Diabetes & Pregnancy: 4 Eating Tips

If are pregnant and have diabetes then you will need to completely stop taking any prescription drugs that may be harmful to the fetus. Also, in order to establish some sort of a baseline to prevent future damage, you must have your kidneys and eyes checked. You must stop all smoking and alcohol drinking.

Being pregnant means that a diabetic woman will need to adhere to a stricter regimen of glucose control during the pregnancy as compared to the treatment she was adhering to before pregnancy. Your blood glucose levels are going to be lower than normal because the fetus is extracting glucose from you and at enormous speeds.  On top of that, your body will look towards fat for fuel much sooner than it normally would which ends up producing ketones sooner. Having too many ketones is also dangerous to the fetus.

Keeping A Close Eye On Your Diet

As a diabetic, you probably have researched plenty of information on what it takes to eat healthy and in accordance with preventative measures against long-term complications.  However, now that you are pregnant you need to know about the following special requirements:

1. The amount of protein that you should be consuming is approximately 2 grams per kilogram as per your ideal body weight. This means that if your ideal body weight score is 50, then you should be eating approximately 100 g of protein every day.

2. The amount of carbohydrates that you should be eating everyday should be approximately 50% of your entire daily kilocalories. In other words, half of everything that you eat each day should be in the form of carbohydrates, preferably complex carbohydrates.

3. The amount of fat that you should be consuming should be 30% of your total daily kilocalories or less. You must remember that fat contains 9 kg calories per gram, which is twice as dense as a carbohydrate or protein.

4. You must be sure to eat at least three solid meals each day. Eating more than three meals is acceptable so long as they are in smaller portions.  Having a snack before bedtime is also beneficial because it helps slow down the starvation process that your body goes into from the long fasting period between dinner and breakfast.