As attempts at keto go, the food tray you see below is a failure, but I haven't seen too many radical sugar spikes from this sort of eating... as long as I take my meds.
Let's go over the problems with the food, shall we? Starting with the chocolate: it's 90% cacao (Lindt, quite possibly my favorite brand), and for keto, you need to be eating over 70% cacao, but as Dr. Becky Gillaspy points out after a self-experiment, even dark chocolate will spike your blood sugar fairly significantly. Moving up to cashews: while it's generally good to eat nuts as opposed to candies, cashews are among the worst of the nuts (along with another of my faves, pistachios) because they're carby.* Here, too, blood-sugar spikes can be tamped down with meds. Without meds, you just need to avoid cashews (and dark chocolate) altogether. Dried cranberries: people will tell you that dried fruit is a healthy option because of all the concentrated fiber, which helps to clean you out. What they neglect to mention is that, when you dry fruit, you're making them way more carb-dense per unit volume. Dr. Sten Ekberg (among others) calls dried fruit "carb bombs." They are very carby. Cheese: while it looks like Gruyère, this is actually Comté, the French equivalent. Cheese barely spikes your insulin, so in that sense, it's a good choice for people watching their blood sugar, but the problem with all keto-friendly dairy is that it's almost all heavy in calories.
Despite these cautions, I ate every damn thing you see on this tray last night. I paid for it this morning, too: my blood sugar was at 164, which bumped up my A1c average by two hundredths of a point, from 6.94 to 6.96. I'm still under 7, and since I'll be fasting for at least 48 hours before next week's hospital appointment, I might be able to bump my A1c down as low as 6.9 by Thursday night. We'll see.
Tonight's walk will also be helpful, and my Sunday meal will be the rest of my soup from Friday, plus maybe a taste of low-sugar almond butter. (Sounds pathetic when I put it that way.) Anyway, next week is the final stretch before I'm off the chain for a day or so, but now that I know my food can actually kill me if it's too carby, I'm still going to have to behave myself. That, or have nitro tablets handy and pray to Jeebus I don't cark it from a heart attack.
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*My least favorite nuts turn out to be the healthiest: walnuts (boring) and fucking Brazil nuts, which have to be some of the dullest nuts God ever created. I hate Brazil nuts, but I'd be open to trying them if they've been crushed, oven-roasted, and salted or otherwise flavored (roasted, sprinkled with cheese, and served in a bowl like popcorn? ooh, maybe).
Walnuts and Brazil nuts* are part of my daily salad. I don't mind either. I also throw in some sunflower seeds as well. And, even though they are terrible for the environment, I add some almonds, too, because almonds are my favorite nut.
ReplyDelete*I should say "nut" singular, because I have gotten in the habit of adding a single Brazil nut to my salad. Apparently Brazil nuts contain a lot of selenium, and you can actually suffer from selenium toxicity if you eat too many. I've seen different recommendations online ranging anywhere from one or two a day to no more than fifty(!), so who knows. But I figure popping one a day, like a natural multivitamin, can't be too bad.
I like sunflower seeds, but I'll let you enjoy your nuts (or single nut) in peace. Then again, I might try the roasting/salting thing. Maybe I can make a keto party mix with Brazil nuts, keto fries, etc.
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