A healthier you: Adjusting your regimen

Congratulations!  You've taken the first steps towards taking control of your diet and your health.  Keep in mind that as your health improves, you and your health care team may need to make adjustments to your regimen.

Losing weight and/or following a diet with a lower glycemic load may allow you to reduce or even eliminate some of your medications.  (CAUTION!! Do not discontinue any medications except as advised by your doctor.)

Stay in touch with your health care team and share your progress with them so they can adjust your medication regimen as needed. If you've lost more than ten pounds and/or reached your goal weight, remember to re-evaluate your Daily Needs and update your Nutrition Data preference settings.

Next Steps:
Calculate your Daily Needs
Update your Preference Settings

Go to the Type 2 Diabetes Resource Center

Analyze your recipes and make them healthier

Nutrition Data can help you see how your favorite recipes stack up nutritionally and how they fit into your overall diet plan.  To analyze your recipes, simply enter the ingredients and quantities and click the orange "save and analyze" button.

You can also use our recipe analysis tool to make your favorite recipes healthier!  Once you've saved a recipe to My Recipes, click on the orange "edit" icon to modify the recipe and see how it affects the nutritional quality of the recipe.

 

Substitute low-fat sour cream for full-fat sour cream to reduce calories, for example. Cut the amount of sugar to reduce carbs or lower the glycemic load. Increase the amount of vegetables to add more fiber and nutrients. And so on!

Next Step: Go to My Recipes

Related Content
Help page for My Recipes
Make your recipe analysis more accurate

Go to the Type 2 Diabetes Resource Center

Making better choices

You can use the Better Choices tool on Nutrition Data to give your diet a nutritional upgrade. (And if you're trying to lose weight, Better choices can help with that too!).

For every food you eat, there are likely to be similar foods that are more nutritious. By "more nutritious," we mean that they contain more essential nutrients and/or less saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium per calorie. We consider these to be Better Choices for Optimum Health.  There are also similar foods that are both more nutritious and will fill you up for fewer calories.  We consider these foods Better Choices for Weight Loss. 

When you track your diet using the My Tracking tool, the analysis report includes a list of all the foods you've eaten that day.  Next to each food you'll find Better Choices links.

For example, yesterday, you might have had some frozen corn with dinner.  If you click on Better Choices for Optimum Health (and then choose the "vegetable" category), you'll find that there are 597 vegetable choices that are more nutritious than corn. Choosing any one of these as a substitute for corn will be a step in the right direction!  For example, you could choose asparagus, kale, or zucchini instead of corn.

If you're trying to lose weight, click the Better Choices for Weight Loss instead for a list of foods that are both more nutritious and more filling per calorie.

Each Better Choice you make will improve the nutritional quality of your diet and can also make it easier to lose weight.

Next Step: Learn more about Better Choices

Go to the Type 2 Diabetes Resource Center

Track and analyze what you eat

One of the best ways to get a handle on your diet is to analyze the total of all nutrients that you consume over the course of an entire day. This is very easy to do with My Tracking.

More powerful than a simple "calorie counter," My Tracking gives you a detailed analysis of your diet, including information about over 140 nutrients and dietary factors. My Tracking can help you monitor your calories, fats, carbohydrates, glycemic load, inflammation factor, protein quality, fullness factor, nutritional balance, and individual vitamins and minerals.

If you've set your own customized Individual Daily Values in My Preferences, My Tracking will compare your intake against your customized target values and tell you how your diet measures up. (If you haven't customized your nutrient targets, My Tracking will compare your intake against the standard Daily Values.)

   

If you find that you're falling short on a particular nutrient, just click on that nutrient for a list of foods that are good sources.

Share or save your report

At the top of the report, click on the "e-mail a friend" link to send a copy of the report to someone else, such as your dietitian or personal trainer. You can also download the report as a CSV file.

Next Step: Go to My Tracking

Related Content:
How can NutritionData be personalized for your goals?
My Tracking Help Page

Go to the Type 2 Diabetes Resource Center