Diabetic Recipes
When I go grocery shopping, I rarely buy junk food. If there's a big game (Yeah, sorry about last night, all you Rockies fans. Sort of sorry anyway. OK, not really sorry at all....), I might buy a bag of chips. Once in a great while, I'll buy brownie mix or I'll make cookies. It's not a regular occurrence around here, however, mainly because we don't have the money in our grocery budget to buy crap like that and also because, well, it's crap. Of little or no nutritional value.
One of the main reasons, though, is because Olivia will just eat it all up. A pan of brownies will be gone in a day. A bag of Doritos? Two sittings. It's ridiculous.
Yesterday my mother came to visit. She brought Olivia a cute little soccer ball-shaped picture frame and a bag of Reese's peanut butter cups. Actually, they were banana and peanut butter cups and they were nasty. Olivia thought they were good, so I let her have a couple. A couple being the operative phrase here.
Not too much later, I had to run out to the market for milk, as you do. I left Olivia home with the Shriek Sisters. When I came home, she'd eaten almost half the bag of peanut butter cups.
I don't know how to handle this. I took them away and will probably just toss them out, but I can't spend the next however many years she's living at home hiding food from her. If there isn't any junk food in the house, she'll just eat toast or English muffins. Before dinner, after dinner, doesn't matter. She doesn't ask, she just gets it and half the time, the only reason I know she's eaten something is because I'll find the plate in the sink.
She's starting to get chubby. The endo even said something to her about it the last time we were there. I honestly don't know why she feels the need to eat like that. It's almost as though she's worried she'll never get it again, so she eats all of it right away.
I know that girls with type 1 have a higher rate of eating disorders than girls who have a functioning pancreas. I don't want to make food into this huge battle, but I don't really know what to do about it. She sees me struggling to lose weight. She knows that she is gaining weight and she gets frustrated when her clothes don't fit her any more. I don't know if she's just not equating the one with the other or what. It's very frustrating.
Hi Julia,
It was a little painful for me to read this post, because I was reminded a lot of myself at 13. When I was 13, I was ravenous, all the time - and not as active as I should have been. I didn't have much access to junk food at home, which made it all the more special to me - when babysitting for a favorite junk-food-loving family I would often shoot myself up with a ridiculous amount of insulin, and pig out. I also attribute a lot of the binge eating I did to sheer boredom. As a result, I was a little bit overweight through my teen years, and very insecure about it.
I should also mention, us type 1s can have some added challenges due to fluctuations in blood glucose - nothing packs on the pounds quite like overtreating low blood sugars and then needing more insulin to correct the high.
I'm sorry that I can't tell you the best way to help with this, but I know that in my experience having someone else point out that you're gaining weight doesn't really help. My mom would often say to me "Now, I'm not one to talk because I need to lose a few pounds too, but..." - and it mostly just made me want to poke my eyes out. Looking back, the best thing she could have done would be to suggest going for a bike ride or a walk with me on a regular basis - just for fun. No mention of needing to lose weight. Because as soon as I started exercising for fun, I didn't have much of a problem keeping the pounds off.
Sara - Oh, believe me, I don't mention to her about gaining weight. I do talk about going for walks and getting outside to just run around with the toddlers. I'm really careful about what I say because I remember having a very fragile sense of self-esteem at that age (and at this age, too, to a certain extent) and I don't want to create problems.
I know I need to make more of an effort to shift my butt, too.