Depending on where you live, low-carb can be expensive. It can be even more expensive if you want grass-fed beef, lobster and asparagus.

You also want to do your blood glucose a favour by eating low-carb. Combining that with a lack of funds isn’t easy but it’s possible!

The trick to low-carb on a budget is to buy on sale and buy seasonal which means abundance and reasonable prices. It’s probably a good strategy for all food shoppers on a budget.

By ‘sale’ I don’t mean horrid looking limp vegetables. You don’t want to buy rubbish vegetables that have been sitting on a shelf for a week and every vitamin has long evaporated into thin air, yet you can’t afford what you think is low-carb.

Vegetables you buy have to look good, smell good and hopefully taste good. It’s not enough for the veggies to be on sale, you have to think about why they’re on sale. Are they in season and abundant, or are they an over-purchase that the vendor can’t move? Are they a loss-leader to get people into the store? Are they completely out of season or imported?

If budget buying means driving an extra 5 minutes, the petrol is minimal compared to the favour you’ll be doing your bank account, your body and your budget.

Similarly for meat – buy what’s on special at the butcher’s but don’t buy rubbish meat that looks like it’s about to go off. With low-carb, you NEED the fat! Don’t think buying low-fat will save you anything. It won’t. You can buy cheaper cuts that need long, slow cooking, or mince that can be made into any number of tasty low-carb dishes.

Buy in bulk and store appropriately, eg freezing or in long-life vegetable bags. If you’re not in the city and you need vegetables, then buy direct from farmers or go to local farmers markets. At the end of the market, that’s when the produce is often cheaper.

Buying larger quantities of cold pressed oils is often more economical. Take your calculator to the store or make use of the one in your mobile phone – I do, often!

Buy cheese in bulk  - as much as you think you can eat before it goes off.

In Australia, if you know someone with an ABN, then get a Campbells card and go bulk shopping. It’s a huge money-saver.

Another trick is to shop like many Europeans do – don’t go to the store with a meal in mind. Go to the store with an open mind. See what’s on offer. If chicken is cheap, that’s what’s for dinner. If lettuce is expensive and cabbage will stretch further, then make a cabbage salad instead (recipe below). If the Roma tomatoes you want are expensive, then see what other tomatoes are on offer.

Eggs can be  a cheap or expensive meal. In the city, often your only option is a choice between organic, free range or battery hen eggs. In Australia, there’s a huge difference in price between these options. In rural areas, find a local farm which sells eggs and buy in bulk! In the city, go for free-range at the very least, if you can afford it.

In Australia Aldi supermarkets sometimes have a two-for-one on chickens. That’s a great way to get 2 or 3 meals (for two) out of a low carb ingredient. Or a large pack of steak, at a reasonable price.

Go shopping at the end of the day if possible – that’s when specials often appear.

If you work, then take your lunch. A salad with some meat and cheese is easily transportable, so is tuna and any number of other low-carb lunches. Put your homemade salad dressing in one of those tiny containers and only open it right before you’re going to eat the salad.

Here’s a salad dressing I keep made up in one of those chefy squeeze bottles at home. It’s not only used as salad dressing but as a marinade or a splash of it across some BBQ meat.

SUSI’S SALAD DRESSING

Fill about 3/4 of the squeeze bottle with good olive oil – the best you can afford (cold pressed if possible)
About 1 teaspoon of Mustard – I use wholegrain, mild (love the crunch when eating the salad)
Sea Salt & Freshly Ground Black Pepper to taste
1 large Clove of  Garlic, finely grated
Red Wine Vinegar – a quarter volume of what you already have  in the jar – try half that first, taste and add as needed

Close the lid and shake. Taste! If it needs more of something, add it. 

The dressing is better after a couple of hours. Can be kept in the pantry up to a week.

Another cheap option is cabbage salad, especially in winter. This salad tastes great with fatty dishes. The vinegar in the salad seems to cut the fat.

HUNGARIAN CABBAGE SALAD

Also great for a crowd

Half a head of plain old-fashioned cabbage (sugarloaf cabbage is ok too), shredded into long strands  (must be shredded very finely or the salad doesn’t work) .

