GD!

Let me tell you about Gestational Diabetes. It’s not any fun – AT ALL.

Ok, so, I went in for my glucose test and failed it miserably. I got 216 and the target was 185. That’s bad enough that they didn’t even need to send me for the 3 hour test. I have GD. So I go to see the nurse and get a prescription for a little machine that sucks up my blood and tells me what level my sugar is at. It’s actually a pretty cool little device. I have a finger poker thing that has a little lancet in it. I hold it to my finger and press the button and get a drop of blood. I insert a test strip into the meter and touch the end of it to the drop of blood and it sucks it up like a straw. See, I told you it was cool.

I have to test my blood 4x a day. Once in the morning before I eat anything and after each meal. I also have to eat 3 meals and 3 snacks. Breakfast has to have 15g of carbs (equivalent to a slice of bread), must contain protein (eggs), no fruit or juice or milk. Lunch is 45g of carbs and at least 3 ounces of protein, same with dinner. Snacks are 15-30 (preferably 30) carbs. I’m not allowed to eat anything made with white flour and I can’t have any empty carbs. So nothing sugary or nothing without fiber.

It’s hard to not eat junk. I love candy and sugar and sweets. The junkiest thing I’ve had to eat in the past week was a tablespoon of strawberry preserves slathered on my whole wheat English muffin. I think it’s a shock to my system. I cried a lot the first couple of days because my numbers are still high even though I’m following the diet, because I wanted junk, because there is nothing good to eat that doesn’t have carbs, because I don’t really like meat all that much, because cooking takes longer now, etc. I’m kind of over that now, except for the cooking thing. I still hate that. We need to get a George Foreman grill or something like that. It is depressing to go into the grocery store and read labels and find that EVERYTHING has carbs in it. I bought steaks and wanted to marinade them and the marinades are chock full o’ carbs too. No wonder type 2 diabetes is on the rise, it’s very, very hard to follow a low carb diet.

So, I’ve been doing the GD thing for a week now and it’s obvious that I need to be put on some insulin at night to help with my fasting numbers. I go to see the perinatologist about it on Tuesday. I have a feeling that I will also have to go on it before meals too since my numbers are above target quite a bit. A lot of the reason my numbers are off is because GD is hormonal too. For instance, I eat the same thing every morning for breakfast because, well, there isn’t anything else to eat except eggs. So I have 2 scrambled eggs with a little ham and cheese mixed in and a slice of whole wheat toast. It’s 13g carbs. On New Years day when I tested and hour after eating, my sugar was at 102. This morning, I ate the same thing and my sugar was at 155, it was 118 yesterday. I can’t win!