Alanna Risse

Tears, tears, tears. I just talked to my midwife. I’m slightly anemic (not surprised), but I also had a glucose level of 196. It should not be above 140. Levels of 200 or higher are considered gestational diabetes. I have been so good for the past two months and I’m so surprised that my test results were so bad. I was so convinced my test results were going to be fine, I went ahead and had some french bread this week, and some pasta with my chicken, and I even had a hot dog in a white bun last weekend. All of those things were very bad for me and I feel awful for thinking it was ok. Midwife is saying the bulk of my calories need to come from meats, dairy, beans, and nuts. I need to limit whole grains and completely cut out breads and crackers. So that nice big farro risotto with pea shoots I had last week? Not good. I should have had a small amount of farro with a big piece of chicken breast or other meat. If I can restrict my diet down to no breads and few grains, I can hopefully get control of those glucose levels, get them down the the normal range, below 140. Otherwise I’m looking at gestational diabetes.

Before that first high glucose reading, I could understand why it was high. I had developed a sweet tooth, and I thought, a little treat here and there won’t hurt. Once I got that reading, I really knocked a lot of stuff out of my diet. There were very few occasions I had anything at all with sugar or white flour. At my last midwife appointment, I didn’t have high glucose in my pee test, so I went out and celebrated with a dainty brownie sundae. I can no longer afford such celebrations. Sorry Summer, no Cold Stone ice cream after the next test results, good or bad. This is fucking serious.

I had bought a whole grain bread book. I love baking bread and I thought, I’m going to totally get into all this pre soaking of grains and multi-day leavening and what-not. Today I had to throw out the batch I’d started yesterday. No bread for me, not even hippy bread. I just threw out my sprouted grain tortillas, my whol grain flat bread, and my buckwheat frozen waffles. Guess I’ll have to eat my peanut butter ant-on-a-log style, without the ants even.

I pride myself on my diet. I think I make excellent food choices generally speaking. I do allow myself the odd treat, but I think my diet is 10 times better than 90% of Americans. Reading up on gestational diabetes, turns out I probably have a 60% chance of developing Type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years. I thought that was only for people who ate at McDonalds all the time and drank lots of soda. So even after pregnancy, I need to seriously keep an eye on my diet. I am at major risk for diabetes in my life. This sucks. It sucks so bad. I am a wreck.