Half a mild Onion (use a whole one if you love onion), very finely chopped or sliced
5 tablespoons of plain vegetable oil (this salad doesn’t work with olive oil or any other flavoured oil)
3 tablespoons of plain white Vinegar – don’t use red or any other type of vinegar
3/4 – 1 teaspoon sweetener (I use Splenda, but you can use whatever you want, including sugar – there’s not enough sugar in there to make a huge difference if you consider 1 tsp sugar is around 11 grams of carb).  
Salt & Pepper to Taste
Note about the vinegar: you may like more vinegar, I do, I put about equal amounts. It won’t taste good right away. 
Combine the dressing first, then pour over the cabbage

IMPORTANT: once the dressing is on the salad,  get your clean hands in and squeeze the cabbage to get the juices out of the cabbage. These will dilute the dressing some so what you think might be too much vinegar, isn’t after the salad has been sitting for a while. 

This salad is much better made a few hours ahead and is great the next day. 

There are definitely ways to make eating low-carb much more affordable. If you’ve not tried low-carb because you think you can’t afford it, give the budget way a try! Your waist-line will love you and so will your blood glucose!

And please don’t start on me about ‘healthy whole grains’! When you have diabetes (of any kind), there’s nothing healthy about whole grains. The body does not need this kind of carbohydrate, despite what you may think. Carbs are also converted in the body from about 58% of protein and 10% of fat, as well as from low-carb vegetables. Plenty for your body’s needs! You don’t need high-carb fruit or high-carb vegetables when you’re trying to get your A1C into a normal range and further down into a range that won’t cause complications. It goes without saying that grains aren’t necessary.

One of my heros is Dr Robert Lustig. If you haven’t seen his video on Sugar: The Bitter Truth, go see it on YouTube. Released this month, is yet another of Dr Lustig’s talks – Interventions to Reduce Sugar Consumption.

It’s another must-see and it speaks for itself…

If you can’t see it below, it’s HERE.

In the scheme of things, my HbA1C is fine. It’s under 7%, I’d like it lower (which I’m working towards), but now and then, I get times where I have highs that just don’t make sense until after I’ve solved the problem – either in my head or by doing something like changing my site. It’s these times that totally annoy me because they are a barrier to getting my HbA1C lower. Yes, it’s only a few hours in 3 months, but it has an effect nevertheless.

Now is just such a time.

I had what could be loosely called dinner around 9pm. It was a bit of mince, maybe less than a cupful, with some spices and less than half a Lebanese pita – probably 1/3rd. One pita (the large, flat kind, not the Israeli pocket kind) is about 39 grams of carb. So I bolused for 25 grams, plus another 5gr for the mince which had some tomato paste in it. I’ve eaten nothing since.

At 11pm I tested and was 12.5 mmol/L (225 mg/dl). Shocking, right? So I did a correction bolus. It’s 1:45am and I’m now still 12.4 (223)!!! The insulin has had no effect. I’m not entirely sure what my basal is doing either. Probably nothing much, but clearly some insulin is getting where it should be or my blood glucose would probably be much higher.

If it was my pump site, which was a new site yesterday, you’d think I’d have been high all day. I wasn’t.

This is just one of the mysteries of insulin, diabetes, food, insulin pumps. I’m fairly poor at the moment, struggling to get new clients in an area where no on knows me, so to waste a site by changing it so soon, has to be done with much thought and consideration, but really, I have no choice. If bolus and a correction has done nothing in 5 hours, it’s a foregone conclusion. Change the darn site.

I have to ask myself – what on earth could have gone wrong with the site 24 hours later? I have no idea! I haven’t yanked it. The line hasn’t got caught on anything. The site change went normally. I give up! I have no idea what the problem could be!

Right now, there’s nothing I want to do less than changing a site. I don’t want to change it because it’s too close to bedtime and I will now need to stay up to  make sure the site is working. I’ll also need to give myself a shot because my blood glucose has been high a bit too long, so I won’t know if the site is working or if it’s the shot. And I’ll have to use one of my last few Inset IIs, so I’ll have to order more earlier than I anticipated, which I can’t do right now.

Doesn’t matter how much you know, you never know what’s going to go right and what’s going to go wrong, or when! Isn’t it one of Murphy’s Laws? Things always go wrong at the worst possible moment.