Things I’ve been eating:
- Stonyfield farm plain yogurt with fruit, trail mix, and crumpled up puffed brown rice from Lundberg farms brown rice cakes.
- Spaghetti sauce … over beans.
- Cream cheese on brown rice cakes.
- Boursin on tortilla chips– this is amazing. Sadly in a few weeks I won’t be able to eat tortilla chips anymore because they’re not gylcemically balanced enough for third trimester. (Btw, even though boursin is soft, it should be ok because it’s more like cream cheese than like brie in terms of pathogens.)
- Breakfast burritos on corn tortillas (ditto on the soon unable to eat)
- Cheap brown rice sushi from a place in town that is totally like the Subway Sandwiches of Sushi.
- Annie Chun’s Mai fun brown rice noodles. In stir-fry! In soup! But not with spaghetti sauce as that would be wrong.
Horrific discoveries:
- Most (but not all) of the Mexican places in town put flour in their cheese sauces. It will be a long time before I eat out at a Mexican place again.
- Many places in town lightly dust fish fillets with flour before grilling.
- Even though buckwheat flour isn’t wheat, I can only eat four bites or so of a 100% buckwheat flour pancake before my body refuses and sends the signal to my brain: What are you doing?!?! Are you crazy? Then whenever I think about pancakes my body tries to decide whether or not to feel queasy, but when I don’t think about it I feel fine, until someone posts on her blog about chocolate chip pancakes and my body starts going hey, shouldn’t we be feeling queasy by now?
- But I don’t have the same problem with buckwheat waffles.
- Most gluten-free pizzas are DISGUSTING. Also really expensive. (The pesto one we tried wasn’t so bad though… but not really worth $9 for a personal size.) Though if there were a Lou Malnati’s in town I’d totes order his gluten-free pizza (formerly his Atkin’s pizza)– sausage crust is awesome.
- 100% buckwheat soba is also pretty gross.
- I cannot reuse the pasta pot without cleaning it first, even if it just boiled spaghetti.
- There’s a local cheesemaker that makes amazing raw cows and sheep milk cheeses. Or so I’m told by the rest of my family members.
- Ethnic Gourmet only has one brown rice entree left, everything else has been switched to white rice.
- Grocery store just started stocking a tonne of new ben and jerry’s flavors… they ALL either have wheat or they have no fat. *whimper*
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
April 5, 2012 at 3:37 am
You wouldn’t think so, but it’s amazing how you find out that wheat/flour is everywhere, once you need to eliminate it (spoken from experience, I don’t tolerate wheat).
Re: pasta sauces, I suggest using polenta (Italian cornmeal) as the base instead of pasta/rice. Or corn pasta, which is available in health stores as one of the gluten-free pastas (others usually include rice flour, but that is from white rice, so probably not for you).
April 5, 2012 at 4:51 am
Unfortunately I can only eat corn for another few weeks– it’s essentially also just sugar, so would increase my chance of needing a c-section. Real polenta may have enough butter in it to offset the sugar– that’s a good idea. I will have to check it out.
April 5, 2012 at 5:02 am
Couldn’t you add butter until the point where it did? And does the high fat content of boursin not do the same thing for the tortilla chips?
Also, is increasing the risk of C-section the only major risk? Were it I, I am not sure I could maintain motivation on that account alone. (The awesome thing about C-section is that it virtually guarantees that if you start labor with a healthy mom and healthy fetus, you end up with a healthy mom and healthy baby.)
But, of course, everyone is different! And I do love corn food.
April 5, 2012 at 5:15 am
Considering my crippling fear of anesthesiologists, yes, avoiding a c-section is worth a lot. But unchecked gestational diabetes also has bad health outcomes for the baby besides just the higher birth weight. And I’m not sure that a couple more pounds of baby would actually fit inside me… we think being cramped is part of the reason DC was born a little early. (Also: my labor, from first contraction to finish, is predicted to be an hour long this time… though my mom thinks it could go as long as 4 hours given her second child-birth experience. I come from a long line of good birthing hips on both sides.)
I would have to check the numbers and my bodily feelings when it actually comes to third trimester. I was unable to handle a lot of things third trimester that I could eat without problem second last time around because it would directly cause a glycemic reaction. Like no more Kashi bars and some of the higher sugar Ben and Jerry’s flavors (of course, both of those contain wheat…). (Poor DH having to deal with that.)
