Top 10 Tasty Recipes for Diabetic Diets eBook

This is a guest post by Linda Strother. She is the author of Top 10 Tasty Recipes for Diabetic Diets. You can read her blog and follow her on Twitter and Facebook

Info graphic from Healthline.com

According to Health Line “Nearly 26 million people in the United States have diabetes, 7 million of whom may be undiagnosed and unaware of their condition.”

In 2013 the International Diabetes Foundation estimated  globally 382 million people have diabetes.

In 1999 I found myself as one of the statistics as I was officially added to the ranks with a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis. Perhaps I had been diabetic for or pre-diabetic for years but didn’t want to face it, even though we have a strong family history with the disease. When I was diagnosed, I weighed 236 pounds or (107kg 47.791g) and my BMI (body mass index) was almost 40, BMI of 30 is considered the low end of obesity. www.cdc.gov

All diabetics, no matter if you are Type 2 or Type 1, are ruled by the numbers on the glucose meter and the accumulated blood sugar readings otherwise known as the hemoglobin A1c report.  Also known as glycated hemoglobin, glycosylated hemoglobin, hemoglobin A1C and HbA1c. The A1C test result reflects your average blood sugar level for the past two to three months. Specifically, the A1C test measures what percentage of your hemoglobin (a protein in red blood cells) that carries oxygen  is coated with sugar (glycated). The higher your A1C level, the poorer your blood sugar control and the higher your risk of diabetes complications.

So what’s normal?  For people without diabetes, the normal range for the hemoglobin A1c test is between 4% and 5.6%. Hemoglobin  A1c  levels between 5.7% and 6.4% indicate increased risk of diabetes, and levels of 6.5% or higher indicate diabetes. For those of us diagnosed with diabetes a hemoglobin A1c level of  less than 7% is the standard. The higher the hemoglobin A1c, the higher the risks of developing complications related to diabetes. Your doctor may have a targeted goal in mind for you, my doctor works with me to keep my levels below 6.5.

Learning to eat right is one of the major challenges in living successfully as a diabetic. Diabetes is a complicated disease but I wanted to see if I could change my diagnosis.  I learned a lot about myself on this journey. At one point in 2003, I was so successful my doctor said my A1c test was below 5.9% and changed my diagnosis to non-diabetic. Unfortunately I was unable to maintain the low test readings forever but did manage to keep it low for 18 months. Stress and a long illness soon led me to fall back into my old food habits and little to no exercise. By early 2009 my A1c was well over 7.2 and my doctor was very concerned and placed me on a medication which caused too many side effects for my liking. I knew I had to make some serious changes. I began to modify recipes to work toward a healthy weight and better A1c results. To date: I have lost over 70 pounds and lowered my BMI to the low 20’s and have kept my A1c below 6.5 and maintained my weight loss for the past five years.

 Preparing meals for the diabetic diet is not just about reducing or replacing the sugar, as diabetics we are concerned about fat and calories too. Diabetic food does not have to be boring and tasteless.  I think the hardest part of being a diabetic is trying to find the right food that still tastes good. In the past we thought of a diabetic diet as a sugar-free, tasteless pile of lettuce and cottage cheese with a dried up piece of chicken breast. I assure you that diabetic cooking can be tasty and healthy at the same. 

I began a blog in 2009 so I might share some of my own recipes and feature recipes from other cookbooks that worked for my diet.  I have also published some of favorite recipes on Ezines and GoArticles.

The Diabetic Cookbook

In December of 2013, I published my first diabetic cookbook on Amazon for Kindle ebooks. Tasty Recipes Diabetic Diets Cookbook ebook.  The idea was to showcase 10 of my favorite foods converted for the diabetic diet. All of the recipes in this book were created or adapted by me as well as taste tested and I shot all of the photos. I took all of the photos because I wanted to be as honest as possible about how the food looked when prepared by a home cook and not a professional chef.

 Tasty Recipes Diabetic Diets Cookbook ebook

Click to this link for the Not So Cheesy Cheesecake recipe. This is the recipe from the featured photo from the book cover.

Look for our next cookbook coming out in the summer of 2014 it will include 100 plus recipes, many contributed by my friends and family.