Better Homes And Gardens Diabetes Meals By The Plate

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It happens. Decades of sugar, cookies, brownies, and margaritas. You have your favorite foods and you could go on forever. But your body is filled with chemical clocks and one day your doctor says something about blood sugar. You start to measure your blood sugar each morning at home.

At first, you are upset that the new blood sugar monitor you bought is defective. It cannot read 165. That cannot be correct. Can't.

And 165 appears. Day after day. The medications help a bit, but if you do have that extra brownie before bedtime, if you don't exercise the day before, then the morning and the monitor are going to ring high.

It's a bitch. And you worry that your life is about to be changed for the worse. The clouds on the horizon are the shadows of some kind of new diet, foreign, unfriendly and unappetizing.

I was having that conversation with myself last week when a package arrived. Maybe there is a God after all.

From Better Homes and Gardens, if not God, we now have Diabetes Meals by the Plate. There are 90 meals in this book, each under 500 calories. That's meals, not dishes. The dietary need here is to have complete meals that meet the new portfolio demanded by diabetes. So, each meal in the book is divided into three portions: 1/2 plate devoted to non-starchy vegetables, 1/4 plated devoted to some carb like a starch or grain, and the final 1/4 plate for protein.

Each meal has those three components and you are encouraged to mix and match, so there are more combinations here than you are going to eat in a lifetime. I mean that. There are 729,000 combinations. At one a day, it would take you 1997 years to try them all. So, there is no issue here of "getting bored" with the same meal.

And what about the meals. What are you giving up? I begin, naturally, by going to the back of the book. Is dessert gone from my life?

No. There is actually a low-cal dessert chapter suggesting carrot cake, angel food cake ideas, baked fruits, and even a key lime pie. All of a sudden, when browsing through this chapter, I began to feel less encumbered. I don't consider key lime pie to be a sacrifice.

Time to look at the front of the book. If dessert survives, then what is in store for that part of the meal you obliged to consume before you get to dessert? The front chapters are organized by protein:

Chicken
Turkey
Beef
Lamb
Pork
Seafood

And there a section of meatless meals which is an idea that all of us should consider. Maybe not 7 days a week, of course, but some nights would be a good idea. If you are making a change in your life, why not make it as positive as possible? If you can be meatless and yet satisfied, then balancing out your meal selection might make your morning monitor session a tad less stressful.

What are these proteins recipes like? Is there compromise? No, not really, not at all. The selections here will let you pick and choose and be quite happy. Consider:

Spicy Ginger-Marinated Chicken
Crisp Chicken Parmesan
Taco Meat Loaf with Ground Turkey
Coconut-Lime Turkey Skewers
Coffee-Rubbed Beef with Red-Eye Beans
Cherry-Plum Balsamic Beef Meatballs
Fennel-Coriander Roasted Leg of Lamb
Baked Honey-Dijon Pork Chops
Seared Salmon with Mushroom-Shallot Sauce
Shrimp Jambalaya

Beyond the proteins, what about the sides? Potatoes are not forbidden. But you scale them down and your potatoes are roasted now, not French fried. There are greens and asparagus and mushrooms. Baked sweet potatoes. Spinach and fennel salad. Roasted parsnips and beets and cauliflower. Italian white bean salad. There are things here you will like and, if you have not been a user of vinegar or spices or pepper flakes, you are about to become one.

You keep turning the pages of Diabetes Meals by the Plate and you keep feeling less and less deprived. Honestly, the meals here will remind you restaurant menus. Attractive titles that tell you directly the dishes will not be bland. It's not just a baked pork chop, it's Honey-Dijon baked.

I'm really thrilled to have this book. I have to change but I'm stubborn and worried and stressed and still cannot quite believe that this change that happens to so many is now happening to me.

I could ask the question: why me? But I know why and it's rather useless to fight those chemical clocks in your body. The better question is this: what's for dinner. And now I know just where to look. Honey-Dijon. I could not be happier. I just have to pick up some Angel Food cake and berries.

Ah, the picture at the top? That little blue tag thing in the upper left? I can't get rid of it. It's embedded in my scanner. I pull on it, but it won't budge. And now my scanner is making weird musical buzzing noises to tell me the scan is done. It's changed on me. I would take its blood sugar, but I don't know how.