60 Ways to Lower Your Blood Sugar

by Dennis Pollock

4 packets Splenda

  3 tablespoons unsalted butter

  Preheat oven to 350° F. Mix Splenda and ground almonds; set aside. Melt butter in microwave or on stovetop, then add to nut mixture and stir until evenly distributed. Spray 9-inch pie plate or small spring-form pan with cooking spray. Pat nut mixture into pie plate or pan, using a spoon or fingers to cover bottom and sides. Bake for 11 minutes, being careful not to overcook. Cool on a wire rack.

  Filling ingredients:

  2 8-oz packages cream cheese (not low-fat or fat-free)

  1/2 cup sour cream

  3/4 cup Splenda

  1-1/2 teaspoons pure orange extract (or 1/2 teaspoon orange oil)

  2 eggs

  Preheat oven to 350° F.

  Mix all the above ingredients in a blender until smooth. Add the cream cheese last, and add it in small pieces rather than all at once. Pour into cooled crust and bake at 350° F. for approximately 40 minutes. Allow to cool for one hour on wire rack.

  Topping ingredients:

  1/2 cup sour cream

  4 packets Splenda

  1 teaspoon pure orange extract (or 2 drops orange oil)

  3 pieces of sugar-free chocolates (the small ones that come 6 or 8 to a package)

  1/8 cup sliced almonds

  In a small bowl combine first three ingredients and whisk until well blended. Spread on top of chilled cheesecake. Melt chocolate pieces in microwave until they resemble a chocolate sauce, but try to avoid letting them bubble or boil. Cool for approximately 30 seconds. Drizzle top with chocolate. Immediately sprinkle with almonds.

  Place in refrigerator and chill, covered, 6 to 8 hours or overnight. Yields 8 to 10 servings; 5 to 7 grams of carbohydrates per serving (depending on piece size).

  The recipe for the crust is invaluable. It is truly one of those low-carb gems that tastes as good as or better than what you are replacing. And while I am on the subject, let me give you a quick way to enjoy pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking the low-carb bank.

  Easy Low-Carb Pumpkin Pie

  Follow the directions on a can of Libby’s pumpkin with these alterations:

  1. Use the almond crust above in lieu of a normal pie crust.

  2. Substitute Splenda for sugar.

  3. Substitute heavy whipping cream for the evaporated milk the recipe calls for.

  These three substitutions will save you a fortune in carbs and turn a sugar nightmare into a very nice and very manageable dessert. I’ve never had anyone who tried this who didn’t like it, and some even say it’s better than a regular pumpkin pie. I agree!

  16

  Using Low-Carb Muffins as Fillers

  It is unnatural to sit down to a plentiful table with a healthy appetite, eat only a small portion of what is available, and then leave the table almost as hungry as when you sat down. Yet that can often be the case when you are determined to only eat those foods which will keep your blood sugar within healthy boundaries. “Those potatoes look great—but no, I dare not touch them. The corn on the cob would sure be nice, but I’d better avoid it. I’ll take some of the main dish, but I won’t have too much.” You pick and choose, and you test your blood sugar when it peaks an hour after your meal, and it is fine, but the problem is, you’re still really hungry. What do you do now?

  As you test your blood-sugar peaks frequently you will find basically three types of foods: the good, the bad, and the so-so (you thought I was going to say ugly, didn’t you?). You will learn that you can eat smaller portions of those so-so foods, but you absolutely can’t pig out on them like you used to. You take one taco rather than three; you eat a small portion of lima beans rather than a big one. All of this is prudent, but too often it will leave you hungry at the end of your meal. Small portions just don’t fill our stomachs like big ones.

  The answer to this dilemma is to have a ready stock of foods and snacks that can fill us up without taxing our pancreas and raising our blood sugar to obscene levels. Allow me to introduce one very wonderful such filler, the low-carb muffin. At many a meal these babies have allowed me to leave the table feeling well satisfied, rather than deprived. Not only does this muffin serve as a filler, but it also satisfies a psychological need most of us have to eat bread products. Since our childhood we have eaten bread, rolls, buns, pancakes, doughnuts, cornbread, bagels, and all kinds of other bread products. To be told we can never taste any kind of baked flour food for the rest of our days is depressing. It’s enough to bring our inner rebel to the fore, and soon we are stuffing ourselves with bread of every variety.

