Your diet is just one way you need to look after your wellness when you have type 2 diabetes, especially as losing weight has the wellbeing-boosting benefits of stabilising blood sugar levels and even eliminating the need for diabetes medication. According to Nora Saul, RD, CDE, a certified diabetes educator and manager of nutritional education at the Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston, ‘people who have diabetes can, with a little forethought, use many of the healthy popular diets,’ so what’s out there?
Firstly, the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet is a good eating plan as it is high in fruits and vegetables, which means high levels of fibre, antioxidants, and potassium. The DASH diet also has high levels of low-fat dairy, calcium, lean protein, and whole grains, and ‘meal plans for different calorie levels’ says Saul, which allows flexibility according to your weight.
The Weight Watchers diet is popular with all kinds of people, but it’s a good option for type 2 diabetics because it provides a structured eating plan alongside group support and accountability. However, a few tweaks may need to be made as Saul explains that the latest version of Weight Watchers’ points system allows zero points for fruit, but if you have diabetes a serving size of fruit does count towards your total daily carb intake.
However, a specific eating plan may not be the way for you, so why not try a Mediterranean diet? This means eating plenty of beans, nuts, fruits, vegetables, grains, and seafood, and isn’t so much a weight loss diet as a different way of eating, but people still can ‘lose weight because they are full and are not eating a lot of the empty calories they consumed before’ says Saul.
Finally, though an Atkins Diet famously is a low-carb system and can be a restrictive and short-term choice for people with diabetes, Saul recommends that reading about and trying out this diet could be a learning experience for you, so that you may better understand how carbs function in your diet. Another diet that would benefit from a little research is a low glycaemic index (GI) diet, as you’ll need to learn exactly where foods fit in the glycaemic index and how you can include the right ones in your diet. However, Saul says this is a great choice for diabetics as the glycaemic index lets you know how fast a 50-gram portion of a carbohydrate food raises blood sugar in comparison with white bread. The lower the number, the better the food is for controlling blood sugar.
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