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My copy of Carbs/Cals has reached the end

gail2

gail2

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Type 2
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Its got more loose pages than fixed, it has my writing all over it of things not in the book + food label stickers off things
A m thinking of getting the app just wondered if it was the same as the book? Do you think its worth it? Plus the app would be more easy to carry than the book
Gail
 
I love the app, used it every day since just after Christmas.
 
I started off with the book - l got mine via my local library. I’ve also got the free App but am annoyed at having to pay to unlock certain foods etc. so l just use free one and try an calculate from there.
 
I hated the app. Expensive annual cost and made difficult to terminate that recurring fee. Where foods are "loose", ie not in bespoke packaging, the portion sizes can be pretty arbitrary but not necessarily creating a round no amount of carbs. To get the carbs per 100 gms (which at least creates a percentage figure for any one food item) it needs you the user to ask that question - so more finger tapping on my phone. That percentage figure allows you to compare similar food items - such as weetabix vs cornflakes, or peaches vs apples vs melon. For me, needing to carb count this is important for dose calculations. But I also like to get a sense of which food item I might get away with as a small snack, without a bolus.

I know that increasingly we are forced to do everything digitally. Sometimes a straightforward printed manual, which I can annotate with my own notes wins hands down for me.

I can get carb values per 100 gms from simple Internet searches for whatever item is of interest at that moment, particularly something composite, such as a sausage roll (not in Carbs and Cals book, except as scribbled in by me).
 
I got the book, a few years ago at a time when I desperately needed it
think it was someone on this forum that introduced me to it, although these days I don’t refer to it quite as much, and got it online via a secondhand book retailer think it was, I did once look at the app but didn’t like it, so my vote is definitely for the actual book
 
Thanks ihave yet to decide if to go for it i must admi that i like the feel of going thou a book I guess i could invest in a lot of sellotape
 
I’d imagine you know what foods / quantities you can eat by now and can stop tracking carbs and save the expense? You could use a supermarket app for looking up new things.
 
I bought some A5 ring binders and loads of pockets a few months ago in one of my sorting out phases, put loads of recipes, instruction books and information in them - then had to buy shelves to put them on....
I rescued several books slitting the last of the binding with a butter knife and getting the pages in order again, plus all the notes and mementoes were kept safe too.
Although it took a bit of time to start with it saves so much time to have things instantly available, labelled and also protected in the plastic sleeves - be sure to get the 'crystal clear' ones so things can be read easily.
 
Drummer said:
I bought some A5 ring binders and loads of pockets a few months ago in one of my sorting out phases, put loads of recipes, instruction books and information in them - then had to buy shelves to put them on....
I rescued several books slitting the last of the binding with a butter knife and getting the pages in order again, plus all the notes and mementoes were kept safe too.
Although it took a bit of time to start with it saves so much time to have things instantly available, labelled and also protected in the plastic sleeves - be sure to get the 'crystal clear' ones so things can be read easily.
Click to expand...
wot a good idea
 
gail2 said:
A m thinking of getting the app just wondered if it was the same as the book? Do you think its worth it? Plus the app would be more easy to carry than the book
Click to expand...
It felt different to use, and when they started wanting a subscription (which is fair enough: these things need work to keep up to date) I stopped using it. I realised I had barely used it anyway. For things where the nutrition isn't on the packet I use a Google search, checking that the result looks sensible before actually using it. (For some things you also need to be careful to use the right figure: rice and pasta carbs are different depending on whether you're measuring cooked vs raw because of the weight of the water.)
 
I bought the book, never used it!
 
Lisa65 said:
I bought the book, never used it!
Click to expand...

I was given one by the diabetes dietician. I didn't find it helpful at all and gave it away to someone else. Because I following a low carb way of eating, I didn't need to know how many carbs there were in high carb foods because I was avoiding most of those foods that were in the book.
 
I use my carbs and cals book most days. It's helping hubby to adjust portion sizes when he cooks. Also helping with calculation of carbs as I am trying to be more disciplined after latest hba1c results. Tonight I had wholewheat spaghetti and homemade bolognaise sauce. Total carbs 35g so keeping within my limit of 30 to 50g per meal. It will be a while before I am confident enough to guesstimate carbs.:D
 
I have the book and the app (plus the pocket-size one I was given on my DAFNE Course) - I used to read them/use them religiously but now very rarely as I have got better at estimating it, with decent success (if it doesn't have nuttritional info on the packaging) - I do still refer to them if I'm eating out for example (46g ish for a Big Mac) but that's usually because I'm being lazy and am not looking it up on google or the chains website - I won't be renewing my subscription next year for the app but will still refer to the book from time-to-time I'm sure
 
Sounds like you got a lot of value out of your copy of the book @gail2 <3
 
I think Carbs and Cals is like Marmite.
Some people refer to it every day and wouldn't be without it.

Like @rebrascora I found the book did not represent my way of eating. In my case, that is not low carb but it is mostly vegetarian, for want of a better term, "International" and home cooked from scratch. Being able to look up the carbs in a Big Mac isn't very useful. My home equivalent is beetroot burgers with halloumi and chilli jelly in a home baked bun.
I totalled the carbs in the individual components of my meals and overtime built up an eye-balling technique.
The times when I need to look something up, now, are when I have pre-prepared food because it is easier to know what is in a dish when I put it there.

If I had bought my own copy of the book, I would happily give it away to those marmite/carbs and cals lovers.
And I know you enjoy marmite @gail2
 
We found it invaluable for the first year or so, it was my Bible and we never went anywhere without it. Got the first copy free when daughter went on the pump, bought an updated version a year or two later, and eventually got the app as well. But my daughter is a creature of habit when it comes to food so we started to learn the carb counts of favourite foods and got better at eyeballing, so it gradually fell out of use, and since the app became subscription only we haven’t used it since. I keep a copy of the book just in case we try anything completely unusual, but you can also use Google in such instances, and daughter just gets on with it on her own now.
 
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