Simple Tips for Eating during Holidays with Diabetes

The holiday season is fast approaching and that means there will be lots of foods and desserts ready to be eaten, so here are a few simple tips for eating during the holidays with diabetes.

Thanksgiving starts the holiday season eating frenzy with an abundant amount of foods. Including turkey, stuffing, ham, mashed potatoes, candied yams, veggies, cranberry sauce, stuffed artichokes, pastas, desserts and much more. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of high carb foods and fats listed here. Diabetics have to account for all of that and try our best to administer accurate doses of insulin. It’s a very difficult task for people with diabetes but a necessary one. The best tips for eating during the holidays is to not eat that much. But we all know that’s virtually impossible when all those delicious foods are available.

I cut down my carb intake by limiting my portions of stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams and other starchy sweet foods. As a result, I eat more meats, sweet potatoes and non starchy vegetables. When eating more meats and gravy, it means more proteins and fats so you’ll have to account for that when counting carbs for your insulin bolus. Soon after the big feast comes the sweet delicious desserts that have our names written all over them LOL… What to do? Go outside and play some football with the family instead of sitting on the couch and watching it on TV. Most likely it’ll be the latter lol. When dessert time comes, try small portions just to satisfy your sweet tooth and bolus accordingly.

*I understand this is hard to do but you have to remember you have diabetes and this must be done otherwise you can pay the consequences later in life.

One final thing to mention is to make sure you check your blood sugar more often during holiday feasts, including Christmas and Chanukah.

Try these simple diabetes tips for eating during this festive time, and Happy Holidays!