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I’ve noticed that I can achieve better glucose control if I track the number of carbs that I eat.  But, that’s hard to do.

3 Challenges

1. Distraction / Forget

Sometimes, I just forget.  I get distracted and eat something without thinking about measuring the quantity.  It’s hard to remember to think about my diabetes every time I eat something.  Sometimes life just happens, and my mind is on work or family concerns.

2. Foods without labels

Bread from a local bakery is a great example of this.  The bread is super delicious and good for me (yummy sourdough!) but there is no nutrition label.  So, I have to figure out how to count this.  My firsts thoughts were that I’m going to have to use a food scale to measure a slice of bread, and then use google to search for a nutrition profile of sourdough bread. Did you know that Sourdough bread is special?  However, if I get good at estimation, I may be able to count accurately enough without a scale!

3. Homemade foods

For example, I made a pasta dish recently and it had sausage and vegetables in it.  How do I measure how much “pasta” there is?  Take the vegetables and sausage out before weighing?  How about how much sauce… Sauce has carbohydrates in it.  I poured the whole jar in and only ate 1/6th of the pasta… Time for some mealtime math.

There are way(s) to count carbs in everything!

Gary Scheiner’s book “Ultimate Guide to Accurate CARB Counting.” provides several ways for estimating carbohydrates in foods without nutrition labels.   It also provides a great deal of information about different kinds of carbohydrates and how they effect blood glucose levels.  He is a type 1 diabetic and author of “Think like a Pancreas.”