Help with food choices - moving to vegetarian as a diabetic

As a newly diagnosed diabetic, have you not been offered diet counselling from a licensed professional?

lanajanewoolf wrote: »

Hi Folks,

Looking for some advice.
I was recently diagnosed with diabetes T2 - unsurprisingly. I am/ was obese and inactive.

In the last 35+ days, I have started to turn my life around. Healthier foods, lower calories and active lifestyle. (re-living my teens, 20's and 30's lifestyle) In this time, I have lost about 7.5kg.

However, I found myself eating a large amount of animal proteins.
As a former vegetarian (in my 20's and 30's), I keep thinking about returning to that eating style. However... I am a little confused about the plant proteins, carbs and low GI etc.

MFP seems to be unable to distinguish between plant proteins and carbs. (i.e. beans, lentils etc when looking at macros)

Or am I reading it wrong and just not having enough protein?

As a diabetic, is it ok to be eating a comparatively large amount of plant proteins that are also carbs that are low GI?

Will this impact my losing weight (I still have about 25+ KG's to lose)

Will this impact being a long term healthier change to my diet? (Looking to be less of a diet that a regular type of eating)

Advice much appreciated.
L

I can't comment on the diabetic side of this, as I'm not diabetic. I can comment on the vegetarian-protein-carb aspects, I think, because I've been vegetarian (ovo lacto in my case) for 47+ years.

The comment in your post that I bolded . . . I don't really understand.

Here's why: Any food has various attributes (characteristics). One is the number of calories, one is the glycemic index, several are the macronutrient composition of the food (the amounts of carbs, protein, fats in the food). MFP is quite clear about the macronutrient composition of foods, assuming we choose accurate entries from the database. (The database is crowd-sourced, i.e., entered by average users: Some are more accurate than others.) There are inter-relationships among those characteristics, but they can also be considered separately.

Many vegetarian protein sources come with some carbs. That is, the food contains both proteins and carbs (and sometimes fats as well). In many cases, those higher protein plant foods that also contain carbs foods are relatively low GI. Beans/legumes, for example, have both carbs and protein, but are relatively low GI foods (predominantly because their carbohydrates are primarily complex carbohydrates (starches), and they're also high fiber, which tends to slow absorption of the carbohydrates).

The thing about GI is that the GI of an individual food may not matter as much, when you eat it as part of a multi-food dish or meal. If I eat a small amount of a high GI food with a larger amount of a very low GI food, the overall GI of that meal can still be pretty low.

From reading posts by other diabetics here, there are some indications that there's individual variation in which foods or combinations will spike a particular person's blood sugar, and which don't. It isn't always obvious or intuitive. Much can be learned by testing your blood sugar after foods/meals, but I'll defer to diabetics here to tell you the ins and outs of that. You may also find that timing exercise around your eating may moderate blood sugar spikes, even with fairly small/mild doses of exercise - again, that's individual.

There are plant protein sources that are relatively low in carbs, such as some traditional soy foods (tofu, tempeh, etc.), seitan (which is gluten), and others. Looking at good entries in the MFP database, you can see what the proportion of carbs vs. protein is, in any given food choice, and prioritize those that are higher in protein. To the extent that the food contains some carbs, choosing foods with higher fiber, and carbs that are starches (rather than sugars) will tend to identify lower GI foods, but you can look up a food's GI online separately, too.

If you want to minimize carbohydrates in your diet, but also want to be vegetarian - or at least reduce the meat/fish in your eating routine - you may want to prioritize the plant protein sources that are relatively higher in protein (vs. carbs), whose carbs are more starch than sugar, and that are higher in fiber. Combining those foods in a dish/meal with other, lower-GI foods, should also reduce the effective GI.

I hope that makes sense?