Well, last month the doc told me he was concerned about my blood sugar, and that we needed to bring it down. His advice was to go back on a low-carbohydrate diet until the next scheduled exam. Having no desire to become another diabetes statistic in our family (we have several!), I decided to make the effort.
The trouble with low-carb diets, is that they're boring. I know this because I've done them before. The last time, I lost 40 lb in 30 days, so I know it can be done; however, even on a low-carb diet, I had to be near starvation in order to continue losing weight, so when I'd finally had enough and abandoned the diet, the weight came back in a big way.
This time, however, there is a different problem. You see, blood glucose isn't just about how much sugar you eat; it's about how much of everything your body can turn to sugar you eat. Carbohydrates are just long chains of sugar molecules, and most of which your body can easily break down into simple sugars that can be absorbed directly into your blood. The relationships between fats or proteins, and blood glucose, are too complicated for this discussion: suffice it to say, you can't reliably control blood glucose by increasing your fat and/or protein consumption.
I'm not going to focus on weight loss, just on reducing my blood glucose, so dieting doesn't have to be as much of a trial. Today's recipé is the sort of thing I'm going to be doing to reduce my carb intake. Essentially, I'm simply using recipés that I've succeeded with in the past, but now I'm making simple substitutions of lower-carbohydrate components for some of the higher-carbohydrate ones. In this recipé, I'm using rutabaga (or if you prefer, Northern Turnip) in place of potato.
As a vegetable side, a cup of rutabaga contains 12 grams of carbs, while an equivalent amount of potato contains about 30 grams. Both vegetables would provide about 3 grams of fiber, which (for those who care about such things) means that the potatoes have about 3 times the "net" carbs as rutabaga.
When I told my Honey of my intention, she looked at me somewhat askance, but gamely cooperated in the experiment, assisting with preparation of the fresh vegetables. With the exception of the one substitution - 1 pound of diced rutabaga for each can of diced potato - the recipé is identical to my previous one, posted here.
Like the original recipe, this one makes about 6 quarts of hearty soup. To be perfectly honest, I was extremely pleased with the outcome of this experiment, and did not miss the potatoes at all.
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