It works - some of it!

 Well, yesterday's challenge was to put together all they had taught so far about blood sugar and to try to achieve a more level graph by eating according to the rules.  so . . 

 For lunch  (after a thirty minute brisk walk) I knocked up a small salad of bits out of the fridge - beetroot, lettuce, cucumber, diced red onion, thinly sliced apple and celery and dressed it with a splash of cider vinegar and olive oil. It was yummy.  I ate this first then followed it with half a cheese sandwich made with wholemeal bread.  Cider vinegar has been found to be good for blood sugar control, the olive oil provides good fats to mitigate the carbs, the salad provides the fibre which should precede the carbs, then the carbs in the bread were mitigated with fats from butter and cheese.  All as taught by Zoe.

Did it work?  Well yes, my afternoon graph was much flatter than usual.  Maybe there is something in all this science.

Earlier in the day though I had a much less successful trial.  I had managed to get some steel cut (aka pinhead) oats from a wholefood shop.  These are normal oats but instead of being steamed and rolled, or ground they are just chopped into the consistency of cous cous.  Because they are less refined, these oats are supposed to take longer to release the sugar from the carbs.

These oats need longer cooking than normal porridge, so I pressure cooked them until they were soft and ate them with a couple of strawberries, three raspberries and a spoonful of honey to sweeten.

Well I was shocked by the result.  My blood sugar shot up like a rocket!  It reached the highest point that I had seen since wearing the monitor.  Maybe it was the honey.  Then shortly after, it plunged just as steeply back to base level.  A steep, tall, sharp spike. So that's not good

So this morning I tried the oats again with some sliced apple , a few nuts and a tablespoon of yoghurt.  It's now an hour and a half since breakfast and my sugars rose to a less high level and not a sharp peak but a rounded one and is falling much less sharply- so maybe it was the honey and the sweet fruit that did the damage yesterday.  Or maybe the nuts and yoghurt are helping slow things down.  A bit of both I suspect.  Still, it's all learning.  Aaah, it might also be because the oats I had today were the remains of yesterday's cooking kept in the fridge overnight.  Apparently that is a good way to lower the impact of starchy foods.

I just found a very good video on youtube that backs up everything Zoe have been saying about all this. It's quite short but very useful, giving good, simple every day strategies for blood sugar control. 

https://youtu.be/yg0Y3eNSANg?si=LV7XGiUt8qeHhwYr

Over the last few days we have been staying with our son Peter in Cambridge and eating out for dinner, so we've tried naughty food as well as good stuff.  Predictably the naughty food -pizza, pub curry, beer etc don't do too well on blood sugar control, but we reckoned I ought to try all sorts for science's sake. (that's my excuse anyway).

We're back home later today and for the final couple of days with the monitor I'll try and eat according to the recommendations.

BTW thanks to Nb Duxllandyn for the ideas for make ahead breakfast frittattas, they sound yummy.  I'll have a bash at something similar.