How to eat well and enjoy Christmas food when you have diabetes

When you're managing your diabetes, it's possible to eat healthily while still enjoying a lot of the delicious, festive food on offer over the Christmas season.

Diabetes and Christmas

If you are living with, or know someone close who has a variant of the diabetes condition, you’ll be aware that following a healthy diet is one of the most effective ways of managing your diabetes and reducing the risk of developing long-term complications, including cardiovascular disease, blindness, amputation, kidney disease and depression. Maintaining this over the festive period and subsequent festive celebrations that fill December - can feel daunting.

While it's true that many Christmas treats are high in sugar, refined carbs, saturated fats and salt, there's plenty of healthy festive food. By managing your portions and finding a balance between treating yourself and restraint, you can still enjoy your food this Christmas. We need to be realistic that our normal goal setting may get a knock over the festive period. Trying to lose weight during the immediate festive period is likely to be a self-defeating goal. Instead, strive to maintain your weight. Depriving yourself of festive foods or feeling guilty when you do have them isn't part of an empowering healthy eating strategy.

People living with diabetes need to consider the best times to eat, how many carbohydrates to have per meal, (particularly those living with Type 1) and managing their alcohol intake. Perhaps keeping a simple food diary will help highlight eating patterns and trends and subsequent feelings and moods. It can also help to nip things in the bud early if you recognise things might be getting out of control. (You can email Cuppa Squad for a food diary template).

Christmas food to avoid or limit with diabetes

Starchy and sugary carbs

When it comes to managing your diabetes over Christmas, knowing which festive treats greatly impact your blood glucose (sugar) management is a good place to start. Carbohydrates - both starchy and sugary - can cause your blood glucose to rise. These foods contain a surprisingly large amount of sugar.

This is particularly true of 'refined' carbs, like white bread/flour/sugar, which can be found in many Christmas canapes like mince pies, breaded chicken, and sausage rolls. Checking food labels, as well as limiting your consumption of shop-bought processed foods, can significantly reduce your refined carb intake.

Food that's high in fat

Technically, fat as a macronutrient will not encourage a blood sugar spike, unlike its counterpart carbohydrate. Never the less, too much of anything can be detrimental to health. It’s also important to maintain a healthy weight if you are living with diabetes, as research shows that health risks are increased if you are living with obesity or overweight. A key factor in avoiding weight gain is limiting your intake of fatty foods, such as too much unhealthy fats. These can raise your blood glucose, your cholesterol and your blood pressure.

Consider the fats found in cheap highly processed meats and related products like bacon and sausages. Trans fats are sometimes present in highly processed treats like cakes, biscuits, pastries, crackers and takeaways. A surprising experiment on various takeaway food highlighted that a simple pizza can increase circulating blood fats - in our bodies - by up to 50%.

Healthy Christmas food to embrace

While it's true that you need to manage your intake of many festive favourites carefully through the optical lens of diabetes, there's plenty of Christmas food that's healthy and delicious: Perhaps surprisingly, many traditional Christmas treats are nutritious foods, moderate in calories and rich in health-promoting vitamins, minerals and nutrients.

Foods that are high in fibre and protein, and also contain complex carbohydrates - such as fruit, vegetables, whole grains and pulses - are recommended by NICE for managing type 2 diabetes. Research has shown that this diet can keep blood glucose, cholesterol, and blood pressure at healthier levels which in turn reduces the risk of associated conditions.

Christmas day could even be the perfect opportunity to reach your five portions of fruit and vegetables a day without having to try. Why not set yourself a little challenge or goal to eat up to thirty different plant based products (inclusive of herbs and spices) over the course of the festive week. This will encourage greater levels of fibre whilst giving your gut bacteria a celebratory Christmas dinner as well. A healthier gut will also have a powerful and positive impression on diabetes management, and can help reduce blood sugar spikes.

Extracts taken from https://patient.info