April 5, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Is spaghetti squash an option? We have used that as a substitute for spaghetti when being GF but I’m not sure of the carb content. I find it pretty decently tasty though annoyingly watery; it’s possible baking it (more) would solve that.
April 5, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Spaghetti squash is an option when it’s in season!
The paleo cookbook I got is really annoying because it relies a lot on such things. I’m like, I’d LOVE to use spaghetti squash… just gotta wait until it shows up in the produce section…
April 5, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Oh, right. Tricky that! Well, squash season is coming.
April 5, 2012 at 7:12 am
What’s different about the 3rd trimester? Is it just something you discovered, or is that typical for folks with GD that certain foods are no longer tolerated then?
April 5, 2012 at 8:44 am
Most people don’t get GD until third trimester. The problems actually gradually and steadily increase, but they usually reach some sort of threshold nearing the end- that’s why the testing for GD generally happens near the end.
First trimester eating non-glycemically balanced foods increases the chance of miscarriage for women with PCOS. Third trimester it makes the baby gain too much weight (and other problems) for women with insulin resistance or GD. Since I’m already insulin resistant I need to follow the GD diet third trimester.
April 5, 2012 at 9:49 am
If you buy buckwheat from a russian/polish grocery store (but not from health food/organic american stores) you can cook it like rice and eat it that way
April 5, 2012 at 10:34 am
Yeah, my body just isn’t interested in anything it remembers from eating Kashi (a 7 grain groats thing that includes both buckwheat and wheat groats). I can eat things like barley (despite the gluten, which makes me suspect this is an allergy and not celiac) but I don’t *want* to. I’m doing pretty well with brown rice and quinoa in the “like rice” category.
Also: we live in a really small town! We have a Mexican grocer and a very small Asian food store and that’s about it besides regular groceries.
April 5, 2012 at 10:59 am
To combine yesterday’s topic, what about horse meat? (DH grew up with it.)
April 5, 2012 at 11:05 am
Not something I have seen for sale around here. They do, however, sell parts of the pig that I had not seen outside of ethnic grocery stores in cities.
April 6, 2012 at 2:37 pm
Newly (kind of) legal again, but probably not a great idea in the US since horses are not treated as part of the food chain (they are routinely given a bunch of medications that are prohibited from use in food animals at any time). Horse meat is tasty though.
April 5, 2012 at 11:47 am
Wow, third trimester already..I had GD too and I felt like I was on the Atkins diet with just enough carbs for health/weight gain. I do not miss those days! Are you measuring glucose too?
April 5, 2012 at 12:34 pm
I’m not quite third trimester yet, and I don’t know if I’ll get GD this time around, but I do have the underlying sensitivity (from prior to pregnancy), and it definitely got worse as the third trimester progressed last time. So I kept to the GD diet and plan to do that again this time too. It’s a pretty healthy diet, all things considered but more difficult when you can’t eat whole wheat!
April 5, 2012 at 11:47 am
wow, third trimester already! Are you also measuring your glucose? I had GD and hated that part but it was necessary to stay off insulin.
April 5, 2012 at 11:48 am
oops..double comment..
April 5, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Why put flour in cheese sauce? To thicken it?
April 5, 2012 at 3:39 pm
I assume they’re making a cheese roux.
April 5, 2012 at 9:59 pm
Yes, most cheese sauce recipes will call for making a roux from flour and butter first. Then you slowly add milk, and then finally you add the cheese. I think it helps produce a creamy texture in the final sauce.
I have found that the shortcut with cheddar cheese soup (I add some yummier cheese to it) makes a decent substitute, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the soup had flour, too.
On the original topic- I’m sorry you have so many diet restrictions! I have no suggestions, just sympathy.
April 6, 2012 at 12:45 pm
This place ships Finnish 100% rye bread, and the shitte is pretty tasty. They sell in person at our greenmarket:
http://www.nordicbreads.com/
April 6, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Wow, you’re making me never want to get pregnant :P Did you have similar food problems with your first pregnancy? Will you be able to eat “normal” foods again after you give birth?
