Dinner today was a prime example of the food challenges faced by PWD with T2. It consisted of Chinese style food, I call it Chinese style because I doubt the Chinese actually eat this stuff in that manner. There was orange chicken, rice with vegetables (mostly rice), noodles and spring rolls. To say the least it was carbs, carbs , carbs and more carbs.
The cook in our household (my beautiful wife) is an excellent cook, I do not ask her to limit the diet of everyone for me, I am the only T2 in our immediate family. When these kind of meals happen I do not insult the cook, I partake and enjoy, then do the best I can to treat the onrushing carbs.
I don’t know why but for some reason I feel a strong correction bolus coming.
It’s only once in an great while that I dare to tackle the Chinese foods…
For me I usually encourage a hellacious to fast spike (excellent afrezza material) but it’s not terribly tenacious and long lasting up-all-night to beat it down like some things
I’ve started to venture into some Chinese food with the help of a dual/extended bolus. White rice gives me an instant blood glucose takeoff though, pre-bolus or not! Usually I’ll try to substitute some sprouts or other veggies while everyone else in my family loads up on the carbs.
It is really interesting how we all deal with the same issues in different ways When my son was diagnosed, we all changed the house food menus so that we eat diabetes friendly food all the time. But, for us, it was not that hard because we never had a very high carb lifestyle – except for wonderful, lovely delicious French baguettes
We periodically go to a Chinese buffet: my son likes Chinese food. We dose very carefully, but differently from what we normally do: instead of bolusing for a menu, we bolus a carb target (for the Chinese buffet it was 80 carbs), then my son ate to the amount: he ballparked it by eye – we added it all as he went and it worked out nicely.
To @kenrick’s point, he eats no rice (or noodles) at all – just the rest of it. Because of all the sugar, you still get very high carbs: you have to account carefully for the sauces.
Here’s what I had at the airport on the way to work. I only ate one bite of the egg roll and a little bit of the rice outside of the sushi, and washed it down with 2 glasses of wine. I bolused with an 8u of afrezza 15m after my first bite and it required no follow up… I assume due to the fast digesting nature of it. How would you have counted for, dosed for, and attacked something like this ?
I tried Thai tonight for the second time in 18 months, and it was a roller coaster blood sugar night—chicken curry and chicken satay with peanut sauce. Going for a walk after dinner seemed to help a lot, but the standard deviation on that meal was depressing! Still, it was delicious!
If I make the curry at home I will serve rice for our family but ladle mine into a bowl usually with no rice. Is somethig like that an option that would help or was there too little wiggle room in a meal like that?
Hard to say. I had about 1.5 TBL of the rice. My number came down fairly quickly, but it surged high and fast. Now that I think about it, another problem was that I was high going into that meal. I started the meal thinking I was in the 70s for some reason (there was a lot going on at the time), but within a few minutes (too few) I was at 120, so I think I was higher than I realized when I started. My general rule (as with many of us) is that I don’t begin a meal if my bg is over 100. But, yes, it was probably the rice and perhaps the coconut curry (almost surely sweetened). That was the part I had trouble estimating.
I actually regularly eat Asian food (often Southeast Asian, but sometimes Chinese, usually Szechuan-style) to good effect, but I skip all or most rice and all noodles—I eat a lot of veggie and meat/tofu stir-fries without any side carbs, and I stay away from the gooey Americanized sauced ones. Occasionally, I’ll eat more of the carbs if my blood sugar has been both lower going into it and with a substantial pre-bolus, and that works well. What I’ve learned I definitely need to avoid are nim chow (fresh summer rolls at South Asian restaurants) because the sauce with them is basically peanut-filled sugar water.
@Sam If you don’t eat the rice the rest of it looks pretty doable.
I sometimes go to Panda Express and get Kung Poa chicken and Pepper chicken, with a side of steamed veggies. No problem, about 20g carbs. If I got the fried rice side I would be correcting all night.
To be fair, every now and then I succumb and eat a piece of nim chow (my girlfriend always orders it for herself and is all too willing to share…) and just end up high. Such is life! Most of the time my go to order at our favorite Cambodian place though is stirfried pea greens with fried tofu, in a garlic-ginger sauce, and then I steal a spoonful of her fried rice (and one with lots of egg/veggies/other goodies) to go with.
I’ve considered trying to make my own fried rice that’s mostly all the other stuff with only a tiny bit of rice, since what I love about good fried rice tends to be all the stuff in it anyway. I wish I could order that at a restaurant, even if it cost more.
That makes total sense! I need to try this out for us too – we love fried rice but pretty much never eat it anymore.
Which brings me back to @SLEE: Gary, wouldn’t it be a good practice for each meal at your home to have a very large portion of vegetables and protein?
The “rule” at our house is: each meal must have a large, hefty salad (not just one of those piles of lettuce with a couple pieces of tomatoes in the middle), a large portion of cooked vegetables, a source of protein, and a fruit. We keep piles of fruit so it’s easy to pick, but we always have lots of berries so the boy can get some low-carb fruits any time.
So, you see, if you lived here, you would have no trouble at all any day That is, if you could deal with -20F weather in winter!
[EDIT] by good practice I mean for a family with a T2 (so you can eat dinner)
When my son was diagnosed, we all changed the house food menus so that we eat diabetes friendly food all the time. But, for us, it was not that hard because we never had a very high carb lifestyle – except for wonderful, lovely delicious French baguettes 