The Holidays Are Hard

 As I enter my first holiday season as an official diabetic, I’m reminded just how difficult it is to stick to a diet regimen.  It seems that the date range between Halloween and New Year’s Day are dates that are filled with food-focused gatherings among family and friends.  For me, I have more success with my diet plan when I’m able to plan out my meals in advance.  Holiday gatherings aren’t as conducive for meal planning since you don’t know what all the meal options will be and what each dish available actually contains in terms of carbs and sugar etc.  

Halloween wasn’t too hard as a day itself since I didn’t eat any candy that day.  I included it since football season usually has some big games around then that lead into Thanksgiving and includes more get togethers and lots of food.  

As I write this, we are in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I must say for me that it’s been so far so good.  Here is a photo of what I ate during Thanksgiving.

For Thanksgiving, I ate servings of turkey, ham, turnips, green beans and deviled eggs.

Here is what I would have eaten if I didn’t have to worry about my blood glucose levels.

I know what many of you are thinking.  Go ahead and get a small serving of the carbs and don’t deny yourself that treat on just this one day.  I chose not to do that this time since I’m still in my initial diagnosis period and I’m trying to get my A1C as low as possible. Maybe next year I can taste a little of that pie. 

Let’s take a look at how my lean and green meal affected my blood glucose.

Okay so what’s the takeaway here?  Well, I think I was able to control myself due to the fact that the CGM was going to show me in real time what was going to happen to my levels.  It’s not as if I was going to fool anyone or myself anyway if I went crazy and ate everything that was available.  Having the numbers before me in black and white seem to help in making the best choices.  Time will tell though since this is all still new to me.