You’re reminding me of when I had mono. I had to cut all lactose and gluten out, as well as anything solid. By the end of it, I was just eating chicken broth (no noodles) and jello cups. Oh and drinking apple juice and water as my only liquids. That was an incredibly cheap period on the groceries. I started keeping a list of all the foods I HAD TO EAT AS SOON AS I WAS BETTER. And then attempted to eat them all in one day lol.
Have you tried making your own gluten-free pizzas?
April 6, 2012 at 4:11 pm
No, with the first pregnancy all my allergies went away (like I could eat green peppers for the first time since I was 12). It was glorious.
We don’t know if I’ll be back to being able to eat wheat again after. It’s possible.
I don’t like the Bob’s Red Mill gluten free flour. Apparently buckwheat flour is also out. So I haven’t found a good substitute. I suppose I could try duplicating the Lou Malnati’s sausage crust…
April 6, 2012 at 6:53 pm
I don’t know the brand name, but I got good gluten free frozen pizza crusts at Whole Foods. They were kind of cracker like, like the crusts of the regular frozen Red Baron pizzas. Since we always have spaghetti sauce and shredded cheese in our house, it was just as fast as a regular frozen pizza.
April 6, 2012 at 6:58 pm
Ah, I see you’re also doing gluten-free. Good luck!
My doctor said a couple of restaurants in town now have gluten-free pizza so we’re going to try that. The nearest Whole Foods is sadly a couple of hours away. It’s been very convenient of the universe to have their health food trends map my food needs– Atkins was really getting underway when I was diagnosed with IR and trying to reproduce and now that wheat makes me throw up the medical establishment is recognizing that gluten intolerance exists.
April 7, 2012 at 11:28 am
I just bought a bunch of jerusalem artichokes at the farmers’ market, which I had forgetten all about. Don’t know where you live or if anyone grows them there – but apparently they are a great diabetic substitute for potatoes?
April 7, 2012 at 11:40 am
I’ll have to look out for them. I don’t think I’ve seen any in town. I was really enjoying yucca chips from the last time we went to the city (I think it was yucca.. whatever it was I looked up its glycemic index and it was better than sweet potato). The victory garden cookbook has a nice section on Jerusalem artichokes but I don’t think I’ve ever actually had one.
May 23, 2012 at 3:38 am
I haven’t been able to eat wheat AND corn for two years (irritates and possibly caused my arthritis). Eliminating corn is so difficult, it makes eliminating wheat easy!
Many of the gluten-free flours have high glycemic numbers, so I turn to foods that don’t have bread or crust substitutes made of flour (rice flour, bean flour, etc). I loved spaghetti, but found that it was the sauce that I like. When I feel like spaghetti, I put spaghetti sauce on veggies. Brussel sprouts w/spaghetti sauce is now one of my favorites — I didn’t even know I liked brussel sprouts (fresh is far superior to frozen).
For sandwiches, I use unconventional ingredients as bread substitutes: lettuce-wrapped tacos are delicious (and kind of messy). A ham “sandwich” is ham & mustard on a Finn Crisp cracker. For hamburgers, I just eat ground beef patties with the condiments. Can be paired with potato chips not cooked in corn oil.
There are lots of good non-wheat recipes in cookbooks that specialize in eating raw.
P.S. to Leigh, pregnancy IS worth changing your diet. Such a small price to pay for so much joy.
May 23, 2012 at 4:53 am
Thanks!
April 17, 2020 at 1:21 am
[…] So that leads to flexibility. Go ahead and menu plan your week (I guess 2-3 weeks in advance?), but also have back-up meals that you can make if you get, say the leeks but not the eggs you wanted for your leek and egg dish (that you’re hoping to make from Ottonlenghi’s Simple this week, just as a non-random example). Keep in your back pocket flexible recipes like stir-fry, things in sauce over a starch (if you can find pasta or rice) or over a piece of meat, sandwiches, and so on. If you’ve been able to get any frozen veggies or chicken, these are something you can add to fresh to use up extra veggies. Standard flexible things can be rough because there’s so much demand for things like rice and bread, but you can often substitute carbs (as @scalzi demonstrates, anything can go in a tortilla, like sauteed beet greens with some cheese) or even just not have the carb. […]