What is the New Food Normal?

After you get diagnosed with diabetes, or any disease for that matter, what is normal goes away. All of a sudden you are pricking your fingers, watching your carbs, dealing with the strange side effects of your medications, and trying harder to drop some pounds.

There is a feeling of loss, almost mourning for the things the way they were and foods the way we expect them to be. All of a sudden you need your glasses every time you go to the “stupidmarket.” Label reading is now the new food normal for me.

When speaking with other diabetics, I am fascinated with the things they miss and want to find replacements for in their diets. Bread, desserts, and juice spring to mind as biggies.

During a speaking engagement I was surprised to see this one lady burst into tears when I started talking about Tropicana's Trop 50 juice products. She had not had juice in years and my sharing this product with her filled a hole in her life. I thought it such a little thing. For her it was the world.

My world was rocked by finding breads that made the old humdrum sandwich a part of my life again. I went for months eating a lunch of salads or a protein with salad. It took longer to prepare and never satisfied me the way lunch usually did. Finding the Joseph’s Lavash & pita, Arnold and Walmart Sandwich Thins (rounds), Sara Lee “Delightful” wheat bread (some of which are in the photo above) filled a hole in my eating life. I won’t tell you that any product replaces a ham on rye for me. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy these products. They have become my new food normal. Do I still crave a baguette slathered with butter or olive oil? You better believe it. I do treat myself to a baguette every once and a while, and it's like ice cream on a humid summer day--heaven!

Still for others it's dessert they crave. Sometimes even I am impressed with all the desserts I still make, still enjoy, and share with others. Replacing the sugar with a sugar substitute was the start. Replacing the flour with ground nuts made so many things work. Finding out that chocolate did not have to be forbidden was, pardon the pun, the icing on the cake. Eating cakes that did not rise as much as they did with sugar became the new normal for me. What also became normal were the subtle added flavors that the ground nuts imparted to cakes. I remembered that my grandmother used to add nuts to her sponge cakes for a variation on a theme. That old memory combined with the new subtle flavoring was a bonus. The AH HA moment was getting that I could do what I need to do to lower the carbohydrates and at the same time make something that was better than the original. It is not all BAD!

One of the people I spoke with requested ONLY my dessert recipes. That is what she misses most from her diet. Desserts are not it for me. Sure I like /love them. Sure I eat them. For me it is having a full plate when I need it. Foods like my Skinny Slaw that gave me a lot to eat became most important. I hated feeling hungry when I could only have a spoonful of this, a palm full of that.

So I slog along,  working harder at preparing meals, reading more labels than I care to read, still missing the pasta and the rice, but happy for things like mashed cauliflower, cauliflower salad, spaghetti squash, and a bit of bittersweet chocolate on the weekends and in my desserts. So that is my new food normal, and you know what? I can live with that!

Enjoy, be Healthy, be DECADENT!



Resource:
http://www.diabetescare.net/authors/ward-alper-the-decadent-diabetic/what-is-the-new-food-normal