Hello,

I met with the diabetes educator/dietitian yesterday. She gave me a booklett with information and a meal plan. It was very helpful ~ helped me to understand things better. I was pleased that it seems fairly easy to follow. The booklett has lists of different types of foods ~ starches, fruits, milk, non-starchy vegetables, fats. I am to eat a certain amount of servings of each of these and it will add up to 1600 calories a day.

My question is, if you are cooking from scratch (I was thinking today it is cold and I might like to make a pot of chili) is there some sort of tool online to help diabetics ~ that you can enter in what you put in the recipe and it tells you how many starches, meats, vegetables etc are in a serving of what you've made?

Or would there be a recipe book you could recomend that tells this information for the recipes it has?

Thanks for your help

Another question ~ I am not always able to make stuff from scratch ~ how do you figure prepared foods into the kind of diet plan she gave me?

I am supposed to do:
starches - 7 per day
fruits - 3 per day
milk - 3 per day
non starchy vegetables - 4 per day
meat and meat substitutes - 6 oz per day
fats - 5 per day

to total 1600 calories per day

At first thought this seemed fairly easy, but as I start thinking and trying to apply my choices to this plan ~ still having questions.

Thank you for your help.

Most prepared foods have the nutritional breakdown on the package. For recipes, I use www.fitday.com, enter all the ingredients and divide by the number of servings. I hope this helps.

I agree with RUTH that Fitday can help you with this issue and I also have a Diabetic Cookbook (by the same name) that has some recipes and the nutritional info with the recipes, so they are available. You can also GOOGLE lots of Diabetic recipes online as well.

I find that the portion-based plan easier to follow for breakfast and lunch, but for dinner, it can get more complicated as you stated -- especially for prepared meals like chili or shepherd's pie and so forth. More manufacturers are putting diabetic info on their foods than before though ... but it's the homemade stuff you need a little help with.

When I make a meal, I count the servings ahead of time as I am making the dish; meaning, I carefully measure the right portions per person as I am making up the dish and/or serving it. For instance, when I could pasta, I measure 1 cup "cooked" pasta onto our plates OR so many into a casserole based on how many I intend to serve with it.

If I am making a casserole for 2 persons -- I use 2 cups "cooked" pasta in each casserole; if making for 4 persons, I use 4 cups in the casserole and so forth. For things like chili, stew, or soup -- I measure the total serving for each person, say 1 cup servings but Fitday could help you be even more precise.

... hope this helps you a bit.

Thank you both for your help and suggestions. I was prowling around on the web and on the web site www.diabetes.org they had a thing called My Food Advisor that looked like it might be of help too. It has lists of foods, prepared foods, restraunt foods and a thing where you could plug in the ingredients of a recipe.

Thanks again