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3. Diabetes and Your Body39

take certain diabetes medications that encourage weight gain. Regardless of the cause, weighing more than your target weight can change how attractive you feel and affect your desire to connect on a physical level with your mate. To help overcome these feelings, try the following steps.

Follow a healthy weight loss plan. There are many weight loss plans available today. Some are better and safer than others. One way to learn about how to lose weight is to visit the weight loss section on diabetes.org (https://www.diabetes.org/fitness/weight-loss). You can also meet with a registered dietitian (RD) or registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) to learn about additional weight loss options. To find one, con-tact your local hospital or visit eatright.org, the official website of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Don’t skip meals. When you go longer than 5 hours without a meal or snack, your blood glucose level can drop and cause you to feel tired. If your schedule doesn’t allow you to sit down for a meal, keep diabe-tes-friendly snacks, such as nuts, crackers, and dried fruit, in your purse or car. Several diabetes companies make snack bars and meal replace-ment shakes, and these foods are often portable.

Watch your food portions. The updated Nutrition Facts label on foods you buy can help you choose your food portions wisely. Newly up-dated, it now contains even more information about different nutrients that you need each day. The label contains information for one serving of that item.

Eating out can be challenging because you don’t usually know all of the ingredients that the chef used to prepare the dish. You can use the Plate Method or your hands to estimate food portions. Using your hands to estimate is easy to do, since your hands are always with you (see the Easy Portion Estimations box).

Consume a healthy amount of fiber. Fiber-rich foods can help fill you up so that you are better able to meet your weight goals and may help control your blood glucose level by slowing down digestion. Women with diabetes should try to eat 21–25 grams of fiber each day and men should try to consume 30–38 grams per day. Of this, try to in-clude at least 7–13 grams of soluble fiber. Examples of this type of fiber include oatmeal, oat bran, apples, pears, barley, legumes, and psyllium.