Eating to beat diabetes: timing is everything

When you have diabetes, eating is a little like riding a roller coaster. Meals spaced far apart are the scariest coasters, with steep climbs followed by huge drops. Timing is everything.

By watching when you eat, you can go a long way towards stabilizing your blood sugar as well as preventing your body from storing food as fat. Contrary to what you might think, it's the best way to lose weight, and it helps keep blood sugar swings in check. So bring on breakfast! Bring on the snacks!

• By eating more often, you put the "bumps" closer together, so the peaks are lower and the dips are shallower — much like what people with normal blood sugar experience. It's an easy way to feel better, weigh less and take control of your diabetes.
• Most diet plans focus on what you eat. but think first about when you eat. You may not think of timing as a critical part of a successful weight-loss effort — and that's exactly why it's overlooked. The truth is that poor timing of meals is one of the biggest trouble spots for overweight people with diabetes, but it's actually good news because it's such an easy problem to correct.

Consider the typical approach to losing weight.

• If you want to eat fewer calories, the reasoning goes, you should eat less often. Fewer meals means less food — right? Wrong.
• Skipping meals or going long periods without eating backfires in the long run.
• Sure, eating less often means that you temporarily avoid calories you would otherwise have eaten — but those calories tend to show up with a vengeance when you become so hungry you eat everything in sight.

If you're a person who zips out the door without food in the morning or lets yourself go so long without eating that your stomach whines and growls for food, you need to pay particular attention to this advice.

• It's true that for some people with diabetes, blood sugar tends to be high in the morning. That's because as dawn approaches, your body starts releasing energizing hormones that stimulate the liver to produce more glucose, even if the glucose level in the blood is already abnormally high.
• Will eating make it rise even higher? Probably, but because breakfast is so important for weight loss and proper nutrition, you need to make eating a priority and find other ways to deal with the "dawn phenomenon."
• First, check your blood sugar at 7 a.m. If it's above 11, try controlling morning spikes by eating less in the evening or exercising before you go to bed, which siphons glucose from your blood into your muscles for hours afterward. If you're taking insulin, you may also need your doctor to adjust the timing or amount of your last dose of the day, or you may need a morning dose of medication (taken with food) to keep blood sugar under control until proper eating, exercise and stress management get you on a more even keel.
• For people with diabetes, missing meals will make your blood sugar levels fluctuate more erratically.
• To prevent this from happening, eat within two hours of getting up each morning, and go absolutely no more than five hours without eating a meal or light snack.

As you can see, when you eat is just as important as what you eat. Do your best to establish healthy eating habits and a consistent eating schedule -- you're body will thank you for it!