Auntie Bobbi's Food Revolution - part 1

I am in charge of feeding eight souls for the next how many months?  Let's not think of that - let's think of the next week or six.

  I had been changing our meals to include more vegetables and had been trying to have the kids choose healthier snacks. It hadn't been going as well as I had hoped.

Last week, I took my nephew to his diabetes appointments. Both kids see a diabetes educator, a nutritionist, and a pediatrition who specializes in diabetes. Both E and M have pumps. The diabetes center can download all of the information from each pump and see all of the glucose readings from the past two weeks.  E's sugars were everywhere.  There were so many highs and lows.  It was depressing. I really thought I had been doing a good job regulating everything.  Turns out that E is still a kid and needs to be reminded.

"Time for you to step up to the plate"  Arlene, the educator told him.  "You know you need to check your sugars more than this.  What were you thinking?  What are you eating?"

 I took this as the perfect opportunity to bring up nutrition.

"We've always been told that they can eat anything any other kid eats, but I wonder of all the other kids are eating too much junk food.  What do I do? "

"One junk food snack a day is it."  She insisted.

"WHHHHHHHAAATTTT?"  E shouted.

"You heard me.  One.  The rest need to be bananas, yogurt, sandwiches, cheese sticks - E - healthy food.  All kids are eating too much junk - when we say you can eat like other kids - we mean other healthy kids."

"But I'm not even fat!!!!!" E was very angry.

I agreed with that - "No - you're not fat - but your food needs to better - I want the best for you."

We left the center with three goals.

1.  We all would only eat one junk food snack a day.
2. E. would check his blood before eating and as soon as he felt a low coming on -- this means a little less than ten times a day.
3. We would check E and M at 1am.  If they were above 120 and lower than 250, we could sleep the rest of the night worry free.  Otherwise, we'd correct and check again accordingly.

This day began Auntie Bobbi's Food Revolution.