My photo
Ontario, Canada
I am a wife, mother and grandma who enjoys the many aspects of homemaking. A variety of interests and hobbies combined with travel keep me active. They reflect the importance of family, friends, home and good food.
Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.
--Bobby Flay

For Your Information

Please watch this area for important information like updates, food recalls, polls, contests, coupons, and freebies.
  • [March 19, 2020] - Effective Mar 17, this blog will no longer accept advertising. The reason is very simple. If I like a product, I will promote it without compensation. If I don't like a product, I will have no problem saying so.
  • [March 17, 2020] - A return to blogging! Stay tuned for new tips, resources and all things food related.
  • [February 1, 2016] - An interesting report on why you should always choose organic tea verses non-organic: Toxic Tea (pdf format)
  • Sticky Post - Warning: 4ever Recap reusable canning lids. The reports are growing daily of these lids losing their seal during storage. Some have lost their entire season's worth of canning to these seal failures! [Update: 4ever Recap appears to be out of business.]

Popular Posts

Saturday, July 02, 2011

An Update - My Husband and Food

It is not very often over the life of this blog that I have made a simple update post.  I apologize for the messed up posting recently.  If you have been following this blog you will know that for the last week of May and all of June we have be dealing with my husband's health problems.  There are still some unknowns and still more tests but what we did discover is he is officially diagnosed as impaired glucose tolerance aka pre-diabetic.  I grew up with my Mom having Type 2 Diabetes so have always been very concerned about developing diabetes which is reflected in our diet.  Now the good news is we have a very healthy diet that avoids artificial anything including sweeteners, food preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, fast foods AND desserts are not a normal part of our daily diet.  About 90% of our meals are made from scratch using whole ingredients.  So in terms of diet there will be little adjustment.  What it will mean is:

  • regular  meals no further than six hours apart
  • portion control 
  • regular exercise
All of these will be a challenge because even though  we eat healthy foods, we tend to not pay attention to portion control.  And lets face it we are getting up there in age so exercise is not all that appealing and neither of us do breakfast unless traveling.  Watch for a few more health conscious meals on this blog.  Now we are still dealing with a few other other unknowns that we don't think is diet related but in all honesty all health is related to diet somehow.  I really think that many fail to realize that if they eat a cheap diet of processed foods they will at sometime pay for it with their health.  There are high blood pressure problems and trust me that is not related to dietary sodium intake.  I home can and cook without adding salt and salt is seldom on the table so I know we eat low sodium.  There is the issue of unexplained edema and we still don't know what the recent batch of medical tests uncovered.  At the moment, my primary goal is to serve healthy, homemade meals as always.

Having dealt with diabetes for so many years I know how deal with this.  I think with portion control and exercise his blood sugar will return to normal.  I heard of a recent study where Type 2 diabetes can be cured by going on a starvation diet (600 calories per day) for two months.  Six hundred calories is the minimum needed to sustain bodily functions and nothing more.  Being educated in the medical sciences, I do not think this is a good idea as a starvation diet could cause other problems but it is something I will be keeping a close eye on.  Should we decided to try this diet, I will be posting more about the method, meals and the results.


2 food lovers commented:

LindaG said...

My hubby has type 2 and it's controlled with exercise and Byetta.
He would never do a starvation diet. Well, he tried when he was in the Air Force and I think that made what was probably pre-diabetes, become worse.
No telling.
But I do hope they come up with all the answers you need and that your hubby will be well.

Garden Gnome said...

Thanks so much for this and the well wishes Linda! The study with the starvation diet involved 11 individuals and apparently it did cure their diabetes. I can't help but think that a starvation diet would do more harm than good though. I'm so glad you said something because I certainly do not want the problem to worsen! Thanks :)