A guilt free way to kick the sweet cravings
- 1 pear (chopped)
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp coconut oil
- ½ tsp peanut butter
- 1½ tbsp rolled oats
- 1 tsp shredded coconut
- 1 tsp almond meal
- 6-8 raw hazelnuts (chopped)
- 2 tbsp greek yogurt
Chuck on oven at 200 deg cel. In your oven safe bowl mix up your pear and cinnamon. In a mug, zap the peanut butter and coconut oil in the microwave for 30 seconds. Stir in everything else except yogurt. Sprinkle this crumble over your pear and bake until pear is soft and crumble is golden brown. Serve topped with yogurt.
Total Carbohydrate 30.1g
Dietary Fiber 6.3g
Total Sugars 15.7g
Protein 6.7g
Learning to eat a diabetic friendly diet is making me get extra creative to satisfy my sweet cravings… After much researching the do’s and don’ts this afternoon I’ve come up with my new go to, healthy pear crumble!
The Ramblings:
Brace yourself for a long, not funny, but very honest, real one…
Today is Hyperemesis Gravidarum Awareness day. If you’ve never heard of it, please read up on it here. Basically HG is a very very severe form of morning sickness with very serious side effects and it typically doesn’t go away during the entire pregnancy. Some will remember, it’s what Kate Middleton had when she was pregnant?
I’m here to tell you, HG sucks. Actually the words to properly describe how sucky it are would give my site an MA15+ rating…. So you know how end of last year/ early this year the site was pretty quiet for a while? Here’s why…
For the first 5 months of this pregnancy I was vomiting well in excess of 15 times a day. Whenever I wasn’t vomiting I was constantly nauseous. Water wouldn’t even stay down… I lost 12kgs and ended up in hospital at one point because I passed out from dehydration and smacked my head on the toilet door. For months, our toilet was home to our foam roller as Matt would use it as a pillow to lay down in there with me when he got home from work and my head was still glued inside the loo. During this I was on a hell of a concoction of drugs, including some that are used to help chemo patients with nausea. I absolutely dread to think what it would have been like if I hadn’t been taking those.
Now, thankfully, I’ve discovered the concoction of drugs for me that makes it manageable. I’m still sick between 1-4 times a day but can keep down fluids enough to not get as dehydration.
Now I always knew that people are often emboldened to share unsolicited advice and opinions to pregnant women and parents, however I had no idea. No idea that people could be so so hurtful under the guises of being ‘helpful’… And surprisingly enough, people I barely know.
As you can imagine from the picture painted above, in those first 5 months I looked like a complete wreck and zombie. IGA was my arch nemesis. All the smells and no loo’s to run to if needed. A lot of days if I was doing groceries it was literally such an effort to put one foot in front of the other and get out the door that I really wasn’t up for a great deal of ‘socialising’. Many well intentioned people would stop and say hi and congratulations and I really appreciated that. However many went further and made comments about how much weight I’d lost and didn’t I know that was bad for the baby? Or to tell me not to worry it should be over soon and when I’d try and explain I was stuck in this for the long haul (that’s how HG works!) would tell me that it was all in my head and no wonder I was still sick with an attitude like that. Others said ‘it’s just morning sickness, everyone gets it, stop being so dramatic about it.’
Now Miss Hazel was quite a surprise… Now a very happy one, but in the beginning a very surprising surprise… Before I had really had time to come to grips with it all I became so all-encompassingly sick. I wasn’t sure that having kids would even be possible so while yes, in some ways, I was counting my lucky stars, it is very hard to get excited about being pregnant when said pregnancy is goshing darn hard. People would often ask if we were excited and my stock standard response would be ‘I’m trying to be but will be a lot more enthusiastic when I can drink water again’. Some people were really supportive and lovely, but many others told me I was basically a terrible human and didn’t appreciate the blessing of a baby… I’m not even going to address that one… FFS….
Once I got a bit more under control and we found out she was a little girl it all became very real and very exciting. Feeling her kicking went from making me need to run to a loo to spew (not so magical..), to a beautiful ‘connectedness’. I was so relieved to finally being ‘enjoying’ my pregnancy like everyone had been telling me I should that getting a diagnosis of Gestational Diabetes this week has completely crushed me.
So many people have tried to be reassuring telling me it’s perfectly ‘common’ and ‘normal’. Yes it is. However, when the only foods I can keep down are really high carb and often have lots of natural sugars (and the odd brownie..), managing it is not simple. Your average person with GD can simple adjust their lifestyle and often this is enough to control it. I have only just found the ‘lifestyle’ that lets me not spew 24/7 so no, this is not normal or common. Like everything else, we’ll get through it, but for today it really sucks and is making my heart hurt so much. I haven’t stacked on pregnancy weight, I was a relatively ‘healthy’ weight, living an active lifestyle before I fell pregnant, I’m not an older mum, and I have been soooo restrained with cravings, finding healthy alternatives wherever possible. This has most likely been brought on by PCOS… It’s very hard not to have a little throw down, bang my fists and sob that none of this is fair. Instead though I’ll just keep cradling my little tum, playing whack-a-mole with Hazel and chant ‘this too shall pass’ to myself.