Below 7: Chicken salad

After eating this meal for seven days straight, I’ve nailed it. To be honest, it wasn’t that difficult to get it right. Meat and vegetables have two things going for them as a meal – they’re healthy and easy to dose insulin for. Salad is good food for diabetics, which is why I eat a lot of it.

It also requires minimal effort on the cooking front. You take a big bowl of iceberg lettuce and arugula, add radishes, spring onion, cucumber, red pepper, and a few cherry tomatoes to a total carb count of 30g. Mix with 200g of chicken breast, which has around 50g of protein. Dress with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Be generous. The fat and protein are key to making a salad filling. It also helps that you have to do a lot of chewing, which makes you eat slower.

There’s a lot of protein in this meal, so I split the bolus in three – first for the carbs and then two doses for the protein. I take the 3u of ActRapid when I finally finish chewing my salad and an extra unit after an hour. It leaves me with almost flatline blood glucose for this meal, which is why I keep eating it. My highest reading after dinner in the past seven days was 7 mmol/l (126 mg/dl), which means chicken salad is a win. Right now, I have a lot of school assignments, so stable blood glucose trumps an interesting diet with zucchini bread and century eggs. Once again, I find myself eating to live rather than living to eat.