  And some foods seem to simply call for bread of some kind. I love to eat eggs and sausage, but the meal seems sort of incomplete if there isn’t a muffin to go with the eggs, or a piece of toast or a pancake. Low-carb muffins fill the bill. They taste great and you can even put several blueberries or pieces of strawberries in each one to make them especially delightful. Another nice thing about these muffins is that they are portable. Sometimes I have taken them into a restaurant in a jacket pocket, and when they serve the eggs, sausage, and toast, I snub their toast and go for my muffin instead.

  In past years there were low-carb muffin mixes available in stores, but now you rarely see them. The good news is you can make your own without too much trouble. You may have to invest 15 minutes of your time to prepare them, but what a small price to pay for the benefits received! And how marvelous it will be on Saturday night to put an old Humphrey Bogart movie on, make yourself some coffee, and enjoy one of these bad boys with your coffee as you see Humphrey get the bad guys (or be the bad guy who gets got).

  Dennis’s Favorite Low-Carb Muffins

  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

  2. Spray a muffin tray with cooking spray.

  3. Mix 2 tablespoons of oat bran with one tablespoon of soy flour.

  4. Sprinkle the oat bran / soy flour combination on the muffin tray.

  5. In a large bowl mix the following:

  2 eggs

  1/2 cup of heavy whipped cream

  1/2 cup of Splenda

  Just under 1/2 cup of water

  1 cup of soy flour

  1 teaspoon of baking powder

  6. Mix the ingredients together with a spoon.

  7. Place in 6 or 7 holes in the muffin pan.

  8. Cook in oven for 20 minutes.

  If you’re like me, you may want to double this recipe and then freeze some of the muffins, which ensures you’ll be enjoying great muffins for a while!

  17

  Managing Rice

  To me rice is awesome. Chicken chow mein over a bed of rice, shrimp gumbo over rice, pepper steak over rice, teriyaki over rice…there are so many tasty combinations possible! The rice soaks up the juice of the stew or sauce and every bite is sweet and satisfying. When you are invited to friends’ homes for dinner, there’s a pretty fair chance rice will play a role in the meal they serve you.

  What to do? First know that rice is a high-carb food. The minute you see rice in a bowl, sirens should sound in your head. It’s not that you can never eat rice, but if you have blood-sugar issues, you can never shovel it in like you did in your youth—not if you value your health above your taste buds!

  When you indulge in rice, always choose brown rice over white rice. Although the carb content isn’t significantly different, the brown rice has about seven times more fiber than the white, plus it provides far more nutrients. This does not mean that brown rice gets a free pass. If you think whole grains don’t affect blood sugar, think again! If you don’t believe me, eat a big bowl of brown rice for breakfast, and then test your blood sugar an hour later. The next morning eat a big plate of eggs and sausage for breakfast and test yourself in an hour. You’ll need no more convincing!

  You can eat rice dishes, but you’ll need to know how much your body can handle. To find this out, have a dinner with rice as the only major source of carbs (no biscuits, bread, desserts, or fruit). Make it something like pepper steak over rice, with green beans and a gar
den salad with a low-carb dressing, such as Italian. Measure the rice you take. You might start with a half-cup portion. Check your blood-sugar level about an hour after your last bite and see what the meal and the rice did to you. If you stay within your desired limit, you’re good. If you were somewhat below the limit you might be able to eat a bit more rice the next time. If you were somewhat above the limit you will have to cut down a bit.

  Judging ourselves by a monitor is far superior to an “I can eat this but I can’t eat that” approach. To be told we can never have rice again would likely result in our having a few “pig-out” rice meals just to satisfy our inner rebel. But when we understand that the goal is to keep our blood sugar under a level that will ensure we do not suffer from diabetic complications, we find we can live with this a lot better. So have a bit of rice under that teriyaki or shrimp gumbo. But know that the days of heaping up huge mounds of rice and then smothering them with our favorite stew are gone. It wasn’t particularly good for you even when your pancreas was working well, and it certainly isn’t good for you now!

