Meals Away From Home

As you can see by the title of this post, I've been away from home this week and meals have been a challtenge.  I've been at a hotel in an orientation program for a ew job I start next week. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks each day were provided.  While the food was very good, although sometimes cold when it should have been hot, it was a challenge to put together a diabetic friendly plate at mealtime.

Selection at breakfast proved to be difficult because the hotel caterers had the same choices each morning; eggs, oatmeal, toast, bagels, danish, bacon, sausage and accoutrements for the oatmeal and eggs.  So, I had eggs bacon and toast pretty much each morning.  Ordinarily I would not have eggs every morning.  I broke things up one day by having a yogurt (20 grams of carbs) and another day by having a 1/2 cup of skim milk (12 grams of carbs).  I also had peanut butter on my toast (whole wheat) one morning.

For the snacks, I had the forethought to bring some homemade diabetic oatmeal cookies and granola bars.  I know how many carbs in each and divided them between my three snacks per day.  The hotel provided chips, salsa and cheese sauce for one snack, nothing for another, cookies for another and bags of chips and pretzels for another.  I was glad I had brought my own.  One boon was that they had those tablespoon portion sized peanut butter cups for the toast and bagels at breakfast.  I swiped those to have with my snacks a couple times.

Lunch and dinner were a bit better because they had salad as a choice each time and a healthy protein choice.  However, the first two dinners and first lunch were all chicken.  It was a relief when the second lunch had pork and the third dinner had fish. My carb choices were based on what types they offered at each lunch and dinner.  I had a bit of potato salad at lunch one day and a small portion of long grain and wild rice at dinner another evening.  Another dinner had pasta as the main course so I took about a 1/2 cup serving and plenty of salad and a piece of chicken.  

Overall, I believe that, despite not always knowing the amount of carbs per serving throughout the week, I did a good job of eating well-balanced meals with a modicum of carbs.  All my hard work in researching how to assemble a good diabetic meal and learning the amount of carbs in different foods prepared me for my week away from home.  While I'm not fully prepared for things like eating at restaurants yet, I feel that I am making some progress.  My next challenge will be making meals ahead and to take for lunch to my new job starting next week.  I'll also, hopefully, be preparing evening meals ahead of time since I'll be working long days., 

The lesson for this post is that, if you do your homework, have confidence, and pay attention to what you're eating, you can be successful in eating right and controlling your blood sugars.  Now, I know I'm not tracking my blood sugars throughout the day at this point, but I am starting to notice how my body feels after I eat.  I'm also doing better at keeping my carbs to around 45 grams per meal and under 175 per day.  This is a huge improvement over my first two weeks.

During this trip away from home I started to realize that thinking about food differently and having to be selective about what I eat, how much I eat and how often I eat is becoming second nature to me rather than a chore.

So, I hope that this post has been beneficial in showing you that taking a new step in your life with diabetes doesn't have to be hard, or scary or unsuccessful.  Be confident, do your homework and keep making choices based on what you know.