Ahhh, we are all right in the thick of the holiday season. There are many reasons why I love the month of December. For starters, the month starts out with my birthday on December 1st. Then I love attending all of the holiday parties and catching up with friends. Work is usually a little more laid back leading up to Christmas and New Years, and then you have some days off to spend with the family and relax a little. Or however relaxing is possible with two kids under 4 years old.
4 Years Officially!
As great as I think December is, it was almost 4 years ago that I received a call from a doctor while I was driving home from work who told me that I have Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). I believe it was right after Christmas, so what a way to bring in the New Year!
Anyway, fast forward to December 2017, and I’m happy to report that after 4 years as a T1D, I have yet to take any medication or insulin injections to manage my disease. At this point, I have no clue how long this can last, but I’m getting more confident as the years go by that this is very sustainable with the right amount of discipline and attitude.
I received a nice email from one of my blog followers asking about what I eat on a daily basis. It’s been a while since I’ve conveyed in my blog what my typical meals are so I decided to give it a shot for this month. The holidays are always a tough time to stay disciplined with diet, so I thought focusing on my diet was a good motivating post for this month.
Tracking My Meals
To make sure I had good data for this post, I tracked what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner over the past 30 days. I used to try and track all of my meals but it gets tough to remember to input this each day and I end up forgetting. However, I was able to stay focused and track everything for the past 30 days pretty diligently in order to provide the data for this post.
Last 30 Day Fasting Blood Sugars
To start, I put below the link to my fasting blood sugars for the past 30 days. As you can see, they have been pretty good (average of ~100), so most of what I ate was well received by my body over the past month.
Last 30 Days Fasting Blood Sugar Readings
In general, I’m essentially vegan now. I used to eat a plant-based diet with about 10% animal products. However, life was so much more stressful when animal products were involved, even to this low extent, because they would cause significant volatility in my daily fasting blood sugars. Since I’ve turned vegan during the summer of 2017, my blood sugars have been much more stable and much lower on average.
Below is a more detailed view of my diet, but in essence I eat a raw organic vegan diet consisting of vegetables, nuts and seeds. I try and avoid fruit for the most part and 80% of what I eat is uncooked (raw). Also, I’d say 80% of what I eat is organic.
Breakfast
Breakfast is easy. Over the past 30 days, I’ve eaten my raw nut granola (Raw-Nut-Granola-Recipe) 26 days, pecan porridge 3 days and one day I had almond flour pancakes. The pecan porridge is a nice quick breakfast to make when I run out of granola, however, I typically have granola for a vast majority of the days.
The nut granola includes raw / organic almonds, walnuts, pecans, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, yacon syrup, cinnamon, and coconut butter. The nuts are soaked for 4 or 5 hours in order to release more nutritional content and then everything is mixed in a food processor. After being processed, you place the granola on a dehydrator and cook it at 115 degrees for about 24 hours. Cooking it at this low temperature retains a majority of the nutrients from the nuts which increases their healing power. Food to Live is a great site to buy raw organic nuts in bulk. I eat the granola with organic almond milk that I make myself.
Raw nuts are very powerful healing foods for your body. This meal is where a majority of my calories come from on daily basis and it allows me to keep my weight up. After eating this every day for nearly 3.5 years, I still look forward to breakfast every morning. This stuff is good, I swear.
The pecan porridge is just almond milk (3/4 C), pecans (1 C), yacon syrup (2 T), cinnamon and coconut butter blended in my Vitamix blender for about 15 seconds. It’s a quick and easy alternative when I’m running low on granola.
Also, I drink a small serving of Vitamineral Green each morning as well. This stuff is packed with green superfoods and provides a great source of healing nutrition.
Lunch
Lunch is pretty easy, it’s almost always a salad made out of low glycemic vegetables. Over the past 30 days, I pretty much ate some variation of a salad for lunch each day. This is really the primary healing meal of the day for me. My salads are fairly basic and include the following vegetables / seeds: kale, spinach, arugula, cabbage, cucumbers, red peppers, broccoli, avocado, mushrooms, cauliflower, chia seeds, flax seeds and hemp seeds.
I occasionally put on other items like tofu, edamame, chickpeas, beans, carrots and tomatoes but I try and use these sparingly as they are a little higher on the glycemic index.
As for dressing, I use a combination of store bought low-to-no sugar dressings or my wife makes me some homemade ones. Thrive has some great dressings that I really like including a honey mustard one and greek vinaigrette one.
I will say that my daily salad is the foundation of my diet and gives me the ability to remain off of medication as a T1D. My lunches are packed with a significant amount of nutritional content that I believe heals my body and allows the little insulin that I have to still work. It’s also pretty amazing to think that my body can still manage my blood sugars on its own, so I personally believe my diet has some sort of healing and/or beta cell regeneration capabilities.
Snacks
I really don’t snack too much. From my experience, eating 3 meals per day allows your body to work less hard and not use as much insulin. Each time that you eat a snack, your body must break down that food with insulin. As a T1D, your body is already insulin deficient, so saving your reserves for your 3 core meals is optimal. That said, I do snack on occasion during the day, and it will usually be kale chips that I get from Whole Foods.
Dinner
Dinner is where I typically change things up. I don’t mind eating the same breakfast and lunch each day, but changing up the dinners is key to keeping things interesting. Many people think being vegan prohibits consumption of tasty meals but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’ll give my wife much of the credit for being creative with my dinners. She comes up with some very good meals. It’s probably easiest to just list some dinners that I ate over the last month below. You’ll also notice that I sometimes even get fast food (pretty much only Chipotle). You don’t have to be perfect to accomplish what I’m doing as a T1D, but you always have to be considerate about what you are ordering. I also probably dine out several times per month, and I typically just get sides of things like broccoli, asparagus or mushrooms.
Vegetable Mix (cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus)
Chipotle Veggie Salad (Fast Food)
Kabob from B52 Cafe (Dining Out)
Sphagetti Squash with Vegan Marinara Sauce
OTB Mushroom Veggie Burger (Dining Out)
Cauliflower and Broccoli
Poros – Broccoli, mushrooms/onions, asaparagus (Dining Out)
Vegan sausage wrap and cabbage / broccoli mix
Portobello Mushrooms and Assorted Vegetables
Cauliflower Rice Vegetable Mix
Hopefully this provides a pretty good idea of what I eat in a typical month. It can be a little monotonous at times, but as you can see by my dinners, there are plenty of ways to get creative to keep things interesting.
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