With diabetes, it’s important to spread your food, especially your daily carbohydrates, over time. Spreading your carbohydrates minimizes blood glucose spikes and gives your body an opportunity to bring levels down. The same holds true for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Spreading your meals out also is associated with successful weight loss. That means, don’t skip meals.
It also means that breakfast and lunch give you two new opportunities each day to incorporate foods into your eating habits that benefit your health. So, are you? Or are you hitting the drive-through in the morning for your driving entertainment and picking up a sandwich and chips for lunch?
The truth is that breakfast and lunch can sabotage your best efforts at managing diabetes if you don’t treat those meals with the same consideration as dinner.
Breakfast and lunch are the perfect times to work healthy dairy foods into your day, like low-fat milk or yogurt. And, what other time are you likely to enjoy the benefits of the soluble fiber in oatmeal? Canned fish, like tuna packed in water, and portable fruits are perfect to grab and go for lunch, and whole-wheat bread gives healthy grains a place to shine.
Breakfast and lunch do take some planning, but many people find they’re perfectly happy to eat the same thing every day for these meals, or rotate a few favorites. If that’s the case with you, the planning for these meals into the foreseeable future requires an incredibly small investment of your time.
By the way, if you’re thinking you can find a way to make takeout food work well for these meals, think again.