eating out

At the hospital, when I was diagnosed almost three months ago, the dietitian came to teach me about carb counting. This seems to be the cardinal skill necessary for any insulin dependent person. She gave me some guidelines and print outs and told me to buy the essential carb counting guide, Calorie King.

So, I went home, pulled out my scale food scale for the first time, and started measuring every single thing I ate. In the last few weeks, I'm finding that it is insanely difficult to count carbs..... you have to measure every single thing that you eat, know exactly what is in your food, and know the carb count for every ingredient in your plate; it’s more manageable when you are eating at home (although still exhausting), but when you eat out, it is nearly impossible. After the first couple of weeks, I just started guessing.....but honestly most of the time I have no idea.

Now, the thing that has been bothering me is that except for large chain restaurants, most restaurants don’t seem the least bit interested in providing any kind of nutritional guide for their food. This bothers me for several reasons: 1) most restaurants don’t change their menus that often, so it would be easy to figure out nutritional info for most of their dishes; 2) it’s really easy to figure out nutritional info, and there are many free websites, like http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp available for this purpose. All you need to do is enter the ingredients and portion sizes. It would not take very long. Even my mom figured this out and has already catalogued all of her signature dishes. 3) Finally, it would be tremendously helpful not only to people like me, who need to know exactly how many grams of carbs they eat in order to dose the right amount of insulin, but to anyone trying to make informed decisions about what to eat.

I really wish small, independent restaurants would start doing this…. even if it’s only for a few of their dishes.