“But…I’m cooking for a family of four!”
Not a problem. If you are cooking for two or more, you can still use the meal plans in this book! Most of the recipes in this book yield four servings. You’ll simply change how much of a certain dish each person gets. In many cases, the only difference will be the portion sizes of the side dishes.
Step 3: Become Familiar with the Ultimate Diabetes Meal Planner
Now that you’ve chosen your calorie level, you’re ready to get started using the Ultimate Diabetes Meal Planner. You’ll notice that this book is divided into four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. Don’t worry about starting your healthy meal plan in January; start with the season that you’re currently in. It’s never too early or too late to get your eating on a healthier track.
Further, each season is divided into four weeks of meal plans. You’ve probably already recognized that a season contains more than four weeks. What you will need to do is repeat each week a few times each month. You probably won’t become bored with the same dishes over and over because there are four weeks separating each meal, but if you do, try swapping out days from other weeks. For example, if you don’t want the Whole-Grain Waffle for breakfast on the first Sunday of Week 1 of the Winter Cycle, use the Whole-Grain Muffin from Tuesday of that week or the Whole-Wheat Pancakes from Sunday of Week 2 of the Winter Cycle. The thing to remember is that you’ll need to use the entire day’s meal plan to keep your nutritional levels carefully balanced. As you become more accustomed to using this book, substitutions and improvisations will become natural and easy.
If you don’t want to follow a Winter Cycle meal plan and prefer a Spring Cycle meal plan instead, go ahead and do it. Just remember to stick with the whole day’s meals and you will be fine.
Also note how this book is organized. Each section begins with a week of meal plans, which includes pages of daily meal plans broken down into calorie levels, followed by a shopping list, and then the recipes in the order that they are used. After you have finished with that week’s meal plans, the next week’s meal plan is presented, along with its daily meal plans, the shopping list, and the recipes. This structure repeats itself throughout the book, so you won’t have to flip through the whole book when you’re preparing meals. It’s that easy!
How do I make individual recipe substitutions?
Maybe you have a food allergy or condition that prevents you from having a specific food, such as milk, fish, nuts, or wheat gluten. Maybe you’re really tired of having waffles for breakfast. Or maybe you really can’t handle eating anything with mayonnaise in it. If any of this applies to you, there is a tool out there that can help you make healthy substitutions: the food choice/exchange lists found in Choose Your Foods: Exchange Lists for Diabetes (Appendix 1).
The food choice/exchange list system is an easy way of making healthy, nutritionally sound meal substitutions. Put simply, this system categorizes a single serving of a food item based on its nutritional content. Foods in the same exchange list have about the same amount of calories, carbohydrates, and other nutrients. So, if you want to change a recipe or a food item in your daily meal plan, determine the exchange list that the food is in and swap it out with another food from the same list. Foods with the same exchanges will generally affect your blood glucose levels in the same manner.
However, not every recipe or meal has the same exchange value. If this is the case, you can adjust your exchanges through the day’s meals to fit in the recipe you want. The table on page xiii provides the number of exchanges in every meal of this book. If your recipe uses more exchanges than the previous one, all you need to do is “borrow” an exchange from somewhere else in that day’s meal plan and use it for the recipe you want to prepare. What you cannot do is “borrow” exchanges from one day and add them to another.
You can find the choice/exchange value for each recipe in this book with its nutrition data. Also, every cookbook published by the American Diabetes Association provides the choice/exchange value for its recipes. So, if you don’t want to substitute a recipe from the Ultimate Diabetes Meal Planner, you can use any of the recipes from other American Diabetes Association cookbooks.
To take full advantage of the choice/exchange system, you may want to pick up a nutrition guide that provides exchanges for common foods, such as The Diabetes Carb & Fat Gram Guide by Lea Ann Holzmeister (available at http://shopdiabetes.org; order #4708-04), so that you can make substitutions with all of the items in your daily meal plan. As always, it won’t hurt to discuss exchange lists with your dietitian or diabetes educator, too. He or she will be able to give you valuable guidance in bringing balanced meal plans into your lifestyle.
Example Substitution Using the Food Choice/Exchange System
Don is on the 1,800-calorie meal plan, and he’s on Tuesday of Winter Week 1. Don is allergic to peanuts, so he can’t eat Spicy Whole-Grain Rice with Peanuts for lunch. Rather than just replace the peanuts with a different type of nut that he can eat, Don decides to prepare something else. He will have to use the exchange list to do this. Looking at the recipe for Spicy Whole-Grain Rice with Peanuts, he sees that it has the following exchanges: 2 Starch and 2 Fat. So he looks around the recipes for something that will use these exchanges. He decides that the Parmesan Potatoes look good. This recipe has 2 Starch and 1 1/2 Fat exchanges. That leaves him with 1/2 Fat exchange left over for the day.
Looking at the rest of the meal plan, Don sees that he’s assigned 10 peanuts for his A Snack. He refers to Appendix 1—Choose Your Foods: Exchange Lists for Diabetes—and sees that 10 peanuts are equal to 1 Fat exchange. He can’t eat that, either. However, Don loves black olives, and he sees that 8 large black olives are equal to 1 Fat exchange, too. He also knows that he’s going to have an additional 1/2 Fat exchange left over from his lunch. So, for his A Snack, he has 12 large black olives (8 olives [1 Fat] + 4 olives [1/2 Fat] = 12) instead of the peanuts. Don’s daily meal plan is still balanced, and he gets to eat the foods he wants.
DAILY MEAL PLANS Choice/Exchange Values
Step 4: Go Grocery Shopping
Now that you know what you’ll be cooking throughout the week, you’ll need to pick up the ingredients for your meals. For each week, you’ll find a shopping list containing the names of each ingredient you’ll need to have on hand to prepare all of those meals.
These shopping lists don’t contain the precise amounts of each ingredient—everyone’s needs will be different—but they do give you a pretty complete list of items to make sure that you have everything on hand for the week’s meals. When it comes time to go shopping, take out the upcoming week’s shopping list, look closely at the meal plans and recipes, and write down how much of each item you’ll need in the space provided. It is important to note that snacks are not included in the shopping lists, because snacks will vary greatly for every person. Also, the shopping lists were built on the items in the 2,000-calorie plans, so not every item from the list may apply to you if you’re on the 1,500- or 1,800-calorie plans; the same applies to you if you’re on the 2,200-calorie plan, because these plans sometimes have a few extra items over the course of the week.
It is best to purchase most of your food on a weekly basis; doing this will ensure that very little of your food will spoil and save you money. When you first begin using the Ultimate Diabetes Meal Planner, you may have to pick up several staple items, such as spices, nonstick cooking spray, and sauces. You won’t have to buy these every week. After a while, you will have a fully stocked, healthy pantry!
Reading Food Labels
An excellent tool for keeping your shopping smart and healthy is printed on just about everything