The recommended food pyramid for the persons having type 2 diabetes.
Eating right can be a challenging task at the beginning, but once you get used to healthy food and right diet, you cannot stay out of this regimen. The more you get into the habit of eating healthy, the more you feel the benefits. So, it is very important to decide on your diet for staying fit and healthy forever. For this, you should include plenty of fibers, vitamins and minerals in your daily diet. Always remember to avoid foods which are rich in trans or saturated fat, cholesterol, sugar or sodium.
Here are some suggestions on your daily diet, which you can try on. Once you get the idea, you can also experiment with fresh and nutritious ingredients to prepare delectable dishes by keeping the food value intact.
Breakfast
- Muffins – Bake healthy muffins using bran flakes cereal, fat-free milk, olive oil, unsweetened apple juice or sauce, egg substitute and light brown sugar. You can also substitute the all-purpose flour, if you want to. Prepare the batter by blending all the ingredients along with baking soda and baking powder and place inside the oven by pouring into a muffin tray.
- Flavorful Omelet –
Mix your choice of fresh, green vegetables including fresh spinach,
fresh basil etc with egg substitute. Use fat free milk and fat free
cheese to mix with the omelet batter. Add few drops of oil on a skillet
to fry the omelet. Garnish with chopped fresh tomatoes and more crumbled
fat free cheese to prepare your special breakfast.
- Fruit Salad – Use your favorite fruits to prepare fruit salad. Dice the fruits just before serving. Prepare a salad dressing by boiling pure cranberry juice, orange zest, little amount of sugar and cornstarch. You can spice up this dressing by adding grated gingerroot. Serve with cooled dressing on top of your fresh fruit salad and enjoy.
- Salads – Salad is one of the most nutritious components of a meal. You can mix and match with different ingredients to prepare a different salad for every day. Use as much greens as you can. Select a combination of baby greens. Now you can add other steamed vegetables, mushrooms, cooked chicken or shrimps etc to the salad. Make sure to use fat-free and sodium-free salad dressing for the salad. It is recommended to use homemade version of a salad dressing.
- Soups – There are plenty of choices for healthy soups. Use fresh and seasonal ingredients to make soup, instead of canned or preserved ones. Also, make sure to add healthy vegetable chunks in your soup. There is no need to add chemical seasonings to enhance the taste of the soup. Some of the healthy soup options are chicken soup, corn soup, mushroom soup etc.
- Main Dishes – While cooking the main dish, you can experiment with healthy food ingredients and healthy cooking methods. Add plenty of vegetables to your main dish along with the meat or fish or prawn. Select lean meat to prepare your main cuisine, by discarding all the fats. Cut down on the amount of salt and sugar, while cooking. Use a variety of spices to make the food tasty and flavorful. Fish is a better option for healthy food as it offers helpful fatty acids to our body. You can try some of the following healthy preparations like grilled salmon, roasted pork, barbeque chicken etc.
- Side Dishes – While selecting the item for side dish, give priority to vegetables. You should use seasonal and fresh vegetables, which are not banned for diabetic persons. Stir-fry is a healthy way of cooking mixed vegetables. You can also steam the vegetables and then spice up the dish by adding fresh seasonings. Some of the delicious side dishes are sautéed beans or stir-fried vegetables or vegetable casserole etc.
You should be very careful about snacks you eat, because this is the time, when most of us tend to deviate from the prescribed routine diet. The best thing would be to stick with the simple foods items like fruits or toasts or non-fat yogurt or smoothies or homemade salsa etc.
Desserts
You don’t need to ban desserts from your menu to avoid the risk of Diabetes Mellitus. There are several ways by which you can prepare the dessert to minimize it’s sugar content. For instance, you can use a sugar substitute and egg substitutes to cut down on the risks related to sugar and eggs. You could also use fat free dairy products to control your intake of fat that are usually quite high these mouthwatering desserts like cheesecake, chocolate pudding cake or frozen yogurt etc.