One thing I learned early on in my diabetic journey is that I still can’t tolerate carbs for breakfast. And by “tolerate,” I mean my blood sugar can’t tolerate carbs for breakfast. I, personally, love carbs for breakfast. The perfect, non-diabetic me could eat pancakes, French toast, and granola cereal all day long and tolerate it just fine. (And just typing that makes me want to go make French toast. It’s a good thing I don’t keep bread in the house anymore.)

When I wake up (or, more realistically, when I wake up, hop outta bed, do my morning ablutions, fiddle around on Facebook, and check my email inbox for anything that’s not spam or an e-newsletter I keep forgetting to unsubscribe from), I scramble up some eggs (two or three) and cook ’em in some melted butter. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll make a few strips of bacon in the microwave with this cool little ridged pan made specifically to make a few strips of bacon in the microwave.

And there’s always the coffee, which I now drink with a packet of stevia and some heavy whipping cream. If I’m feeling daring, I’ll add a splash of some sugar-free coffee syrup. These days it’s been a raspberry flavor, but I see a bottle of salted caramel in the cupboard calling my name.

This is pretty much how I’ve started every day at home for nearly nine years. Does it get old? Nope. But then again, I love scrambled eggs and I’ve got the whole meal down to a science. I’m not a big fan of strict routines, but the breakfast thing has turned into a smooth routine every day I’m here. Of course, when I eat this meal varies from day to day, depending on how stupidly late I stayed up the night before … but the meal itself is a no-brainer. And the more I can go on auto-pilot with this whole diabetic planning thing, the better off I am.

Besides, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Every so often I try a few more carbs at breakfast. And every so often, I’m reminded of why I still can’t do that. Curses, foiled again! Those blasted blood sugar numbers!

Apparently many diabetics have seen similar trends. Carbs are not kind to us in the morning, but as the day wears on, our bodies relax a little and can tolerate a few carbs at lunch, and even a few more by dinner. Of course, it’s all relative, and “a few” really does mean a few. Like, very few. Let’s not kid ourselves on that: upping that carb count is always risky. If you’re gobbling down carbs at levels best left to a normal person, you’d better make sure it’s your birthday or some other festive occasion and not just, say, Tuesday.

Pretend you’re back in school. Get yourself a notebook. Take notes. Write down numbers. Take lots of tests. (The school analogies just keep coming, folks.) Heck, in this day and age, start a spreadsheet like I did. (Sure, I had to ask my engineer-husband how to USE a spreadsheet, but I swallowed my pride—which is very low carb—and asked him how.)

I found that, with a lot of testing and tracking, I could see patterns. Not completely scientific patterns, of course. Managing diabetes is more of an art than a science sometimes. But there were trends. There were foods that I had to stay away from. And foods I could tolerate better than I anticipated. And ways to trick my body into not raising that BG number too much. (I’ll get to those tricks at some later date.)

And to this day I continue to learn. The body changes. The body ages. (Ugh, how the body ages!) And how the body is affected by specific foods also morphs. I’m in this for the long haul, so I still need to test in order to keep that information flow going.

And it looks like there are a lot of scrambled eggs in my future … at least for breakfast. And I’m okay with that.

Egging you on …
Linda