Measuring carbs

[Docb]

Good point. I would have thought that the higher the carb content of a food the more accurate carb value of the packaging might be in terms of percentages, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

Another one of my hobby horses.....In my view the use of percentages should be banned in almost all walks of life and especially in politics, advertising and health care. Their use just, often intentionally, confuses the interpretation of data.

It is the amount of carbs that are important, not the proportion of carbs relative to 100 somethings of something else.

 

[Exflex]

My own approach was to start by eliminating the obvious things - all junk food basically and all meals that were obviously very high in carbs, and cutting way back on my alcohol. Then with the app and the smart scale I recorded everything I ate, carbs and calories, right down to the butter I was spreading on my bread. This is not as much trouble as it sounds with the scale as you can zero it (Tare function) every time you add something to the scale. So - put plate on scale, tare, put bread on plate, log bread in app, tare, butter bread, log butter in app, tare, add turkey slices, log turkey in app. End result - calories and carbs in that turkey sandwich, down to the last smear of butter. Not 100% accurate but the process made me consider everything I was eating in detail and showed good meals vs bad in stark contrast.

Every week I eliminated the worst meals I was eating from my shopping list and picked a couple of low-calorie alternatives for those meals. I also made small adjustments - less spuds obviously but also much less butter on spuds, almost no cheese, light mayo instead of butter where appropriate - that kind of thing, week after week, until I hit 1Kg of weight loss per week. Along the way I also increased exercise gradually. Eliminating the highest calorie meals and making small changes also reduced my carb count as a side effect, but big weight loss while not feeling too hungry between meals was my primary goal. It took me a month to hit 1Kg loss per week target and lost just under 3Kg (~6.5lb) in total in that first month. You could speed up the process by planning a lot from the beginning, using the nutritional info for products on the supermarket websites and planning a shopping list, excluding meals before you even buy them, though it would take a lot of effort up-front whereas I could only handle all that hassle in bite-sized chunks. Once I hit the 1Kg twice in a row I stopped logging all my food - everything I need is now in the food diary in the app.

I hope that's a little helpful and not just a confusing mess 😉

Very helpful indeed. Thank you.
One of the problems for me is that my wife is in charge of the kitchen and likes to prepare the meals. Portion sizes are a bit on the generous size, I think she believes I do a 12 hr shift down the mines, 7 days a week!! How do I educate her?!

 

[Dragonheart]

That’s a good point, I’m part way through Dr Cavan’s book ‘How to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes’ which says white carbs especially breakdown quickly to sugar, he calls them ‘carbs holding hands’. Brown carbs apparently take longer.

They may take a little longer (lower GI) but the carbs are all still in there are pretty much the same quantities as the white ones. Typically they give a slightly lower peak but take longer to clear. Imo neither is a great choice as it’s all still above baseline whatever the shape of the curve.

So yes if you absolutely have to have them brown/whole grain are marginally a better choice. Better still is to have something else entirely.

 

[Lucyr]

Very helpful indeed. Thank you.
One of the problems for me is that my wife is in charge of the kitchen and likes to prepare the meals. Portion sizes are a bit on the generous size, I think she believes I do a 12 hr shift down the mines, 7 days a week!! How do I educate her?!

Speak to her? Leave what you don’t want and put it in the fridge for tomorrow?

 

[Dragonheart]

Another one of my hobby horses.....In my view the use of percentages should be banned in almost all walks of life and especially in politics, advertising and health care. Their use just, often intentionally, confuses the interpretation of data.

It is the amount of carbs that are important, not the proportion of carbs relative to 100 somethings of something else.

Totally disagree about banning them. Yes the overall amount is the key thing but how you work out which foods to choose and avoid when shopping is done best with this information. I’m so glad we have this provided unlike the USA labels for example.

Having an individual item size is useful too eg piece of bread, individual sausage, an apple etc but that’s not relevant to all foods when weights are the measure rather than per item.

The maths taken and weighing required to work out how many carbs you eat is much more complicated and time consuming when only given an amount per imaginary portion - that isn’t your portion. I’ve literally no idea what you mean by “100 somethings of something else”. That’s not what % are to my mind and is the only thing about this that is confusing me.

1. The carbs/100g ie the % is really useful to compare one item with another to enable alternative choices to be made. This one or that one box/jar/tub situations.

