What's For Dinner: Low Carb Chicken Enchiladas

So the big problem with meal planning is that I have to not only figure out what I can eat that will be within my allotted carb limit and have plenty of vegetables and protein, but that I have to come up with something that my picky toddler and my even more picky husband will eat.

So I created yet another spreadsheet.  This time with slots for Mom, Dad and Chloe and a meal assignment for each.  It's a little crazy but so far it's working well.

I have to start with a meal that Hubby likes.  Tonight, it's chicken enchiladas.  So what I'm trying is to load some veggies (bell peppers and green chiles) into a casserole dish and cover with shredded chicken.

Next I'll pour over a mixture of Cream of Chicken soup, sour cream, diced onions and diced green chiles. I'm reserving some for later to top Hubby's enchiladas.  Then I'm covering with cheese.  COC soup has 25g carbs per can, so I have to take this into account.  I'm guessing each casserole is ending up with about 18g carbs from the soup so I'll have to do the math when I portion mine out later.

Next, I'm baking in the oven for awhile just to cook the peppers and get all the flavors to combine.  I'll remove from the oven and reheat once it's time for dinner (I'm prepping this early.)

I'll serve the mixture in some whole wheat tortillas, then top with the reserved sauce and extra cheese for hubby.  I'll try one of these tortillas I found today, with a great net carb:



So that's what's for dinner tonight.  I'll report back how it was after we eat! :)

Just When I'm Making Progress

One of the big problems with Gestational Diabetes is that the situation gets worse as the pregnancy progresses.  I know this.  I think I'm prepared mentally.  I'm really not.

I'm working so hard.  Just put a meal plan together for three weeks for three different people with different diets/levels of pickiness (me, hubby and toddler). I'm inputting all my meals into my recipe planner and gonna make a shopping list.  Planning on going shopping tomorrow morning if I can finish tonight.  I'm oh - so - close!!

In the last week I've counted about 4 days where the major pregnancy fatigue has seriously altered my day.  Right now it's not even 8 pm and I feel like my body is gonna shut down any second, like I'm gambling with my consciousness, not even sure if I'll finish this post. When such a huge part of my blood sugar management involves exercising, how in the world am I supposed to successfully beat this when I can barely move to the other room?

And that's not my only setback right now.  It's seems like Extreme Fatigue is visiting with its friend Extreme Hunger.  It's like my body just realized it's making another human body inside me and better make up for lost time and get a bazillion calories.  Technically I'm not allowed to snack between meals but what's a girl gonna do?  And the only "legal" snacks are straight protein (meat, cheese, nuts, eggs). It feels like every day I'm compromising on another one of my health food convictions.  I mean, I can only eat so many walnuts when I'm STARVING!!!

So here I am, waiting longer than I should to test b/c I can't get off my butt to exercise my sugars down and I feel like I need to eat another huge plate of food or I'm really gonna fall over.  I don't even know how to end this, only to say that I hope tomorrow is a better day and that somehow I'll figure out how to hit this moving target.

My Big Fat Project

For about a year now I've been researching, testing, designing, and deciding how to organize my meal planning for the entire family.  I've tried iPhone apps, spreadsheets, even designing my own program. I've settled on a program called BigOven to do most of the work for me.  I input my recipes, assign grocery stores and aisles to my ingredients list and then drag and drop to create meal plans and shopping lists.

Now that I've figured out what I want to use and how to use it, I have to put in all the data and get it all cleaned up. It's really difficult to find meals that my hubby will eat, my toddler will at least nibble on, and that I can separate out my allotted 30 carbs.  I've also found that I have to plan for breakfasts and lunches, otherwise my hubby gets anxious and ends up reverting to his bachelor ways of convenience foods shopping at Walmart. It's not my place to tell him what he shouldn't buy for himself, so my best shot at helping our family eat healthy is to plan, plan, plan.

