Get your hands on the South Beach diet book. Use it. Learn it. Follow it. Use the recipes and meal plans to help you eat balanced, normal food meals. Test your blood sugar 2 hours after every meal. If your blood sugar is over 140 then you know that meal needs adjusted. At this point don't worry too much about calories just get to know what foods raise your glucose levels and what foods don't. Eat to your meter not your scale.

The South Beach diet will give you a good lower carb diet foundation. The first 2 weeks (phase 1) is very restrictive. Think of it as an elimination diet. Phase 2 adds back more carbs. Add them back one at a time so that you can monitor how they affect your blood sugar. I learned real quick that I could not eat tomatoes even though many diabetics can.

Once you get use to it and know how different foods affect you personally then you can begin to expand on your food choices.

It's all about the carbs. Record everything you eat, and test regularly. You will see a patern of what carbs raise your BG the most. For me it was pasta, bread and (duh) suga. I cut out all processed carbs, only have fruit in the morning and have kept my BG in check. Good luck..

I understand the panic. I was diagnost in August and was really lost. I have been following a lower calorie diet (1300 per day) and exercising as 4-5 times a week. I see my blood sugars go down when I exercise,so that encourages me. I am on Metformine,I think it is really heping my body work correctly for the first time in probably 20 years ! I am losing weight and feel better than I have in decades !. The most important thing is to be aware of everything you eat, write it down, plan ahead, make your health a priority. Exercise. Like everyone else has said ,watch your carbs. My doctor told me to eat around 4o grams of carbs per meal. that varies from person to person I think, if your blood sugar is not going down,lower your carbs. Good luck,My fittness pal is a wonderful tool for us. Feel free to friend me and then you can look at my diary, my doctor is very pleased with my progress. Good Luck :flowerforyou:

Yes, please go to the classes. I had been on a medically advised very low carb diet for more than 1-1/2 years and found out at my class my carbs were way, way too low. The staff at those sessions are specialists on diabietes -- general health and nutrition. The diatician reset my carbs to breakfast-35g, lunch and dinner-45g, with two 11g snacks per day. I feel so much better I just can't tell you and my BG is far more stable than it was even 1 month ago!

I agree Southbeach is an excellent source. I'm T2 and limit my carbs to 90 per day under doctors direction. I honestly feel better without the carbs and a bit more protein.

I found that cauliflower isn't a bad substitute for potatoes or in mac n cheese. I just last week came off of one of the meds I was on for a few weeks trial run, again under my endocrinologist's supervision.

Good luck, there is a lot of great advice in this group.

Hi Patricia and welcome to this group. Many of us can identify with your initial feeling of panic on diagnosis. The good news is that with patience, persistence and honest recording, you can gain control and take steps to a healthy and active lifestyle. Travis sums it up very well indeed and I completly concur with his advice. If you haven't already done so I suggest that you try to get booked on a diabetes education course which many of us would recommend. If you really want to set a target, there is a consensus view that a reasonable initial target would be 45 carbs per meal with say 30 carbs for snacks. Take a deep breath and tackle one issue at a time. When you're ready to ask further questions you will find lots of supportive people in this group who are willing to share their experience. I wish you well as you begin your journey to an active and healthy life.

Thanks, Kathie for the recipe links. One tends to get in a rut so these help. Much appreciated.

YAY for you!!!! What a victory!!!!

I remember very well that panicky feeling. I want to second the advice that the best thing you can do for yourself is to get educated, listen to various approaches, and figure out what works for you. And don't forget to take into consideration that you're under a lot of sudden and scary stress, and you need to take some extra time for yourself. No matter how crazy or busy your schedule is, steal 10 minutes for yourself a couple of times a day to sit outside and look at something pretty, take a hot bath, take a walk, lie down with your eyes closed and pleasant music playing, or do something creative -- whatever it is that replenishes and refreshes you. Taking care of yourself emotionally will help you cope with all the things you have to do to take care of yourself physically.

My approach when I discovered I had an A1C of 8.5 in early October (average fasting glucose around 150, as far as I know... I'd become rather lax with testing) was focused on information and technology, since I'm a total technophile and recently I could finally afford a smartphone thanks to Wal-Mart's super-cheap plan. I bought extra test strips and spent a week testing first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and both immediately before and one hour after every meal and snack. If my BG was over 150 at the 1-hour mark, I'd test again at 2 hours. I know common advice is to test two hours after eating, but for most foods the peak BG level comes at about 1 hour, and since I read that damage to the body occurs at 180 and up, I wanted to catch the peak. It's a widely cited fact that more than 80% of diabetics die of some type of heart or blood vessel disease, and I have no intention of being one of that percentage -- I have grandchildren to play with! I set a goal of never letting my BG spike to 180, and aimed to keep peaks under 150 as much as possible. I use MFP to record all my food intake and an app on my phone called OnTrack to record glucose levels and available carb intake at meals (available carbs are total carbs minus fiber, which MFP makes it easy to calculate for a meal). OnTrack lets me export my data in CSV format, which can be opened up in Excel, and from there I spent a few hours learning how to do pivot tables so I could create a graph that showed me, for each day, carb intakes and glucose measurments along a timeline. I put those graphs in a Word document and pasted each day's food diary from MFP beneath that day's graph. This let me look at a given day during that week and see exactly what food made my blood sugar go too high, and what I tolerated better.

