oh golly! to my horror carb counting sources are all not the same! If I use the carb gram counting calculator on dr. atkins site I am well under my 20 allowed carbs a day. If I use the numbers from the fitday site, I'm around 50.

Whats the best source?

Hmmm...i would think the Atkins one would be better. Of course, what do I know about it? LOL. I may start using the Atkins one though.

Are you subtracting the fiber from your count!

You digest it differently...

If you are truly interested in weight loss, and chemical details of your food choices, I would go with FitDay.

It tends to be more liberal in calculating carbs, due to the built in bias for low fat eating plans, IMO. But that results in better results for those of us who are following Low Carb instead, and trying to minimize carbs, especially the hidden ones..

And, unfortunately, the Atkins site has an inherent conflict of interest with promoting fairly high carb products versus encouraging maximum, rapid weight loss. I think that they are still very good on the theory and the philosophy of low carb, but lots of the Atkins revenue comes from selling products that have many hidden carbs, IMHO.

Stick with whole foods, that you prepare on your own, and you will do noticeably better with the Atkin's Diet.

Just my 2 cents.

I love using Fit day to track what I eat every day. Only problem I come up with is if I have a recipe and finding out what the carb/protien/fat is.
I know you can set up a custom food, so what do I have to do? Add up all the carbs/fats/proteins and then divided it out to get the serving?

Hi, Kelly

Great question! One that drove me batty for about a month.

What I do now is go to a future date that has no entries, and enter all of the ingredients of the recipe, for one total recipe worth of food.

Then I record all of the calorie and gram data from the summary table at the top of that page, plus I then go to reports and get the nutrients for that day, recording all the nutrient details for the full recipe.

Then I go back to the date that I am having the custom food, and call up a new custom food. I then name the dish, and record it as 1 serving for the entire recipe. I then enter all the recorded data into the new custom food data base, and save it.

I then put that large serving on my daily food choice, and record how much of the recipe I consumed at that meal, like 1/10, or 1/8 or 1/4, and then the program calculates what my body consumed from that portion of the recipe.

Then I go back to the future day, and delete all those entries so that it will be blank when the day comes.

Works pretty good so far. It sure is a lot of time consuming work, but the results are nice to have.

Keep on, keepn' on!

That is exactly what I do too WW....

For things I make often it is really helpful.

Thanks!...why didn't I think of that! LOL

It makes total sense to me. I will do that in the future for a recipe. Then I will always have the nutritonal counts.

Kelly, and anyone esle who might be interested:

You can go to my FitDay Journal for February 16, and see the results for the Pepperoni Meatza we made that day.

<a href="http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/PublicJournals.html?Owner=W%2EW%2E+Dimmitt">FitDay Journal</a>

Hi, Lisa

Darn, I was hoping that you were going to tell me some neato high tech way to cut all that entering and recording work in half, or less. Heh

Keep on, keepn' on!

LOL I wish! The great thing is like when you put in Atkins bake mix and you set it up with a TBS and when you go to use it again you can choose a tsp serving and it calculates.

But no... it is work.

Hi all,

wwdimmitt, Kelly, everybody, you all make a convincing case for Fitday, and I reckon sooner or later I'll have to bite the bullet and try the thing.

But it all sounds so complicated for a home cook. You know, bit of this, bit of that, and throw in some left overs.

However, so far on this way of eating and in induction, there haven't been left overs.

Something I use for carb counting is Corinne Netzer's Complete Book of Food Counts. It's small enough to take with me anywhere and is especially handy when I'm somewhere without a computer and need to know how many carbs are in something. It also lists practically every food you could think of eating including entries for foods at many fast food restaurants. The book costs $7.50 and is the size of a thick paperback book.
I think the difference between the counts on Dr. Atkins' site and Fitday is that the counts on the Atkins site already have the fiber deducted and those on Fitday don't (you have to deduct the fiber yourself).

Lisa N -

Yes, that is part of the diff, but nowhere near all.

For instance every egg on FitDay is 1 carb, and every oz of cheese is at least 1 carb, and every cup of black coffee is 1 carb. There is no fiber in any of those foods, and Atkins calculates them at zero carbs.

I think that FitDay is much more accurate, even for those carbs that low on the glycemic scale and have much less insulin demand than do dextrose, sucrose and fructose carbs. They should still be counted, IMO.

At least it seems to be working for my weight loss efforts, so far. YMMV

Why would Atkins put out erroneous info? I mean, if all of those are 1 carb on fitday and have NO fiber, then how can they be 0 carbs on Atkins carb counter? I am so confused now.

Well, a few thoughts. First of all, Fitday clearly rounds up. Most sources list eggs at around half a gram (or a little more) a piece, depending on the size of the egg. It's kind of the Atkins induction fudge factor in reverse - if you're rounding all the values up, people who are counting carbs, calories, or fat grams are going to be less likely to go over the mark.

Atkins, on the other hand, clearly lists eggs as an induction food that can be eaten freely. My guess is that he doesn't want you to worry about the carbs in eggs, so to "make things simple" he says there aren't any. Evidently the carbs in eggs aren't "Carbs That Count when you Do Atkins" (in the doctor's own, rather cumbersome phrase.)

But going beyond that, you'll notice as you go along that carb counting is not an exact science. For one thing, carbs aren't measured directly, like protein and fat. They're measured "by difference," meaning that anything that isn't identified as protien or fat is considered carb. And because nothing is consistent in nature - no two apples, for instance, will have exactly the same amount of sugar, even if they grew on the same tree during the same season - no two measurements of the same food are likely to come out exactly the same.

Just for fun, I decided to look up "broccoli" in the four books I have at hand right now. DANDR has only one listing, a generic "broccoli" at 1.7 "digestible carbs" (what PP would call ECC) per half cup or 3.4 per cup. The original PP differentiates between raw, boiled, and frozen -- (I'll go with frozen from here on) -- they list 3/4 c. of frozen chopped broccoli as having 4.4 grams ECC. Their PPLP gram counter lists a full cup of frozen chopped boiled broccoli at 4.3, and Corinne Netzer has that same cup at 2 ECC. Four books, three authors, four opinions. But the bottom line is that you know that broccoli is a healthy, low carb food that you can probably have a cup or so of with no harm done.