We are home. Billy Ray was discharged from the hospital yesterday. He is still pretty irritable because he is having a lot of pain from the pancreatitus.
Adapting to the low fat diet is working reasonably well all things considered. In addition to reading the books I found at Barnes and Noble, Larry and I went to the store to read labels and get what we could find. One example is adapting for grilled cheese sandwiches – a favorite of Billy Ray. We make it on whole wheat bread with very little reduced fat mayo, no fat cheese and instead of margarine, I found a fat free cooking spray and topping called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It is more like butter than those cooking sprays like PAM and it still has no fat. The bread is actually a little brown.
We took a look at his “usual” dinner that we had adapted to when he became diabetic. We had already switched him to brown rice from baked potatoes and garlic bread made from whole wheat and reduced fat margarine instead of white French bread. He always gets a chicken patty which says it has 12 mg. fat but he doesn’t usually eat but half of it anyway. I made grilled toast with the I Can’t Believe It Isn’t Butter spray, gave him half a chicken patty and brown rice.
Not bad adapting that much in just one day. I am proud of our progress.
There is one more reality to adapting Billy Ray to low fat diet - Mom and Dad have to change our lifestyle too. Forget about cooking our favorites like pork chops and chicken fried steaks. There is no way Billy Ray is going to understand Mom and Dad having what he can't have. We had to adapt to never having donuts or candy in the house when he became diabetic. The interesting thing about that was that I never really ate much candy and didn't miss it until I realized we couldn't have it in the house anymore.
It may take us a bit to catch up on our sleep so if I am not writing everyday please be patient.
Until next time,
Peggy Lou Morgan
Amazon Blog
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13 years ago
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3 comments:
Hi Betty Lou, Liz here from I Speak of Dreams.
Have you learned much about glycemic index and glycemic load yet? This could help as you go forward
http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm
The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn't tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food's effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn't a lot of it, so watermelon's glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.
Foods that have a low GL almost always have a low GI. Foods with an intermediate or high GL range from very low to very high GI.
This site
http://www.carbs-information.com/glycemic-load.htm#food
has a list of GL for common foods.
Here's another good site on understanding glycemic index/load
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKA/is_8_66/ai_n6106502
Here's another site, the fat-free vegan
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKA/is_8_66/ai_n6106502
while you are not planning to go vegan, the recipes are good and have lots of good ideas.
I wonder if Billy Ray would accept tofu--but it may be too high in fat for him. Baked tofu is pretty yummy, given the right marinade.
Hope Billy Ray continues to improve over the weekend.
Liz again. I know you are Peggy Lou, I had just gotten of the phone with a friend, Betty [last names rhymes with Lou].
I have to watch out for names, for example I always write my friend Suzette's name as Suzanne.
Liz:
Thanks for all the good information. I will follow up on it.
Your second comment made me smile. I am used to people calling me Betty Lou. In fact, a delightful lady who I work with at the publisher called me Betty Lou for weeks and I always mispronounced her name. Life is too short to worry about such things.
Take care my friend,
Peggy Lou
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