Travelling, Low-Carb, and Normal Blood Glucose - Part 1
Sep 07, 2023This post is to share how our family follows a low-carb way of eating for Type 1 diabetes when we travel.
As background: Our family currently lives in Canada. But because my husband is Australian, our family has lived in both countries. We decided to do a summer trip to Australia (which would be their winter), as we haven’t been back in 7 years, and our oldest, our daughter, just started university in Australia this past February, so my husband and I and our two boys really miss her and wanted to come to visit friends who we miss, too.
Plus, our son, Lachlan, is interested in checking out some universities while we are over here, as he is going into Grade 12 this year and is thinking about going to Australia after high school.
In this post and the coming posts, I’ll be talking about our time in Australia and how we think about nutrition and food when managing Type 1 diabetes. Lachlan was diagnosed with T1D in 2015, and our family has been following Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction - a low-carb way of eating for Type 1 diabetes for almost 8 years. So it now feels pretty easy for us to eat on the fly when we’re away from home. In this video, I’ll share with you what we did for food as soon as we landed in Australia. In the next two videos, I will share what we were doing “food-wise” to get ready for Lachlan to come to university and be able to eat low-carb while he’s studying and living on his own, and how we explored grocery store shopping for low-carb in Australia, so you can see how I look at different food products in a new country.
The first time we travelled after our son Lachlan was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, it felt like an almost insurmountable challenge! My husband Matt and I planned for a couple of weeks and cooked a boatload and felt stressed about food at the time. Nowadays, because we’ve done this for a while, it feels normal to us. Maybe this can give you some ideas for your next trip away from home.
I’ll start by sharing what we did for food as soon as we landed in Australia.
After a 24-hour jaunt from Canada to Australia, you can feel a little out of it and fatigued, so we knew we needed to make finding food easy!
Our flight landed in the morning in Australia. We had eaten omelettes on the plane, so we had eaten breakfast, and once we landed, we immediately headed to campus to visit our daughter. After hanging out in her dorm room and visiting for a while, we decided to eat lunch on campus, and then go to the grocery store to shop for items to cook for dinner and breakfast the next morning.
The 5 of us in our family headed out to explore the campus and what campus food outlets were available at my daughter’s uni. There were quite a few places to eat, AND… a LOT of sandwiches, rice and ramen! None of those food options would keep blood glucose stable, and we were seeking foods that have little effect on blood glucose. Fortunately, we found a great Mexican option that’s similar to a Chipotle. It was called the Guzman Y Gomez Mexican Kitchen.
We ordered salad bowls with a protein and some guacamole and dosed insulin for Lachlan based on a Chipotle meal. Because he’s a hungry 17yo, he ordered a second bowl!
So that was lunch!
Later that afternoon, we checked into our Airbnb apartment. Just before heading to the local grocery store to buy some food for dinner and the next morning’s breakfast, we check to see what the Airbnb has in the kitchen.
When I book an Airbnb, I look closely at the Airbnb photos and reviews of a place, to see if I can determine whether the kitchen is well stocked with dinnerware and cookware. Some Airbnbs have a fully stocked kitchen and others have minimal kitchen items, which makes it harder to serve meals. I’ve learned that when the Airbnb is owned by an individual or a family, the kitchen needs to have what it needs, but if it’s run by a property management company, it will have only a few kitchen basics.
When we first arrived at our Airbnb in Australia, Matt and I checked to see what we had to cook with. It did have only the basics (4 plates, 4 forks, 4 knives, etc), but it had two big frying pans, a couple of pots, and a small stove top and oven with a baking tray, so… we could fry, bake and boil.
Now that we knew what our kitchen had, we headed to the grocery store. We’ve learned that when we travel long distances, we can feel tired when we first arrive, so we try to avoid doing a big grocery shop right away. That first day, we wanted only to buy enough food for dinner and for the next morning’s breakfast, plus we still had some low-carb snacks that we had brought over from Canada.
We’ve also learned to pack 2 good-size cloth grocery bags or foldable cooler bags in our suitcase, so we can carry our groceries when we get to our destination.
The list of groceries we needed for 1 dinner and 1 breakfast was small. Our goal is to keep things simple.
We went to a local Cole’s grocery shop, and we bought the following:
- Chicken breasts
- A bagged mixed salad plus strawberries, feta cheese, and a bottle of olive oil and of low-carb balsamic vinegar
- A head of cauliflower
- Butter
- Eggs
- Thin steaks for fast frying
For dinner that night, we ate:
- Chicken breasts fried in butter on the pan
- Mixed salad topped with some sliced strawberries and feta, with a basic salad dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar
- Roasted cauliflower baked in the oven after being drizzled with the olive oil
For all you nutrition afficionados, normally, I would use avocado oil on the cauliflower when baking, but when you’re in a pinch for a week, I bought an olive oil and made it do double duty to roast and to make the salad dressing.
The Airbnb had salt and pepper, so we used that, too.
Matt panfried the chicken breasts on the stove top. I made the salad in 5 minutes and roasted the cauliflower. I included a recipe from Wholesome Yum for roasted cauliflower in the post, if you want to try this at home! It’s delicious, nutritious, and easy to make.
After dinner, the four of us could barely stay awake until 7pm before jet lag caused us to crash out early. Our youngest, Kieren, was out cold before 6pm!
The next morning, we woke up and made a breakfast that’s pretty typical of what we might have at home. For breakfast, we ate:
- Fried eggs in butter
- Fried steak
We bought thin steaks for fast frying, because we want breakfast cooking to be short and sweet and on the table in minutes.
Once we’d had a decent night’s sleep, we were ready to hit the grocery store the next day to set ourselves up for groceries for the next week. That takes us a long time and even our boys get in on the action, because we all love to explore what foods are available in a new grocery store, so it’s like a family excursion to decide on what to buy and what new things to try.
But we didn’t want to do that on Day 1. We wanted our first day to be about seeing our daughter! The boys wanted to hang out with their sister and we want food and diabetes to run in the background. Food-wise, our aim was to get food in an easy and manageable way without it feeling stressful or being a hassle! So that’s what we did!
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