So that's my Big Fat Project for this upcoming week.  I feel like if I can just get a few weeks of full plans in there then I can finally get a handle on the food situation in my house. Wish me luck!! :)

Feeling a little burnt out

Every once an awhile, I just want to be a normal pregnant woman and stuff my face with donuts and a side of pickles. Or indulge in a piece of birthday cake or snack at a party without counting my carbs.  Truth is, even when I want to be rebellious, there's not much I can do that won't tempt the docs to put me back on meds, and that's something I definitely want to avoid for as long as I can.

I recently did a four day stint on Glyburide to bring my morning sugars down.  The problem was that even though it got my 1 hour post breakfast numbers to be super great, it stayed in my system for an hour after that.  The Glyburide exponentially morphed my body's ability to use physical activity to get sugar into my cells.  So unless I sat on the couch like a bump on a log for two hours, I inevitably experienced rediculous lows.  And those lows, are NOT fun!  Although I got to drink juice and have some M&M's for a few days until I got the call to stop taking the meds.  Now I'm cutting carbs in the morning and exercising which is helping me keep my numbers in check.

The difficult truth to swallow is that all I have to do right now at least is stay active - moving - all day long.  If I train myself not to sit on the couch or in a comfy chair but to keep busy all day by cleaning and walking and playing with my toddler, I can have a whole day of great blood sugar readings.  While it's encouraging when it works, I struggle against the picture in my mind of the pregnant lady with feet up on the coffee table, a big bowl of ice cream in her lap - spoon in one hand, remote in the other.  But in my mental picture, she's also real fat, so that helps!  I don't wanna be a fat slob, I want to be an active, present mom in control of her diabetes as much as possible. 

So I sneak in little cheats when I can.  Yes, I admit it.  I don't have to report my blood sugars after snacks, so as long as I keep to my carb limits and stay active after I eat, I can afford to cheat in little bitty ways.  I was going to eat a nice shrimp salad with three of my 5 carb multigrain crackers and a small piece of fruit for snack this morning.  Instead, I ate a 21 carb jello pudding cup and drank a small glass of milk.  Yes, I'm all into eating natural foods and yes I hate anything in a package but you know what?  I'M PREGNANT!  It's not a box of donuts (whoowee, my sugars would soar past 300 I'm sure!) and I certainly don't do it every day or every week for that matter.  And right after I finish this post I'm off to clean the kitchen to get my sugars low enough before lunch.  So there's my confession, my little indulgence to respond to my whine-fest for not being like "every other pregnant lady out there" stuffing their faces with McDonalds or whatever they are craving at the moment.  Or at least that's what I imagine them ALL doing while they snicker at me through their car windows leaving drive-thrus.

In the meantime, I've started a new idea to create a salad bar in my fridge.  I bought a ton of tupperware (I've been wanting to throw out all the old mismatched and lost lidded ones anyway) and diced, chopped, prepped, and stuffed them with all the salad stuff I could think of.  I love salads, especially when I can put a bunch of stuff on them.  And it helps my hubby eat healthy too. 

So I think if I'm eating all this healthy stuff I can be forgiven the very occasional pudding cup especially if it helps me past the burn-out lulls. =)

For Nerds Like Me (My New Toy!)

So I met with my independent nutritionist today and the meeting went really well. It was a good sign that upon entering her little office I noticed dozens of hippo figurines, which I coincidentally collected during most my childhood.  :)  She advised me to increase my protein intake and showed me a good balance between carbs and protein.  (We settled on 30g carbs to about 14 to 21g protein, in line with the carb requirements of my diabetic program.) During our appointment she used a standalone program on her laptop to throw together food ingredients and automatically calculate nutrient totals - something I had been doing manually on my super dooper spreadsheet.  So of course the first thing I did when I got home was download a trial version of the software from www.calorieking.com . I've been playing with it all evening and I have to say, this nerd is in luv. <3

To give you some reference, here's a snapshot of one portion of my spreadsheet:












Now times that by 5 meals a day with target totals on the bottom for 7 days.  My spreadsheet took me about 2 weeks to complete and it still needed work to finish balancing it out perfectly.  Enter CalorieKing's program.

