Just so I don't mislead anyone, let me just tell ya’ll
up front I don’t have any formal training in diet or nutrition. Our family has been
meeting with a dietitian regularly since my son was first diagnosed with type 1
diabetes at the age of 4. He is now
almost 17.
I know that we all had to
take health and nutrition classes in high school, but for some reason most of
us really never take that information and apply it to our own bodies and our
own lives. When our son was initially
diagnosed, he was in the hospital for about a week. Much of that time his father and I spent attending
intensive educational classes, trying to learn how to take care of our son
before they’d allow him to come home with us. And rightfully so. We quickly learned that type 1 diabetes is
the BAMF of diabetes. There is no
cure. There is no pill to
treat or cure it. Exercise and diet don’t
cure it. Like most people, we were ignorant
about the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. I felt like they were totally different
disease processes. And the more we
learned, the more discouraged we became. The only treatment for type 1 (BAMF) is lifelong insulin
injections.
My husband and I are
both annoyingly positive people, so we naively rubbed our hands together and
prepared to learn how to manage this BAMF disease. Looking back, I’m not sure if our naivety
helped or hindered us more! Ignorance
truly might’ve been bliss at that point.
If we truly knew the challenges that we would confront over the
next 15 years, we probably would’ve been totally overwhelmed and incapacitated. We learned so many hard
lessons about BAMF by trial and error over the years. But in the beginning, the first and foremost goal
for me and my husband was to learn the basics so we could take our son home, and
hopefully not kill him. Since our son
would require multiple daily insulin injections for the rest of his life, we
had to learn how to give injections. I’d
never stabbed anything with a sharp object. At least not on purpose! We
practiced on oranges, and then worked up to each other, and then horrifyingly our
own son, who was by that point cowering in the corner of the room in full blown
tantrum mode whenever we approached him with any type of needle. He began to cry when any healthworker walked
into his hospital room. His little
fingers were swollen and sore from all the finger pokes.
We then had to learn how
to determine the amount of insulin to inject and when to inject it! Since our son generally liked to eat daily,
we also had to understand how much insulin to give him based on what he ate at
each meal. We learned about insulin to
carb ratios. The dietitian worked with
us to explain how to read labels on our son’s favorite foods. Sounds pretty
straight forward, huh? You ever
attempted to actually read one of those aforementioned nutrition labels and
then determine how your body’s going to process it? Hmmm? It
might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. This is when I first experienced shock and
awe by the misrepresentation of advertising on food products. Then I became angry. Food is very important to people who suffer
from BAMF! It’s not so much what they
can and cannot eat. It’s more that they
need to know EXACTLY what they’re eating sans misleading advertising. The dietitian’s first rule was to ignore
everything on the packaging and hone in on the nutrition facts which were usually
in tiny print on the back of the product. Then we learned how to break the facts down into something we could understand.
The first thing we
looked at for every product was the serving size. You probably think a can of Spaghettios is
one serving. It’s not. You also probably think a serving size of Cheerios
is what? A bowl? How big of a bowl? Doesn’t really matter, because it’s not a
bowl. It’s not even a cup. It’s ¾ cup.
Has anyone ever in the history of General Mills ever eaten only ¾ cup of
cereal in one setting? I don’t think so. Maybe a mouse. But in my limited experience with mice, they
are greedy little furry creatures who wouldn’t be satisfied with ¾ cup
either.
This was our first
introduction to learning how the food we eat is processed by our bodies. We learned it because we were forced to learn it in order to help our son. I wish everyone would learn it just
because. It’s been invaluable to not
only my son, but to my husband and myself. Stay tuned for more.
In the
meantime, as promised, here’s the recipe for my “Rockamole”.
I love your beautiful music, Jack White, but you can kiss my grits. My fellow Oklahomans are welcome to use my Rockamole
recipe any day.
Rockamole
3 large or 4 small Hass avocados
1/2 t minced garlic
1/4 to 1/2 c of Rotel tomatoes(drained w/liquid reserved. I like to add a bit of Rotel liquid for a smoother guac. If you prefer chunky, use less liquid, if any, and just use the drained tomatoes.)
1/2 t finely diced red onion
1/2 t finely diced jalapeno pepper
Freshly squeezed lime juice (about 1/4 t)
1 packet of Ortega guacamole seasoning
Handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
Dash of pepper
Ya'll come back now!
