Best App to support starting a Low Carb diet?

mattw

Member
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9
Hi everyone. I hope I am in the right forum here. I am looking for advice on starting low-carbing, and the best App to support that.

For background, I am Type I since 2000, carb counting since 2001, and complication free so far except for a smidge of retinopathy. I turned 50 recently. The current project is a switch to a lower carb diet in order to help stay complication free - since I am about to do a "DAFNE-clone" course that runs in my area as 'revision'.

Looking at the Cals and Carbs app and material, I am meeting quite a few ingredients that I have not used regularly, so I want to build up a bit of a recipe bank in the next couple of months to get a low-carb diet which is interesting and varied. As a step 1 I am aiming for 100-125g carbs a day (currently approx 200-250g).

For a start I have the "Very Low Calorie" Recipe / Meal Plan book, which are also nicely low carb. I have been enjoying a few of these, but all the admin is quite hard work and swallows quite a lot of time - especially with the extra monitoring of BG etc at a time when I am changing things around.

Ideally I would like to be able to have a set of recipes that I can plan ahead, which will give me nutritional information for the day, and ideally a shopping list. I would love to be able to upload the shopping list into a supermarket and then have the ingredients turn up at the door (this last may be a bit optimistic). Plus I want to be able to input my own recipes.

Can anyone give me a steer as to a App or similar that would be a good support / time saver?

I have Carb and Cals for Android, but reading that the Recipe functionality vanished from the Apple version when that was upgraded I do not have that much confidence in that version. Do I need to switch to the Apple one?

Thanks for any comments, and for reading this long first posting in the Low Carb forum.

Matt
 

bulkbiker

BANNED
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19,576
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Diet only
I would suggest having a look at www.dietdoctor.com which has a huge range of low carb and ketogenic recipes with all the nutritional info. These days I tend to keep it very simple and just buy fresh low carb ingredients - cook and eat. "treats" consist of pork scratchings and Oppo ice cream sometimes. Raspberries with double cream. Mainly its just eat real food that doesn't come out of a packet.
 

smc4761

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Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
Mattw, I am very similar circumstances to yourself, slightly older but have been type 1 since 1981.

I am also due to attend a DAFNE style course in the next weeks which will hopefully educate me a little better. I started a low carb diet 2 weeks ago cutting down like you from 200g to around 100 g per day

Main thing I have done is cut out bread, potatoes, rice and pasta, and beer. Mainly have chicken, fish, meats with plenty of fresh veg, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, onions, bell peppers, mushrooms. I do allow myself 1 "blow out" a week in the form of a chines or Indian takeaway

I found the app from fatsecrets.com to be very good, not so much for recipes but good for advising total carbs, calories etc in foods. And its FREE
 
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cdpm

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950
Type of diabetes
Type 2
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Insulin
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Side effects from medication
carb manager

it counts net carbs
but im not sure what functions work for free
it is good though
you can put in your own foods and exercise and meal plannng
i cant remember about recipes but i think so
 
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mattw

Member
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9
@cpdm @smc4761 @bulkbiker

Thanks for your replies, both.

I will have a look at Fatsecrets. (I am having more peppers, so for me it is fartsecrets). On a first very quick look I thought it seemed a little weaker on carbs than calories - though i am trying to address both to knock the BMI down from 27 to 25 over a couple of months.

I will be playing with the iPad version of Carbs and Cals today, as I am experimenting with their "Very Low Calorie" recipe picture book, and see how far I can get down into linking through to shopping. I think I will need to create a duplicate set of meals / recipes on MySupermarket, and will end up able to order ingredients fairly easily if I have a "fridge stock adjustment meal" (like a correction insulin dose) once or twice a week.

But first I need to create some menus and set up the systems :).

Plan to update this thread later this week.

I will probably avoid things that deal with Net Carbs for now, in order to stick to UK measurements and calculations - for simplicity. There's enough going on without having to deal with US measurements too :) .

Cheers

MattW
 
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mattw

Member
Messages
9
Trying out the Apple iPad Carns and Cals.

Very much better, and particularly easy to use ... especially for display and integration between different menu levels.

And there are custom foods, custom portion sizes for existing foods, and most things can be post-edited. On the Android version, for example, you cannot go back and add a photo if you do not put one in when creating a food (unless I have missed something).