The first cool thing about this program is that you can set your own nutritional targets.  So while it's a great tool for people trying to lose weight, I was able to easily customize it for my diabetic pregnancy by setting my own targets:



























You can then choose items from the database and drag and drop to build your meals and snacks. You can adjust servings as you drop the items to match what you're eating:





You can see right away the totals of the nutrients you're interested in. So as I'm recreating my meal plans, I can check my protein counts and adjust my ingredients as needed.

















Progress bars at the bottom help you see how close you are getting to your goals and if you're particularly low on any nutrient.













I am so happy with how much easier this is than the spreadsheet I made myself.  While it was a great learning experience, it was so time consuming and the idea of putting together more meal plans is very daunting.  With the CalorieKing software, I can put together meals super quickly and tweak what I'm eating to match my goals without having to re-crunch the numbers all the time.  At $45 to buy it's a bit of a steep purchase for me, but if I end up using it as much as I predict I will during my free 7 day trial, I'll most likely make this my next software purchase.  I highly recommend at least a test drive for any others out there who are nerds like me.

Building a Support Group

I can’t describe how much better I’m feeling today.  I had a great meeting with my diabetes program people yesterday.  I’ve been so stressed out because I feel that they bully their patients into doing whatever is convenient for them since they deal with so many GD patients.  I was able to really talk about what had been frustrating for me, ask questions about my medication, and show them through use of charts and spreadsheets that I’m not just the average gal trying to squeeze McDonald’s Value Meals into my 30g Carb limits.  Even if the appointment changes nothing in the way they treat me in the future, it sure felt great to talk about what I’ve been going through.  It also felt great that they were all very impressed with my spreadsheet. J Getting a little validation from the people who impose such strict guidelines on my diet and medication lifted a huge stress off my shoulders.

Today I get to have a friend over for a play date / mom’s girl time.  I’m really excited.  I converted my dining room into the coolest playroom ever and I’m really hoping that doing so allows us moms to have some deep conversation.  As a mom it’s so great to get together with other moms.  There’s no apologizing for a sudden diaper change or snack break, or timeout for a munchkin meltdown.  The only problem is it’s so difficult to really connect on a personal level, for me at least.  Serious conversations are interrupted every two sentences to correct, assist, or mediate the kids. It really takes some getting used to as well as some intense focus to not lose your train of thought.  And waiting for a night when both moms can get sitters and go out is just not very feasible.  So I have high hopes for my morning mom time.  I imagine us sitting on the couch with our coffees and chatting casually while our kids play in the other room.  We’ll see if it’s yet another fantasy!

Meanwhile, I’ve finally made an appointment with an independent nutritionist.  I don’t know much about this gal but it’s really important for me to have someone on my team who can help me with my nutrition.  I won’t have health insurance after the baby’s born so this is a great chance to start some nutrition counseling.  I’m hoping it will lift the burden of feeling like I’m trudging through all this all on my own.  The dietician I talked with yesterday brought up the point of food pairings – how certain foods eaten together make a complete meal and are best for balanced nutrition and absorption of those nutrients.  Knowing that I had this appointment scheduled today meant that I didn’t have to go bananas researching a new topic.  I hope that my nutritionist will be able to help me out with that today.

I also think this blog is really helping more than I imagined.  Being able to get up in the morning and put my thoughts out there gets them all out of my head so I can go along my day without being so crazy.  Maybe no one ever reads this, but just maybe there’s someone else out there like me who wants to try and manage their GDM as naturally as they can.  Perhaps my blog can become a piece of their own support group.

Eating Outside the Box

While my focus right now is much on eating to manage my blood sugars while pregnant, I have actually been on a 3 year journey to change the way I eat in general.  It all started when I took a nutrition class and learned the difference between whole grains and refined grains. I had been having episodes of hypoglycemia, some that were pretty scary.  I made a complete switch to eating only whole grains and overnight saw a complete obliteration of hypoglycemic symptoms.  I was astounded at the difference this made.  And that's when I really started getting interested in how my choice of what I put into my body affected my health.

