Count carbs

[lindiloo62]

This may sound the silliest question but how do I count carbs ???

 

[bulkbiker]

In order to see how many you are eating?
Look at your food on a supermarket website check the weight of what you are eating then check that against the carb content.
I then record it all on an excel spreadsheet.
It sounds like a faff but to be honest most peoples diets are fairly regular (or at least mine is) so once you have a couple of months records you should have most of your meals recorded so you can just copy/paste or adjust for different amounts.
Oops edited to add if you are having pre prepared food then it should be on the back of the pack. Multiply carbs by pack weight and voila!

 

[RosieLKH]

I use the My Fitness Pal website to count carbs, where you input all the foods you eat during the day and it tells you the carb values and adds them up for you. You have to be careful with it though, as people put their own food values in and they are not always accurate as most people use it for calories.
You can also look most food up online and find out the nutritional values, then you work out how much you are eating and add up the carbs in that amount.
For a very rough guide to how many carbs in things there's a book called Carbs & Cals which gives you a visual guide to prtion size of foods and the amount of carbs in the food. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Carbs-Cals-Carbohydrate-Counting-Diabetes/dp/B00BW8M7UA

 

[Guzzler]

First decide how many carbs you are going to aim for.

 

[Grateful]

I do the same as @bulkbiker. It is time-consuming and also somewhat confusing initially, but gets much easier over time.

To start with the confusing thing for me was that the grams of carbs (on the food labels) are usually listed as "per portion" so you need to check the label to find out what a "portion" is. This may bear little resemblance to what you, personally, would consider to be a one-person portion. Or, it might just list carbs "per 100 grams."

There are also lots of foods that don't have nutrition labels attached to them at all. Fresh fruit and veg. Alcoholic drinks. And so forth. For those, I type the name of the food into Google, followed by the word "nutrition" or "carbohydrate."

Another valuable resource for (general) information on which foods are low-carb or high-carb is https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb. This was, for me, the most useful such resource when I first went "low-carb" (but I had not found this forum yet).

Of course @Guzzler is right that none of this makes much sense until you decide, first, what level of low-carb you are aiming for. There is a description of the range of possibilities here: http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet/low-carb-diabetes-diet.html.

 

[Boo1979]

With MFP, you can also scan the bar code of a food in order to get the nutritional breakdown, which helps get around the problems of different countries using different methods to count carbs, as well as the problem of incorrect inputting of data by members. For foods that arent barcoded, I always put either “UK” or the name of a UK supermarket into the search bar so as to ensure correct UK data.
I use it mostly to input my own recipes / meals which is a bit of a faff at first ,but once youve entered everything once to create the recipe / meal, its then just a one click job to enter them into your food diary

 

[lindiloo62]

Thank you so much for your replies x very helpful

 

[Sue192]

Another question (possibly silly) - carbs and net carbs..... I understand that you take away the fibre carbs from the total carbs to get the net count, and I also realise (from this excellent website's forums (fora!)) that everyone is different in how they react to carbs, but is it correct that it's the NET carbs that are the crucial bit, or should it be all? I've trawled through various threads but can't find anything on this.

 

[bulkbiker]

Another question (possibly silly) - carbs and net carbs..... I understand that you take away the fibre carbs from the total carbs to get the net count, and I also realise (from this excellent website's forums (fora!)) that everyone is different in how they react to carbs, but is it correct that it's the NET carbs that are the crucial bit, or should it be all? I've trawled through various threads but can't find anything on this.

What country do you live in?

Edit your profile says you live in Somerset.. if this is correct then UK info only shows net carbs. The fibre is not included in the carb count here so don't subtract anything.
Quite a few people here say "just google carbs in...something" but be careful as this often gives you the US numbers. This is why I usually use a UK based supermarket website for carb info.

 

[Sue192]

Ah. Thank you again, bulkbiker!

 

[bulkbiker]

Ah. Thank you again, bulkbiker!

Glad to be of help