Grazing

"Ozgirl", a good friend on the alt.support.diabetes newsgroup, introduced me to "grazing" as a blood glucose management tool some years ago. She developed her own method to combat her pronounced reactive hypoglycemia and I found that the method was very effective.

As a diabetic one of my management goals is to try to keep my BG's as stable and as close to normal as I can. I found that eating the traditional "three square meals" daily caused problems and it became much easier when I broke those meals up into a series of smaller meals and snacks. Dinner is still my biggest meal, but the others are all small. And I rarely feel hungry.

My day goes something like this:

Breakfast, as soon as possible after waking, usually 5-6:30am.
Mid-morning, 10am, a small snack.
Lunch, around noon.
Mid-afternoon, a small snack.
Dinner, about 6pm.
An hour or two after dinner, a small snack
Bedtime supper.

Effectively I rarely go more than three hours without eating something, but the portion I eat is very small. When I say a small snack, that is the equivalent of half an apple, or a cracker with cheese, or a half-cup of yoghurt with berries; that's the sort of portion sizes I mean. Breakfast is equivalent to an egg or two and a slice of ham; lunch an open sandwich, or a soup, or a stir-fry or similar.

The total calories in the day are the same; they are just spread across the time more evenly. By testing after each of these snacks or small meals I've also found that I need to start with a very low carb breakfast but as I approach the evening I can eat higher carbohydrate snacks without spiking. That's why I can have my Psyllium, Fibre, Muesli and Nuts as a bedtime snack.

It works for me. Maybe it could work for you.

Cheers, Alan