I suppose 3 years seems like a long time to be "working" on my diet, but I'm a big believer in baby steps when it comes to changing lifelong habits.  I think I have a much better chance of sticking to something if I pick one or two small manageable goals at a time to work on.  I certainly have done my share of extreme diets for trial periods, but always come back to implement one or two things that I learned while on that diet.  It's easy for me to stress about not making changes fast enough, but then I figure that if it takes me 5 years to transition to a completely healthy diet that I keep for the rest of my life, it will certainly be worth the time it took to change.

Through research, trying out new foods, and becoming perhaps a bit more ornery in my old age of 31 :) I've developed a very strong passion for how I want to eat.  It has ruined me for convenience foods and for eating out at almost any restaurant.  It is always difficult to live in any way that is significantly different than the norm of your society, but the strength of your convictions will determine your success.  When friends and family don't eat the same way, it is definitely a struggle.  I suppose that is one good thing about being on a strict diet for gestational diabetes.  I have to eat my perfectly measured meals at very specific times, so whenever I leave the house I have to have my meals and snacks premade and packed, and keep my phone close so that my alarms can remind me exactly when to eat and when to test my sugars. Because of this, my friends and family get used to me showing up at a restaurant or picnic with my own food and declining theirs.  They understand because of the diabetic pregnancy, and I feel that this sets me up for more understanding when I continue to make similar food choices after my second daughter is born.

I certainly have to contribute my ability to devote so much time to what I eat and the foods I make for my family to my wonderful husband for carrying the financial burden for our family and allowing me to stay home.  I had made some great improvements to our diets while I was working, but staying home really allows me ample time to study, prepare meal plans and shopping lists, and cook from scratch.  If it's one big fat lesson I've learned, preparation is most definitely the key to making better food choices.

So how would I summarize my goal diet in general? While I've tried exclusion diets (vegetarian, vegan, raw) I prefer to implement a better balance between animal and plant foods instead of excluding certain ones altogether.  The one exclusion I do make is crap food.  That's right, crap food.  Anything processed, from a box, or anything that is only available to us through the use of technology. 

So here is my current list of dietary goals for myself and my family:

• Eat foods from their natural sources in their natural forms with their natural proportions. Avoid eating parts of foods only available through technology (like adding vital wheat gluten to bread recipes, see next point.)
• Avoid "foods" that are only available to us through chemical technology or technology that could not be replaced by manual labor. Certain home appliances that ease preparation are certainly ok in my opinion.  I use a grain mill, food processor, blender, etc.  I feel these appliances allow us to eat foods we otherwise still would have eaten but with less effort.  Refined grains, on the other hand, we could not make with manual labor so they are definitely out.

• Get the majority of vitamins, nutrients, protein, calcium and fiber from plant sources. This is SO EASY to do it's mind boggling.  As I will cover in another post, I have broken down a week's worth of food to show where I'm getting all my nutrients.  I was so amazed at how easy it was to get all the stuff I needed primarily from plant sources.

• "Accent" diet with healthy animal products in as natural a form as possible, being very careful to not exceed protein recommendations by eating too many animal products. As a result of some of my research, I believe that eating too much protein from animal sources is a major problem with the American diet.  More on this in a later post.

• Strive to choose organic produce as much as possible, especially any produce or product that involves corn. I strongly believe that Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) products are the Sci-Fi villain of our day.  They sneak into almost every boxed food on the shelf and our only current safeguard is buying organic.

• Eat only natural whole grain carbohydrates in a reasonable proportion.  Currently 30g per meal/snack - can be raised slightly after baby is born but this current 30g proportion is working very well for me.

• Incorporate some foods and spices that are known to be incredibly beneficial to our health. From my various diets I've learning about some foods that are so good for us.  Foods like coconut, cinnamon, raw cocao, chia seeds, wheatgrass, etc. have health benefits that are definitely worth a trip to the natural foods store.

I feel that I have finally settled on a good set of goals for my diet and for the foods that I serve my family.  While it may yet take some time to convert my entire family to eating in such a healthy way, I strongly believe that we are making great progress towards eating outside the box.