STEVE: For me it was a silent, you know, what you would call a silent killer. I was feeling real good-real, real good. I said, "eh, if your feeling good, now's the time to go to your doctor for a check-up". And he said to me "by the way, you have a problem. And it's not a slight problem." He said, "You're diabetic." And that's sort of like the beginning of my journey, the beginning of my odyssey. But I knew that somebody out there had to help me deal with the diet. Before I went to the nutritionist, I wrote down a list of questions that I wanted answered, because I wanted to make sure that in the process I didn't leave anything out.

STEVE: In general, I'm a little bit confused, what general diet plan should I follow?

STEVE: And I must say, she was pretty good about answering them, and then helping me along.

NUTRITIONIST: Well, so I have some excellent information on reading food labels.

STEVE: Well, the first thing that she told me was that I had to start reading food labels, so that I'd be able to count carbs. There are foods that I'd been eating for years-I'd had absolutely no concept of whether they had many carbohydrates or few carbohydrates. But now, that's a very important part of my life.

STEVE: A food journal is very important in that, for me to feel well, I needed to consume approximately a hundred and forty grams of carbohydrates a day. The only way you could make sure that you were doing the right thing was to write down the exact amount of carbohydrates you had at every meal.

STEVE: So for breakfast, I had an English muffin, which is about twenty five grams of carbohydrates-it says it right there in the package-with some eggbeaters. For snacks, I had some triscuits, just to keep me going-about fifteen grams of carbohydrates. For lunch, I had a salad with six ounces of chicken and two slices of bread.

STEVE: So one slice of bread, or one serving, would be seventeen grams of carbohydrates, and two slices of bread would be two times seventeen or thirty-four grams of carbohydrates. And that's what I'm going to write down.

STEVE: The way that you were able to write down the correct amounts was to look on the boxes.

STEVE: On this day, I had twenty-five carbohydrates--English muffin for breakfast. I had thirty-five at lunch with roast pork with vegetables and rice. And I had a snack of thirty-four carbohydrates with pretzels. So in looking for something that would, in this magazine, something light for dinner-I find this recipe, fish baked and foiled, that was really light in carbohydrates. I also followed a recipe here for festive sweet potatoes, which gave me another twenty-three grams of carbohydrates. I still had some room left at the end, so I found this great recipe for "Fresh Fruit Fancy" which had sixteen grams of carbohydrates, and I met my daily requirement.

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