Counting Carbs:

The theory is actually quite simple.  For a diabetic the amount of fat consumed does not matter; the amount of proteins consumed does not matter; the amount of calories consumed does not matter.  The only thing that matters is the amount of carbohydrates consumed.  I was told that the ideal amount of carbs for an adult with moderate amount of physical activity was about 170 grams of carbs per day.  I’ll describe moderate physical activity later but first let’s discuss 170 grams of carbs.

The first step was to split up 170 grams into different meals.  I was taught that the current thinking in diabetes treatment was that eating every two hours (grazing) was not a good idea.  It was better to have three full balanced meals a day about five hours apart without any other intake.  So I split up my meals as follows (time indicated is the beginning of time of the meal):
 7:30 AM    Breakfast   40g
12:30 PM   Lunch         60g
 5:00 PM    Snack        10g  
 7:00 PM    Dinner       60g
                Total        170g

Notice that I added a fourth meal “Snack” at 5:00 PM.  I had to do it in order to accommodate my dinner time of 7 PM, about 6 and a half hour gap after lunch. 

Before I get carried away and give you details of each meal let me just throw in this jewel.  Before I started this plan I’d go to a Starbucks, get a medium coffee with cream and sugar (15g), and a scone (90g).  What do you think happened to these 105g of carbs?  They got converted to fat, of course.  If you thought McDonald’s food was bad for you, think again.  Starbucks is much worse. 
Here is a new mantra: I will never eat a scone or a muffin again.

Basic Rules for the meals:

·         Do not skip a meal

·         Lunch and dinner must be balanced meals.  Not only do I not skip a meal but I do not just eat a piece of fruit or only have a salad.  That is a big non-no.  The meal must be balanced.

·         Each meal must fully satisfy you.  Meaning you plan your meal in such a way that without exceeding your carb intake you feel full at the end of the meal.

·         Initially and until you get really good at this, do not eat out.

Breakfast:
We have all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  This has been engraved in our minds by the “education” imparted on us by the big cereal companies.  “An educated consumer is a good consumer”, otherwise who would buy the concoctions that get sold as breakfast foods? 

Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? 
I never used to eat breakfast before, but I forced myself to start eating breakfast.  Why?  Because I had decided to surrender myself to whatever I was going to be taught about revising my eating habits (I’ll discuss more on the subject of spirituality of surrendering later).  That breakfast is the most important meal of the day is true but it is not the whole truth.  Here is the whole truth.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, if and only if, it is actually breaking a fast of 12 hours.   In the old days before the advent of electric lights people used to go to sleep early and wake up early.  By necessity dinner was an early affair.  Nowadays people eat dinner at all kinds of late hours.  It is common in Indian dinner parties these days for the appetizers to arrive at 10 PM.  Many people in the cities of India, like Bombay, arrive home from work at 9 PM, cook dinner, and eat after 10 PM.  If you are going to eat dinner at 10 PM or a snack at 11 PM, should you be eating breakfast at 7 AM?  Of course not! In that case it makes more sense to skip breakfast.  Also, keep in mind that if you have not taken a walk after eating dinner, and not waited at least three hours, the food you have eaten is still sitting in your stomach putrefying.  The stomach is trying to produce more acid to digest the foods, and all this is causing symptoms of acidity and acid reflux.
Here is another mantra:  I will wait at least three to four hours after dinner before lying down to go to sleep.

Should breakfast include high carb foods like pancakes and cereals? 
In the agrarian and industrial societies, when people used to get up early in the morning to go and work hard in farms and factories, it made sense that the breakfast was rich in carbs.  But does it make sense for the current information age worker to eat a muffin for breakfast while sitting with her laptop in a Starbucks café?  Does it make sense to eat donuts with your morning coffee at the office?  Should business meetings have sweet rolls for morning and cookies for afternoon sessions?  Not if they want you to pay attention to what is going on in the meetings.  Now I know why I used to feel sleepy in all those meetings – carbs overload!

Juices for breakfast anyone?  Stop this practice immediately.  My son and daughter-in-law taught me that.  They do not give any juice to my grandchildren.  My grandchildren can have all the fruits that they want but no juices.  A small glass (8 fl. Oz or 240 ml) of orange juice is 30g of carbs!  Do you think you want to have a hearty breakfast of a large glass of orange juice, coffee with cream and sugar, a stack of four pancakes with syrup, and hash brown potatoes?  My computation for that “hearty” breakfast is 170g of carbs, as much as I should eat during the whole day!  Drinking juice takes out the function of the mouth chewing the fruit, mixing saliva with the fruit, helping in digestion, and helping in sending the signal to the brain when you’ve had enough.  Drinking juice on the other hand is like gulping down sugar.  Your brain has no chance to get informed when you’ve had enough.  Juice is perfect food when you are sick because you can provide energy to your body in form of sugar without having to chew solid food and digest it.

“Cereals” evolved from the practice of eating breakfast items made from grains.  Not a bad practice for an agrarian society.  However, what gets passed on to us as cereal by the big companies is not good food.  This is what I suggest you do.  Take a look at a box of cereal, any cereal, in your home and read the label for ingredients.  I assure you that you’ll find the cereal has both salt and some form of sugar listed in the ingredient list.  Having both, salt and sugar, in any food is a sure fire way to make sure that you find it tasty and eat more of it.  This is a marketing strategy, for increasing sales, built into the formula of the product.  Next count the number of ingredients in the list.  If there are more than one or two ingredients, then it is probably junk food. 
Here is another Mantra:  I will never eat commercially prepared cereal ever again.