  There are rice substitutes you can try. Keep in mind that rice really doesn’t have that much taste. Most of us like it as a kind of gravy or sauce sponge that sits under the main dish. You can use spaghetti squash to this end. Or you can take a low-carb pancake made from soy flour and break it into small pieces and use it in place of rice. Sure, these don’t taste exactly like rice, but they’re not bad and they are far easier on your sugar-processing system. If they make the difference between 190 mg/dl and 135 mg/dl when your blood-sugar peaks, they are well worth it.

  Once, when staying in a hotel in a small town in Uganda, my wife and I ordered chicken and rice (I never eat raw salads in Africa, so my choices are limited). They served us an enormous plate of rice and a single drumstick from what must have been the scrawniest chicken in all of Africa. This was the exact opposite of what I hoped for, since I was planning to go heavy on the chicken and light on the rice. I ended up relying on snacks brought over from America to satisfy my appetite that night.

  18

  Portion Size

  Some things are so obvious you may think they’re hardly worth saying. But trust me, they are. The first thing is that portion size is extremely important in your quest to keep your blood sugar under control. Let me give you an example.

  On the Honey Bunches of Oats cereal box you will find that a three-quarter-cup serving contains 26 grams of total carbs. Deduct two grams of dietary fiber and that leaves you with a net 24 grams of carbs (without the milk). That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But have you ever measured out a 3/4 cup serving of cereal? I just did to remind myself of how small it is—and it is exceedingly tiny. No adult would eat that little amount; in fact, no child would either. Most of us would eat about three times that much, which brings the carb count up to 72 grams. Add 15 grams for the milk and you’re up to 87 total grams. Throw in a slice of whole-wheat toast and you’re over 100 grams—the equivalent of eating three good-sized candy bars! Your pancreas is going to go crazy trying to keep up with that sugar load.

  Let me illustrate the concerns about portion size another way. (Now this gets really, really obvious, but you still need to hear it.) If a small portion of mac and cheese contains 30 grams of carbs, guess what you’ll get when you double it and make it a medium portion? That’s right—60 grams of carbs. And suppose you want a little more so you add yet another portion. Now what do you have? That’s right—now you’re up to 90 grams.

  I realize I haven’t dazzled you with my brilliance in arithmetic, but stay with me here. What this means is that the size of the portions you take when you eat a meal are going to make a huge difference in the number of carbs you ingest, and therefore in the blood-sugar level you read on the monitor when you test yourself. By controlling your portions you control your blood sugar.

  Fortunately for us all, there are nutritious foods that do little to raise blood sugar, and some foods so low in carbs we can pretty much eat as much of them as we want. Spinach is a good example. Yes, spinach has some carbs, but so few carbs for so much nutrition! Green beans and cucumbers are in this category as well. In fact most of the garden vegetables that make up our salads are the same. Carrots and tomatoes are a bit higher and need to be limited somewhat, but there are so many vegetables that are nutrient-dense, carb-light, and just plain good for you. Meat, although not having so many nutrients, is loaded with protein and has almost no carbs.

  Knowing this, what we need to do should be self-evident. We need to take big portions of the low-carb foods and small portions of the high-carb foods. And by all means, never take a second helping of a high-carb food. Take second helpings of the chicken or avocado or celery or low-carb muffin if you must, but leave the potatoes and rice and noodles and bread alone.

  It feels a little freakish to eat out with friends or eat at someone’s house and have to flatly refuse a food that everyone else is eating. Sometimes it is probably good to do this, but often we can get by with simply having a small helping of the high-carb foods. Chances are, nobody will even notice that you went heavy on the vegetables and meat and light on the starches and sugars.

  Theoretically you could eat anything you want and keep your blood sugar under control—doughnuts, chocolate cake, cotton candy, and so on. The problem is, with highly sugar-laden foods and starchy foods, you could only eat tiny little portions of them—nowhere near enough to satisfy yourself. On top of that, sugary and starchy foods are usually not particularly nutritious (except for fruit). In most cases you would not only be perpetually hungry, you would also be nutrient-starved.

