29 Weeks 2 days: Dietician Counselling at KKH

Spend a day at KKH for diet counselling. Comes with one day hospitalisation leave .. yay! (hehe). It was a full day event with 5 meals provided. I was taught how to use the glucose monitor and my sugar levels were taken before and 2 hours after every meal. The dietician also dropped by to teach us on our choice of food and quantity.

My case isn't that bad and does not require insulin injection.

Anyway, some tips i picked up regarding Gestational Diabetes.

1.The dietician gave me a 1800 calories/day formula. Try to go for low calories, but highly nutritious food. We still need to take carbo, cos it gives us energy. Stuff like brown rice, wholemeal bread is good. White rice is ok, but restrict to 1 medium bowl for lunch and dinner. 1 medium bowl is about 12 table spoons, or the spread of your palm size (not piled up like a mountain).

2. Can substitute the white rice for potatoes, yam, tampioca. About 3 egg-sized potatoes = 1 bowl of medium rice.

3. Try to have 3 main meals and 3 snacks everyday. The time difference between meals and snacks is about 2-4 hours apart. Reason for doing so is it will regulates your sugar. Say for instance, if you don't have a snack in between, and you gap 6 hours between meals, you will feel very hungry and eat more than what you should during your main meal. This causes a big sugar spike in your blood. So the purpose of the snack is to kinda control your body's craving for sugar. A snack is like 1 slice of wholemeal bread or 3 whole wheat crackers/0.5 of a small meat pau with a cup of low-fat milk. For the main meal, it's like the rice amt described above, with some meat and a large portion of vegetables.

4. In short, for GD diet, no sweet stuff and no fatty stuff. Apparently, fatty stuff will line our stomach preventing the body from absorbing the sugar, so the sugar will go into our blood stream. We can have unlimited portion of veges (not potato, yam that kind) and unlimited amt of soup w/o the meat (not those creamy kinds). But veges should not be soaking in oil that kind.

5. Fruits wise, Durian is a no-no Just one seed already hit our daily quota for fruit. Avoid dragon fruit too.

6. Milk is still strongly recommended as we need to have calcium for our babies to build healthy bones, but only go for the low-fat or skimmed ones. Can substitute with no-fat yogurt if you are not a milk person.

7. Avoid fruit juice cos to make that one glass, many fruits go into it. And fruits have natural sugar in it. It's better to take fresh fruits as we can take in the fibre at the same time which aids in the sugar absorption

8. Back to carbo, go for those kwey teow, bee hoon. Yellow mee, even mee sua have very high carbohydrates content. Spaghetti is fine. 1 medium bowl of these noodles = 1 medium bowl of rice.

9. And walk for at least 1/2 hour after meals. Exercise does help lower sugar levels. Walking also will improve contipation problem, cos as you move, you'll stimulate your intestines as well.

10. We are free to eat the confinement food after delivery. Dun have to control like these 6 meals regime as typically GD will subside within 6 weeks. However, as GD mums are more prone to developing diabetes later stage in our life, we still cannot go overboard with sugar. As confinement food tend to be sweet/oily, just gently remind our CL or mums to go easy on the oil and sugar

Sounds tough right, but just have to bear with it for 2 months and it's all for the good for ourselves and our baby. =) Jia you!

There is this little handbook given for referral.

I was talking about the cut with the nurse yesterday. She used to be a mid wife and from her experience of having 3 kids, she said apparently, the labor pains are worse than the cut, so most mums do not feel the cut at all. Typically, the gynae will choose to cut at the climax of the contractions. Seeing my terrified face, she quickly added that a local painkiller will be injected to numb the area.