Modifying Recipes for Diabetes: A Key to Success

Modifying Recipes for Diabetes: Tips and Tricks

Diabetes changes everything.
I always tell patients 2 things: 

1. The more you do FOR you, the less I do TO you. 
2. We’re not looking for perfection. If your sugars are in the normal range 70% of the time, that’s great! 

So what happens in that remaining 30%? Well those are your sick days, vacations, holidays–or days where you’re burned out and thinking, “Oh the hell with THIS. I can’t do this today.” 

Diet

We endos talk a lot about changing diet for diabetes treatment, but what does that even mean? Here are 3 quick principles of dietary change: 

1. Be smart about carbohydrate selections. Eating fiber is a great choice. Eating sugar is not. 
2. Prioritizing protein intake from lean meats or plant based sources, because protein slows the rise in blood sugar. 
3. Choosing the good fats–that is, the ones that are liquid at room temperature–to promote heart health. 

So does that mean that we can’t have the things we grew up loving? 

Nope. 

But it does mean that we have to anticipate those foods that we’ve always loved, and take “evasive maneuvers.”

Recipe Modification

Let’s use pancakes as an example. Childhood favorite, right? Comfort food. Lazy Sunday mornings. All of these are good things, unless your Dexcom starts chiming that your blood sugar is 300 afterward. 

There are so many products available on the market that are geared toward high protein/keto diets or gluten free diets and sometimes these can really be beneficial for diabetes. 

Kodiak Power Cakes is a pancake mix that is already loaded with 14g protein. The box will instruct you on how you can further add protein by modifying the mixing ingredients. 

I put together a quick guide about how to further modify the pancake mix to basically double the protein. You can check it out on our Instagram and Facebook! 

Always be thinking about how you can tweak a recipe so you can meet all of your goals–little changes can go a long way.