2. It also allows a person to calculate easily their own portion size (because we all know how ridiculously unrealistic the suggested size is in many cases and different manufacturers make their suggested portions in a variety of sizes so again it’s hard to compare. For those that persist in eating cereals only have to check out the portions on those boxes to see what I mean.

3. And something that is 3/4 or 75% or 75g per 100g carbs is never going to be a low carb item. You then immediately know to either avoid it or eat tiny amounts to fit it into a lower carb diet. The opposite applies too, a 2% item can be relatively freely enjoyed in much larger quantities.

You don’t need to be a maths whizz to round something to the nearest 10% and have a concept of what that means in terms of a lot, a little, half, third, quarter three quarters etc of the item consists of carbs. And being honest if that is still too difficult perhaps that deficit in maths education needs addressing along with the nutritional learning.

 

[Leadinglights]

Very helpful indeed. Thank you.
One of the problems for me is that my wife is in charge of the kitchen and likes to prepare the meals. Portion sizes are a bit on the generous size, I think she believes I do a 12 hr shift down the mines, 7 days a week!! How do I educate her?!

Perhaps you could get her to have a read through the information in this link as it has recipe ideas and some menu plans to suit various tastes and budget. https://lowcarbfreshwell.com/

 

[Exflex]

Perhaps you could get her to have a read through the information in this link as it has recipe ideas and some menu plans to suit various tastes and budget. https://lowcarbfreshwell.com/

Thanks, I’ve sent her the link and I’ll ask her to read the Dr Caran book about reversing T2 and Pre-Diabtes.

 

[Neens]

If you don't already own a scale a smart kitchen scale is worth a look. They come with an app that does the same kind of thing as the free version of an app like MyFitnessPal, though the scale app connects directly to the scale so you skip the step of typing in the weight of each item in a meal. I bought the Arboleaf one because it's cheap on Amazon UK and it was fine - a little annoying to setup as the built-in database of food nutrition can't be trusted, which means you have to setup each type of food you eat as a 'custom food' (a one-off process), but with that done it's quicker to use on a daily basis than a standard scale while tapping the numbers into MyFitnessPal.

5 Best Smart Kitchen Scales That You Can Buy

Looking for a smart new kitchen scale? Check out these modern smart kitchen scales to keep track of the food you eat.

www.guidingtech.com

I also use some mini scales - they are tiny and as some portions need to be they are big enough for the amount of food, they are handy as they are small and I have been known to pack them and take them away with me before (back when I was in control of my eating).
They're not digital but you can probably get digi ones too.

 

[Drummer]

Very helpful indeed. Thank you.
One of the problems for me is that my wife is in charge of the kitchen and likes to prepare the meals. Portion sizes are a bit on the generous size, I think she believes I do a 12 hr shift down the mines, 7 days a week!! How do I educate her?!

You need to tell her that she's wrong.
Just how strongly worded is up to you.
I could curl her hair and tell her about my grandmother's last 5 years, but I seem a bit fragile today and the thought has reduced me to tears.
If you get some electronic scales you can put your plate of food on it and zero the display, but you might not be able t see it - so balance the plate with the protein part of the meal on a glass bowl on the scales, then zero the display. Add the food with carbs.
I keep a little notebook with the percentage of carbs for foods I eat, so it is a simple multiplication of the two numbers, weight and percentage. I use a sliderule for the calculation so I put the decimal point where needed.

 

[Neens]

Very helpful indeed. Thank you.
One of the problems for me is that my wife is in charge of the kitchen and likes to prepare the meals. Portion sizes are a bit on the generous size, I think she believes I do a 12 hr shift down the mines, 7 days a week!! How do I educate her?!

@Exflex you could introduce a smaller plate to the kitchen cupboard....
worked for me --- all my kitchenware is supersized as I love(d) a deep bowl/ huge mug / wide plate! So now we have a couple of plates (dinner plates in the 70s were smaller) ---- take care with bowls though - I bought some that looked tiny but if you fill them they hold as much as some of the bad bowls (lol). Just a small plate and then unless she Desperate Dan serves your food in a pile things may improve!

I think diagnosis is hard on our partners - mine used to love cooking for us both but it was not very diabetic friendly and we ate too late at night, it has taken a long time to find balance and sometimes we find we can still cook together and enjoy it.

