Counting Carbs App

[Stanford]

Morning all
Does anyone know of a free app for calculating carbs. I was using carbs & cals but don’t appreciate paying a fee each year. I am T1 using Libre and Omnipod Dash.

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

I've used an app that comes with a smart food weighing scale. The app is free and as far as I know works fine without buying the scale, though with the scale it becomes easier to weigh things like fruit and veg and get a fairly accurate carb and calorie count. The app is called 'arboleaf' and is free to download from the app stores.

It's a bit clunky to set up as the built-in database of foods can't be trusted. You end up having to add each type of food you eat as a 'custom food' and type in the nutritional info manually. This is a one-off process for each food type. With that done you can add foods to one of four daily 'meals' (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks) in your food diary, entering the weight of each food manually or using the scale (which costs around £20 on Amazon). Once the meal is complete you can tap on it the diary and get the total carbs and calories for the meal. Screenshot of how that looks attached. You can also look back in the diary at previous days/meals, so if you're eating exactly the same thing again you can just look it up rather than entering it all again.

It's not fancy but it might do what you need it to do with no ongoing costs.

 

[CoolShot44]

Carbs n cals is a good one

 

[Stanford]

I've used an app that comes with a smart food weighing scale. The app is free and as far as I know works fine without buying the scale, though with the scale it becomes easier to weigh things like fruit and veg and get a fairly accurate carb and calorie count. The app is called 'arboleaf' and is free to download from the app stores.

It's a bit clunky to set up as the built-in database of foods can't be trusted. You end up having to add each type of food you eat as a 'custom food' and type in the nutritional info manually. This is a one-off process for each food type. With that done you can add foods to one of four daily 'meals' (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks) in your food diary, entering the weight of each food manually or using the scale (which costs around £20 on Amazon). Once the meal is complete you can tap on it the diary and get the total carbs and calories for the meal. Screenshot of how that looks attached. You can also look back in the diary at previous days/meals, so if you're eating exactly the same thing again you can just look it up rather than entering it all again.

It's not fancy but it might do what you need it to do with no ongoing costs.

Thank you so much, really helpful

 

[Charl]

Nutracheck.....

 

[Proud to be erratic]

I've used an app that comes with a smart food weighing scale. The app is free and as far as I know works fine without buying the scale, though with the scale it becomes easier to weigh things like fruit and veg and get a fairly accurate carb and calorie count. The app is called 'arboleaf' and is free to download from the app stores.

It's a bit clunky to set up as the built-in database of foods can't be trusted. You end up having to add each type of food you eat as a 'custom food' and type in the nutritional info manually. This is a one-off process for each food type. With that done you can add foods to one of four daily 'meals' (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks) in your food diary, entering the weight of each food manually or using the scale (which costs around £20 on Amazon). Once the meal is complete you can tap on it the diary and get the total carbs and calories for the meal. Screenshot of how that looks attached. You can also look back in the diary at previous days/meals, so if you're eating exactly the same thing again you can just look it up rather than entering it all again.

It's not fancy but it might do what you need it to do with no ongoing costs.

Potentially interesting. Is your screenshot showing Calories the default or is there an equivalent showing Carbs? If yes are the Carbs displayed immediately or do you have to choose Carbs after seeing Cals?

Personally I have little interest in Calories; not just because I'm insulin dependent and now always need to know the Carbs. But Calories have always struck me as pretty useless. By definition one Calorie is the energy needed to heat one gm of water by one degree and trying to correlate that to energy from food has always been a pretty vague concept. I know people try to make their fortunes from writing books about the calorie content of menus and meal plans - but how that relates to any one individual is far too abstract for me. Does any tech company make a CGM equivalent to tell the wearer what their calorie behaviour is after eating? I think not; I don't wonder why! [Apart from bathroom scales?]

 

[Proud to be erratic]

I've used an app that comes with a smart food weighing scale. The app is free and as far as I know works fine without buying the scale, though with the scale it becomes easier to weigh things like fruit and veg and get a fairly accurate carb and calorie count. The app is called 'arboleaf' and is free to download from the app stores.

