How Meal Planning Can Help Manage Gestational Diabetes

Gestational diabetes can be a challenge, not only because it can be a scary diagnosis, but because you have to change your entire diet. Changing your diet is hard enough without the added stress of pregnancy and all of the fun symptoms and cravings that come with it. Add the emotional and physical hardship of gestational diabetes, and you have a recipe for worry and confusion.

There is something you can do to help ease the confusion and make life a lot easier for yourself. Building a meal plan to help you manage your gestational diabetes diet. An effective meal plan is one of the strongest tools you can use to take the guess work and confusion out of figuring out your new gestational diabetes diet.

Do Some Research

The best way to get started on a truly effective meal plan is to sit down and do a bit of light reading and research. Go online and find recipes that sound appealing to you. Simply looking at all of the delicious recipes and foods that you can eat may help ease your mind and bring the focus off the things that you cannot eat.

Find recipes for all meals for up to a week, and make sure to include snacks as well. Try not to plan for more than a week at a time, at least at the beginning. Taking one day a week to sit down and write out your meal plan is usually the most effective, or if you want to start smaller try three to four days at a time.

Hit the Track

The first step to actually executing your plan is to hit the ground running and load up on groceries. Use the recipes that you found and your written meal plan to come up with a grocery list.

There are, of course, rules to going grocery shopping when you are pregnant. Typically, pregnant women have one of two issues with the grocery store- either they feel nauseated or they want to eat anything. The best way to combat either of these issues is to eat something small but substantial before you go, have some cold water with you to sip, and keep some mints or sugarless hard candies available.

Get To Prepping

After you have all of your supplies, you need to get them ready. The more prep work you can do ahead of time, the easier you are making it for yourself. You are also ensuring success, because you have everything at the ready. There will be no excuses for not being able to eat your healthy planned meals.

Cut up veggies, separate out ingredients, and do whatever other work can be done ahead of time. For lunches away from home, you can use lunch baggies or small containers to separate out different lunch items such as baby carrots, cheese cubes, salads, etc. For dinners, you could even fully prepare and freeze meals ahead of time so you literally just have to heat and eat. The easier you can make it on yourself the better.

All of these steps together equal an easy and fool proof meal plan. Effective meal planning is a great way to manage a gestational diabetes diet because it takes out the guess work and ensures that you always have a healthy meal or snack on hand. Click here to check out my sister site about gestational diabetes diet.