Last Thursday’s lunch
One of the problems in carbohydrate counting is figuring out how many grams of carbohydrate are in any given meal. I explained last week how I weigh my food whenever possible. But to get from that to the number of grams of carbohydrate, protein and fat are in a meal, I use a program called Diet Sleuth. This is a program designed for Mac, though a Windows version is available. There are things that have me screaming at it, but I’d have a much harder time controlling my diabetes without it.
The first figure is the main window, with my lunch for last Wednesday selected. (To enlarge the image, click on it.) Double clicking on a food brings up a window to add the food to a meal, with a variety of
Entry window for adding a food not in the database
serving sizes or number of grams. I use grams to enter except for the cherries. Since they are pretty uniform in size and one cherry is one of the portion sizes given, I just fill in the number of cherries (10 in this case) and let the program calculate the grams.
The program comes with a large database of foods, based on the USDA database of nutrients. It also has a number of prepared foods, including frozen dinners, fast foods, and snacks. You can easily add any packaged food with a nutrition label. The second figure shows the window for adding a food, filled in.
You can also add recipes. This is particularly useful when you make a large quantity of something and freeze it in serving-size portions. The cookie recipe shown comes up per cookie, but it’s impossible to make every cookie the same, so I go by grams when I’m actually eating one. The only ingredient not in the
Florentine cookies, showing window for adding a recipe.
included food database was the candied orange peel, which I added from the package. (By the way, these cookies store very well in the freezer, and I’ll probably make a larger batch next Christmas when candied orange peel is again available. But I rarely eat more than one at a time.)
Problems? Loss of data when I change versions or upgrade my operating system! This is a real problem with added food items and recipes. (It is also the reason I do not guarantee that the version shown is the latest.) There is also a minor bug that puts the “duplicate” button in the middle of the expanded data entry window instead of at the bottom with the other buttons, but I didn’t even know that one existed until I was trying to capture the windows for this blog.
There is another problem that comes up with using any nutrition database: all fruits of the same kind, for instance, are not equal. Take an apple, for instance. Apples vary enormously in sweetness and carbohydrate content per gram. They also vary a great deal by size, if you want to use the “per apple” option rather than per gram. The sizes given don’t often agree with what’s available in the supermarket. That can be addressed by using grams, but the sweetness cannot. Neither can bones in meat.
All in all I’d recommend it as an excellent meal planning tool. You can even use it to keep track of your weight. Just don’t count on it for saving your recipes!
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friend, forgive me if this is a bit off the subject, but… This makes just about anyone furious: Diets ultimately make you put on weight over the long haul and that has turned out to be more and more recognizable within
the excess weight epidemic that\\\\\\\’s
hurting this unhealthy food, nominal physical
exercise era. Are you concerned that arena seats must be increased to support the rise in peoples growing, ahem…girth? It implies that we are now becoming a bigger place (and by
no means in a good way) of men and women than we have ever have previously which is before twenty years only. Our children experience unhealthy weight associated
circumstances for example diabetic issues as well as cardiovascular disease.
I read that during a research project 70 obese Western kids in the age
groups of six to 19 were exposed to
several battery of lab tests to look at
the effect that the diet filled with fat had on the youthful bodies. The outcomes have been eye opening. All suffered from
high cholesterol levels and were within the high-risk group of acquiring heart disease and coronary heart malfunction which some subjects ended up already
revealing warning signs of.
Will there ever be any kind of hope
for any of us? I feel your answer should be certainly. Apparently
all we end up needing is some diet and exercise. We almost all really need to start doing this Right away!
Fantastic post however , I was wanting to know
if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Thank you!