at some point in their life, even if it's just the last six months of their life, they will end up on oxygen. Oxygen, okay. If they don't want this part, the oxygen part, then they exchange their enjoyment of the cigarette for that health part that they're looking for. And that's really what all of us find that we need to do. So some people choose that exchange for nutritional ketosis. They're like, yeah, I like the way I feel on it. It's easy. They enjoy it. That's awesome. And they exchange some of these other foods so that they can be in nutritional ketosis. So, Annie, I hope that answers your question, please. If it does not, please put that in the chat or in the question and answer box. I am going to make sure. Yes. So the Nutritionx website is in the chat box. So if you open the chat box up, the Nutritionx website is in there. The calendly link to Schedule the Reverse youe Diabetes Assessment Call, if you're interested in that, is in there. And then, as always, my email is available to you. You're more than welcome to email me. I would love for you guys to all try this out. And as you're seeing results with this, don't. Aww. The chat box has been disabled. So that was me. Sorry about that. Thank you, Annie. Again, NutritionX is www.nutrition n u t R I T I o n I x. So the word nutrition plus ix at the end of it.com that gets you to nutritionx. I will. The replay will be sent out with this and I'll send all these links there. The calendly link for the 45 minute Reverse youe Diabetes assessment, call www.c-a l e n d l y. Like calendar, but calendly.com forward slash delanemd. Okay, and then my email address, delaneelainmd.com. thank you, Annie, for pointing that out. I apologize. All right, guys, I. That is what I have for everyone. Looks like maybe there's one more thing. Check disable attendant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully that gave you guys the links again. I'll send them out in the replay email. All right, guys, I hope this has been helpful again. Try these things out. If something comes up and it's, you know, you're having problems implementing it or if you're having problems even finding information, send me an email. I'm happy to help you find that information. If, you know, if, like, you start doing this and you're like, yeah, I've done all this. I have the lists in my phone. I know what I should be eating, and I'm just not making that decision. That is a different issue. And that's really where Reverse your. That reversal call is going to be helpful for you. All right, guys, hope this was helpful. If you have any questions. Yeah, one last. Is seltzer water okay? Yes, girl, it is. As long as it doesn't taste sweet. So I would very much look and I. I say, yes, girl, it is. I drink it. I don't drink it a lot, but do understand that sometimes they put sweetener in it. So if it tastes sweet, you want to stay away from it. It should just smell. I always say seltzer water like the peach seltzer water. It smells like it rode next to peaches. It doesn't taste like peaches or it tastes like it rode next to peaches. It's not really tasting like peaches, so be aware of that. Also, look at the label. If there's any sweetener. Splenda, Ace K, Aspartame, whatever it is, any of those that are in there, you're going to want to avoid it. Natural flavors are typically in seltzer waters, and those are kind of questionable, but they don't usually put sweetener in it. Okay. So, yeah, that should be fine. All right, guys, I will hopefully hear from you with any questions. And remember, there is the reverse Delaney MD Reversing Diabetes Facebook group. Next week. I'm going to actually go live in there for coaching. So if that's something you're interested in, go to Facebook search Reverse Delaine MD Reversing diabetes. Ask to join that group. We'll get you in there so you can be available. Try some of these things out. If anything's coming up, you can get some coaching in that hour long session that we'll have next week. All right, guys, I will talk to you later. Oh, wait, there's another question. Got it. Thanks, Annie. We'll talk soon. Bye. Bye.