How to decide on a Type 2 breakfast?

Now that we have established what to do about the beverage part of breakfast in terms of sweetening and whitening it, let us turn to the meal itself.

First of all, breakfast is the most difficult meal to manage when it comes to the post-meal blood sugar increase. Meaning it is very easy to get a large increase if one is not careful.

My approach is very simple. I want to keep my after-breakfast glucose rise to less than 30-35 mg/dl. In other words, if my fasting blood glucose upon rising was 85, which it happened to be today, ideally I want my peak to be 115-120 afer I have eaten my breakfast.

Many trials and errors later, I have managed to come up with my ideal breakfast combo, which I have been having pretty much without change for the last nearly 3 years. I will share that with you momentarily.

But first let's clear up some misconceptions.

Foremost, no cereal is appropriate for us Type 2s who are trying to control our diabetes with diet and exercise alone. Grape Nuts is one brand that I tried after I had read somewhere in a diabetes management book that it was okay to eat that. Results were disastrous. No offense, but this cereal tastes like birdseed. And looks like it too. Most importantly, it was affecting my sugar readings. So I abandoned it quickly.

There is a lot of mention about oatmeal, specially, steel cut oatmeal - that its alright for diabetics to eat them. Maybe. But not for this diabetic. Again, it had an unfavorable effect on blood sugar. So no dice with oatmeal for breakfast.

Fruits are a complete no-no. Here again though, there is a lot to talk about ...fruits I mean... which I will do in later posts. For now, let me say that I experimented with eating a small amount of strawberries each morning because they are one of the lowest glycemic index berries around.

Glycemic index is a measure of how quickly and how much, a specific food item will cause a rise in blood sugar.

Strawberries worked for a while but I found that my A1C was lower without the steady consumption of strawberries and higher when I ate it. So I decided to forgo it.

I thought maybe yogurt would do the trick. But no..it didn't.

One of my most favorite breakfast items is bread and I needed to have bread come hell or high water. How did I do it and what breakfast combo finally worked for me are what I will talk about in my next post.