  19

  Keeping Breakfast Beautiful

  I love breakfast! It is my favorite meal of the day. No matter how busy I’m going to be that day, I always take the time to enjoy it. I’ll pick up the pace a little later, but at breakfast time I want to relax and savor my tea and food. But how are we to keep breakfast beautiful in the blood-sugar arena too?

  When we first wake up in the morning our blood sugar is at its lowest level. For many of us it will never drop this low again until the next morning. The last thing we want to do is spoil this beautiful low blood sugar by stuffing ourselves with cinnamon rolls, bagels, bananas, and then washing them down with sugary orange juice. If we can eat reasonably we’ll be on a roll—we’ll continue to have low blood sugar at least until lunchtime, provided we avoid a high-carb mid-morning snack.

  Americans have for whatever reasons designated some foods as breakfast foods and others as definitely non-breakfast. No one is forcing us to do this, but most of us are such creatures of habit we have a hard time breaking out of the mold. In this step toward low blood sugar let us focus on the traditional breakfast foods, and note the good, the bad, and the terrible.

  When you think about breakfast, you can hardly avoid thinking about eggs. This is good news for the diabetic! Eggs have virtually no carbs. You can eat one egg or ten eggs and the effect on your blood sugar won’t be much different. For years health experts have solemnly warned us about the evil of eggs, with their high cholesterol content. Surely they will raise your cholesterol through the roof, lead to a massive heart attack, and you’ll be dead before you’re 50.

  The only problem with this advice is that research keeps contradicting it and proving it to be flat wrong. Eating eggs, meats, and other foods high in cholesterol does not lead to high cholesterol of itself. The problem is eating these foods while stuffing ourselves with carbs and keeping the insulin level elevated in our bodies. This can indeed be a problem. But in the context of a low-carb diet, eggs are a great choice. A plate of several eggs and bacon is going to have almost no effect on your blood sugar, and on top of that will taste awesome. So enjoy your eggs fried, scrambled, over easy, over hard, or hardly over!

  Another favorite breakfast food is cereal, which is not such good news. Many folks think they can overcome the problem with cereal by choosing the healthy cereals. “I’ll skip the Trix and the Frosted Flakes, and c
hoose the Wheaties or the Shredded Wheat.” But hold on a minute. Have you checked the carb count on those cereals? You’ll be surprised that they are just about as bad. And remember, to your body a carb is a carb. Whether it comes from a healthy-looking cereal like Wheaties or a blatantly sugarfied cereal like Lucky Charms, your body will hardly know the difference. There are low-carb cereals you can order online, but they are somewhat expensive by the time you pay for the product plus shipping. Best to order several boxes at once if you go this route.

  Now let me recommend two of my favorite breakfasts that will treat your pancreas kindly and avoid the hazards of cereal. Eat and enjoy!

  The “continental breakfast” is one of the worst breakfasts for someone watching their blood sugar. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go down to look over the complimentary breakfast and be dismayed to see it is “continental.” What this means is you can eat as many cinnamon rolls, bagels, or bowls of cereal as you like. They’ll usually throw in some bananas as well. When I see these kinds of foods laid out, I say to myself, “Carbs, carbs, carbs.” Then I go back to my room and munch on snacks I have brought with me, or else go to a real restaurant and order a decent breakfast.

  Favorite #1: The first breakfast idea revolves around a bagel—yes, I said bagel. But not just any bagel. Normally the bagel is one of the worst offenders you can find in carb content. But amazingly there are some pretty great low-carb bagels around. They manage this by jacking the fiber content way up, which reduces the net carb content tremendously. Check your grocery-store shelves, and if you can’t find them there, order several packages online and freeze what you don’t plan to use for a while.

  Fry one egg and one slice of ham. Melt a slice of cheese on one half of a low-carb bagel. Then place the fried egg on it and top the egg with the fried slice of ham. This simple concoction takes almost no time to make, tastes great, and is pretty filling. Notice I do not put the other half of the bagel on top. Most of the low-carb bagels have about 9 net grams of carbs per half. I don’t find any need to double this number by eating the other half, although even 18 grams wouldn’t be too bad, since the other ingredients’ carbs are so negligible. Fix yourself some tea and enjoy a breakfast that will do very little to raise your blood sugar.