It's a bit clunky to set up as the built-in database of foods can't be trusted. You end up having to add each type of food you eat as a 'custom food' and type in the nutritional info manually. This is a one-off process for each food type. With that done you can add foods to one of four daily 'meals' (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks) in your food diary, entering the weight of each food manually or using the scale (which costs around £20 on Amazon). Once the meal is complete you can tap on it the diary and get the total carbs and calories for the meal. Screenshot of how that looks attached. You can also look back in the diary at previous days/meals, so if you're eating exactly the same thing again you can just look it up rather than entering it all again.

It's not fancy but it might do what you need it to do with no ongoing costs.

Potentially interesting. Is your screenshot showing Calories the default or is there an equivalent showing Carbs? If yes are the Carbs displayed immediately or do you have to choose Carbs after seeing Cals?

Personally I have little interest in Calories; not just because I'm insulin dependent and now always need to know the Carbs. But Calories have always struck me as pretty useless. By definition one Calorie is the energy needed to heat one gm of water by one degree and trying to correlate that to energy from food has always been a pretty vague concept. I know people try to make their fortunes from writing books about the calorie content of menus and meal plans - but how that relates to any one individual is far too abstract for me. Does any tech company make a CGM equivalent to tell the wearer what their calorie behaviour is after eating? I think not; I don't wonder why! [Apart from bathroom scales?]

 

[Lucyr]

Nutracheck is the best, small annual fee but worth it for a constantly updated database. You can use it free if you don’t actually log everything.

 

[JJay]

Nutracheck for me too. Huge database of food and drink, tracks protein, fat, salt as well as carbs and cals, and you can carb count and save your own recipes. You can get a 7-day free trial to see if it suits and thereafter it constantly offers special deals for 3-, 6- or 12-month membership which saves money. Currently I'm on £29.99 for 12 months so just £2.50 a month, and worth every penny IMO. (NB I have no connection with Nutracheck other than as a satisfied customer)

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

Potentially interesting. Is your screenshot showing Calories the default or is there an equivalent showing Carbs? If yes are the Carbs displayed immediately or do you have to choose Carbs after seeing Cals?

Personally I have little interest in Calories; not just because I'm insulin dependent and now always need to know the Carbs. But Calories have always struck me as pretty useless. By definition one Calorie is the energy needed to heat one gm of water by one degree and trying to correlate that to energy from food has always been a pretty vague concept. I know people try to make their fortunes from writing books about the calorie content of menus and meal plans - but how that relates to any one individual is far too abstract for me. Does any tech company make a CGM equivalent to tell the wearer what their calorie behaviour is after eating? I think not; I don't wonder why! [Apart from bathroom scales?]

The arboleaf screenshot is the one displayed when you tap on a meal, showing the calorie pie-chart type thing with macronutrients inc. carbs in grams, and as a calorie percentage of the meal. On the screen for each day in the diary there's a drop-down menu that allows carbs in grams to be displayed for the entire day, though I assume that's not useful to someone who wants to calculate how much insulin is needed for a meal.

Calories in and out is not as straightforward as many make it out to be, though it is a useful concept. Shortly after I was diagnosed and learned about the link between weight loss and remission I set out to lose 1Kg per week. I wasn't going to try to lose weight, I was going to treat it like a job and just get it done. I did some reading and learned that 1 gram of stored body fat equates to approximately 7.7 calories when burned, thus 1Kg is roughly 7700 calories, thus I needed to burn 1100 calories more than I ate per day to hit my target. I made a spreadsheet (screenshot attached) and used it to plan food and small exercise changes each week based on weight loss rate from the past week. I was able to come close to the 1Kg per week target and, when I'm actively trying, I can come close to that target week after week. I would argue that trying to track the calories burned from individual bouts of exercise for example is indeed pointless - there are too many variables. That said, setting a goal and tracking weight loss, and using that data to estimate how much calories need to be consumed per day on average to hit that goal, against a background of a regular pattern of weekly exercise, works pretty well. It's accurate enough to be useful.