Good luck with the plate!

 

[Exflex]

@Drummer and @Neens, thanks. My wife thinks I’m going over the top on my condition, so I’m keeping quiet now and just doing my own thing. Quite stressful really, but I own my own health and I’m just doing what I have to do to improve my situation and to keep quiet about it.

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

My wife thinks I’m going over the top on my condition, so I’m keeping quiet now and just doing my own thing. Quite stressful really, but I own my own health and I’m just doing what I have to do to improve my situation and to keep quiet about it.

Definitely something to take seriously. I wish I had had the early warning of a prediabetes diagnosis along with the significant chance of reversal through (possibly) a large weight loss. A big effort is worthwhile for a shot at avoiding worry about the pretty horrible health risks a full blown Type 2 has to contend with. Very best of luck

 

[Exflex]

Definitely something to take seriously. I wish I had had the early warning of a prediabetes diagnosis along with the significant chance of reversal through (possibly) a large weight loss. A big effort is worthwhile for a shot at avoiding worry about the pretty horrible health risks a full blown Type 2 has to contend with. Very best of luck

Thank you for your words of encouragement, it means a lot to me.

 

[void]

Pre-diabetic with HbA1c of 44. I’ve been reading and self educating but it’s a steep learning curve.
Can someone please tell me how to measure carbs. Say you want to limit to 40g, for example, that sounds like almost nothing, and although I’ve not measured I guess a piece of bread is nearly at limit. Hope I make sense. I’m cutting carbs as much as possible and finding protein: eggs, cheese, chicken fish all with greens quite satisfying.

Please see the link in my sig. It's easy to work out how many carbs if you know grams carb per 100g

 

[Proud to be erratic]

Another one of my hobby horses.....In my view the use of percentages should be banned in almost all walks of life and especially in politics, advertising and health care. Their use just, often intentionally, confuses the interpretation of data.

It is the amount of carbs that are important, not the proportion of carbs relative to 100 somethings of something else.

Well @Docb I am firmly in agreement with @HSSS and simply do not agree with banning %s when it comes to carb counting. Some of your other items like politics and advertising certainly should be banned because of the misuse of information that comes from selective use of a percentage promoter - but that is another story. Those people who promote and/or promise false information should be banned in their own right.

% was a basic part of my introduction to higher level sums, even before getting immersed into pure or applied maths. My father was a Civil Engineer and he encouraged my interest in simple maths by involving me in calculating simple bills of quantities for his costings. Today for basic carb counting working from data that is offered as a %, to then convert into a mass from the quantity being considered is fundamental. It is helpful for a single item like a pear and is pretty essential for a composite meal with an identified carb % for determining how many carbs will be (approximately) in my "share" of so many grams.

None of that detracts from recognising that a big portion size might simply be too big to be good, or healthy, or appropriate.

 

[Drummer]

Well @Docb I am firmly in agreement with @HSSS and simply do not agree with banning %s when it comes to carb counting. Some of your other items like politics and advertising certainly should be banned because of the misuse of information that comes from selective use of a percentage promoter - but that is another story. Those people who promote and/or promise false information should be banned in their own right.

% was a basic part of my introduction to higher level sums, even before getting immersed into pure or applied maths. My father was a Civil Engineer and he encouraged my interest in simple maths by involving me in calculating simple bills of quantities for his costings. Today for basic carb counting working from data that is offered as a %, to then convert into a mass from the quantity being considered is fundamental. It is helpful for a single item like a pear and is pretty essential for a composite meal with an identified carb % for determining how many carbs will be (approximately) in my "share" of so many grams.

None of that detracts from recognising that a big portion size might simply be too big to be good, or healthy, or appropriate.

As an engineer myself, percentages are the keys to the kingdom.
There is a definite hierarchy in the percentages of carbs in foods - sticking to those under 11% puts you on an easy path.
To calculate the amount of carbs on your plate, weigh the food and multiply by the percentage of carbs it contains. Adjust or record as required.

 

[Docb]

OK @Proud to be erratic and @Drummer, I accept I was pushing it a bit when calling for banning of percentages. Like all things they have their place. They are fine when used to express a proportion of something in a large sample which can then can be used to calculate the amount in another sample of a different size but homogenous with the first.

Otherwise, watch your step and certainly throw your hands up in horror if the word percentage is used by a politician!