If you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, you probably already know that one of the most important things you can do to stay healthy is to carefully manage your diet, balancing what you eat with insulin injections (if you have Type 1), medications (if you have Type 2), and exercise. How well you can follow your diabetes diet and stick to regular mealtimes can really make an important difference in how you feel. A healthy diabetes eating plan isn’t weird and doesn’t mean you’ll have to eat wildly different things from your friends. In fact, if every teenager followed a diabetes diet, they’d all be much healthier!

Excellent Diabetes Diet?

As soon as you’re diagnosed with diabetes, you’ll meet with a dietician or diabetes educator to discuss your diet. A certified diabetes educator (CDE) is usually a registered nurse with special training who is certified by the National Board of Diabetes Educators. A dietician, physician, or pharmacist also can be a CDE. Your CDE will help you understand diabetes and teach you how to balance your insulin or pills with food, blood tests, and exercise. A registered dietician (RD) is trained in the field of nutrition (an LD credential means the person is licensed). Many registered dieticians are also CDEs. You’ll meet with your dietician once or twice to work out a special meal plan tailored to your situation, taking into account how much you still need to grow, what your lifestyle is like, and what foods you like best, while keeping your blood sugar levels within your target range. Portion size, the right amount of calories for your age, and healthy food choices are also important.

If you’re going to be able to manage your meal or diet plan, it really helps first to understand exactly how food affects your blood sugar level. Food provides sugar for your body, which your body needs to fuel its metabolic processes. In a healthy teenager, insulin helps this sugar get into the body’s cells, where the sugar is used for fuel. But if you have diabetes you have a problem with insulin. If you have Type 1 diabetes, you don’t have any insulin at all. If you have Type 2, you don’t have enough or your body doesn’t respond to insulin as it should. The end result is the same for both types: When sugar can’t get into your body’s cells, it builds up in the bloodstream to dangerously high levels and even a rapid weight loss would not help!

The American Diabetes Association recommends that people with diabetes follow an individualized meal plan as an important way to manage diabetes and weight. A meal plan is simply a list of what you can eat and how much you should eat each day. Most meal plans are designed to help you stay within a certain range of carbohydrate, fat, and protein consumption, aiming for high fi ber, low simple sugar, low fat (especially saturated fat), and many different kinds of healthy foods.

If you’re like most teens, you’re probably used to eating lots of soda, chips, cakes, cookies, pizza, burgers, and fries. That’s really not a healthy diet for anyone, but if you have diabetes it can cause real problems. The first thing you’ll need to do on your new diabetic diet is to replace the sweets and high-fat foods with more fruits and vegetables. (You can still have an occasional sweet treat.) What you want to aim for is to include lots of different kinds of healthy foods, without eating too much of any one item. You’ll also want to pick foods filled with vitamins, minerals, and fiber, instead of overly processed foods. You’ll probably be directed to eat at least three small or moderate meals daily having different recipes, along with two or three snacks between meals. This way, you’ll avoid a sugar onslaught that you’d get by gobbling large meals filled with sweets. You’ll also want to eat about the same amount of food at the same time each day, avoiding eating food with added sugar. When you get thirsty, it’s best to drink water and avoid juice, punch, soda, and other high-sugar beverages.

Different diabetes experts have different ideas about diabetes diets, but typically you will be asked to try to eat between 50 to 60 percent of your calories from carbs, 10 to 15 percent from protein, and 20 to 30 percent from fat. There are a variety of meal plans that accomplish this, including the Exchange System, the Food Guide Pyramid, Rate Your Plate, and Carbohydrate Counting. The standard diabetes diet is based on the Exchange System, which focuses on counting the number of servings you can have from each food group (carbohydrates, meat and meat substitutes, and fats). The glycemic index of a food assigns a numerical value to that food, which tells you how much it will boost your blood sugar. In addition to knowing how fast a carbohydrate turns into sugar, to really understand its effect on blood sugar you must know how much of that carb is in a serving of food—the glycemic load (GL). In the “rate your plate” method of diet control, you mentally dissect your plate into fourths; one-fourth should be filled with protein, another fourth with grains or starchy foods, and the other half with non-starchy vegetables. To this you can add a glass of nonfat milk and a small piece of fruit or a roll. These all meal plans add up to healthy diabetes diet for a healthier and longer happy life!

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