A family member (my husband’s cousin’s wife, to be specific) is pregnant and just found out she has gestational diabetes. She is moderately overweight. She’s started testing her blood sugars regularly. After having lunch here that included her “allowed” amount of potato and rice, her blood sugars seemed fine, but she told me that the other day she had some Thai takeaway and her blood sugar shot up higher than it did for the GTT and she had been in tears about it. She put it down to stress affecting her BS levels. I tried to explain to her that I use low-GI (slow release of sugar) potato and low-GI Basmati Rice (NB I don’t necessarily have much, or any, myself; but serve to family and guests as I figure they are better than other types) but that the Thai rice she had would have been Jasmine rice or something similar which has a higher GI than white sugar. I don’t think she believed me, or thought it mattered.
Australia is still stuck in the “eat 2-4 servings of carbs each meal when you have diabetes” stage of development and obviously I am not going to tell a pregnant woman to go against the advice of doctors and stop eating carbs – I don’t even know if that would be good for the baby or not. But I think she needs to cut down and eat different types of carbs. Any advice on how I should approach the subject? I did the Fast 800 for a while but have not been at all consistent so I don’t have a significant amount of weight loss to show her (yet).