To my surprise, I found that some foods that had seemed like perfectly healthy, good choices, like oatmeal, made me spike, while others that were less healthy, like a couple of corn dogs, didn't, even though it had a higher available carb content. Wondering why on earth that was, I started searching, and learned about the glycemic index of foods, and more importantly, about their glycemic load. I kept running across articles on the dummies.com site that were helpful and to-the-point, and finally ended up ordering The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies through Amazon. I also learned during that week of intense testing that about 30g of carbs per meal and per snack kept my blood sugar from going too high and stabilized it nicely, and that if during most of a day I had been eating things like steak and salad, chicken and steamed veggies etc., it was like my pancreas could take a break and when I ate something more carb intense like a sandwich my BG levels were less reactive to it than they were earlier in the week when I had been eating more carbs more frequently. Then the book arrived and I learned new things...

Eight years ago when I was diagnosed, a diabetes educator told me to keep fruit to a minimum. Turns out, that's not so! Fruits tend to have a high glycemic index, but a LOW glycemic load. Pairing protein and healthy fat with fruit, such as a snack consisting of fruit and nuts, is great and I can have around 45g of carbs that way with very little impact on my BG! I was also surprised to discover that while frozen yogurt spikes my BG tremendously, regular full-fat ice cream does NOT, something I tested for myself after reading in the Dummies book that full-fat ice cream has a low glycemic load! So I can indulge a couple of times a week in a filling meal of lean meat with a large salad or huge helping of steamed veggies, and a cup of chocolate ice cream afterwards. I'm full, satisfied, still under my calorie goals, and my glucose levels are fine.

Better than fine, in fact -- after that first week of intense testing, I went to testing 3x/day, once in the morning, and once before and after a meal, usually a different meal each day. If that meal was breakfast, then I'd do a bedtime test. If I was eating familiar foods that I knew didn't have much of a BG impact, I'd be testing just to see how I was doing overall, but I'd often use that before-after meal pairing to test drive foods I wasn't sure of yet. I found that some of my favorite Lean Cuisine entrees, like the apple cranberry chicken, have minimal BG impact even though they're high in carbs -- 55g -- because of the whole grain pasta used. I've decided that I'll do a few weeks like that, testing 3x/day, and then do another week of intensive testing, and do that every month to take a snapshot of where I am. So far, I'm in my fourth week of eating this way and in the middle of a week of intensive testing. For the last two weeks, most of my fasting readings are under 100, and two of them have been under 90. Postprandial readings in the last two weeks have occasionally gone into the 140s, but are usually under 130!

I can't wait to see my doctor's face when I show him all this next month. I don't know how far down my A1C will have had a chance to drop, since I'll be getting it tested just about a month after changing my eating style and will still be affected by the previous two months, but I'm happy with my current numbers. And the best side effect to all this is that after a 3-week plateau, eating this way has started my weight loss going again! I've dropped an additional 9 pounds in 4 weeks, making it 28 in the last year, and I'm down from a snug 18 in jeans to a comfy 16 that's already starting to feel a little loose. Amazing, considering that my calorie intake has stayed about the same. It's actually increased a little bit.

Yesterday, The Glycemic Index Cookbook for Dummies arrived on my doorstep. I can't wait to try the chocolate chip pumpkin muffins. I'm diabetic, and I'm actually excited about food again!

The best part of The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies and about the Cookbook is that the information is presented in a way that helps you figure out how you can incorporate lower glycemic eating into your own lifestyle. The books encourage gradual, sustainable, realistic change. They give helpful tips on how to tweak favorite recipes to lower their glycemic load so you don't have to do without. And they give good advice on how to handle difficult situations like busy days when you're on the go, eating out, social gatherings, and holidays.

They make the whole thing feel manageable. I can't recommend them highly enough.

I agree with the low carb approach to managing blood sugar. Surprisingly, my nutritionist was recommending 225 g carbs per day. Whis was WAY more than I can tolerate. Since going paleo last year, I have lost 40 lbs and my A1C has dropped from the mid 7s to the low 6s.

You mentioned that you were on a couple of meds. Make sure you understand what they do. Metformin is good in that it helps you utilize the insulin better. Other drugs like Glipizide force your body to produce more insulin. When I was on Glipizide, I found that my blood sugar was crashing in the late afternoon and I would go on a ravenous binge. If you are producing more insulin, you need to eat glucose to counteract it, which is counter productive. So, if you go low carb, speak with your doctor to be sure your meds will not cause you to crash.

I recommend buying a book: Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. It contains a lot of good information on dealing with diabetes. I wish I had read it 6 years ago when I was first diagnosed.

It is all about learning what brings your sugar up and what does not. So, test frequently and keep a log of what works and what does not.