A Sample Indian Vegetarian Meal Plan for Gestational Diabetes?

QUESTION: Can you please provide me with a sample Indian vegetarian meal plan for gestational diabetes?

My result shows 88mg/dl with fasting and after 75 gms of glucose consumption ,blood sugar is 218,215 and 148 after 1hr,1 1/2 hrs and 2hrs respectively.

What are the risks? Please help!


ANSWER: Hi there,

I understand your worries, because uncontrolled gestational diabetes could cause your baby to be overweight, or with severe physical malformations (although in rare cases).

The only possible way to avoid the complications of gestational diabetes is to keep your blood glucose level within the reference ranges, which I believe you know that are 64.8-104.4 mg/dl.

There are three main steps, which you have to follow in purpose to keep your blood glucose level normal:

1. to achieve weight control by diet and exercises,

2. to eat small meals every 3 hours during the day and

3. to forget about eating cake, pancake, chocolate, candies and all the other sweet stuff.

In addition, please find the following guidelines on what you may eat during the day.

Remember: Being vegetarian or vegan during pregnancy is not something good for your baby, because the meat contains several essential vitamins.

However, if you still want to avoid eating meat, talk with your doctor about tablets, which can provide you the needed vitamins.

Your Indian vegetarian sample meal plan for gestational diabetes:

At first, it would be better to start your meal plan with breakfast at 8.30-9 o’clock. This breakfast has to contain one glass of tomato juice, one toast, and

peanut butter.

Then, continue with small lunch at 12-12.30 hours, but avoid the brunches, because they will ruin your blood glucose results. Your lunch can be composed of green salad with crotons and onion.

The next meal has to be at 15-15.30 hours, during which you can eat some kind of fruits, like 2 apples.

After this, you can have a small dinner at 18-19 o’clock. At dinner, try to include carrot salad, or salad made of tomatoes.

With the salad, you can eat one toast with peanut butter, if you are hungry of course.

The last thing is to eat something very small at 21 o’clock, e.g. another apple. My advice for you is to use all the vegetables available in your country and to eat different vegetables every day.

Besides this, remember to eat small portions of the food prepared for the day, not more than 300g at breakfast, lunch and dinner and not more than 150g during the other meals.

Remember not to eat too much fruits, because they contain sugar too.

Something else, which you have to keep in mind, is that diet is not the only thing, which can solve your problem.

I want to propose you to start doing some exercises, because they also can help you bring your blood glucose results back to normal.

You can achieve this effect by running for about 30 minutes every day.

I’m sure that you have already talked with your doctor about eventual drug treatment and don’t hesitate to start it, if the diet and the exercises are not effective.

Hope it helped!

Dr.Alba