Has anyone here used CalorieKing to count carbs? Any feedback, opinions, thoughts on it?
Not sure if there is a thread that reviews a bunch of apps with comments. I’ve never used any, so I don’t know anything about them.
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For calorie counting, I played with both CalorieKing and MyFitnessPal, and ended up picking MyFitnessPal. So did my wife. But, for carb counting, my son prefers MyNetDiary.
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If you weren’t looking for any logging or anything other than just a very thorough list of food items and their carb/protein/fat count, which would you choose?
Don’t need to enter anything, just a very complete list, and easy to find items when both home and away, what is your preference?
When I tested it, I thought that, for the foods I needed, I found more of them on MyFitnessPal ([EDIT] oops – I had written MyNetDiary first, that was a typo).
MyNetDiary has fewer listings than either on its database. But it lists the meal result as a carb total, which is nice, since you don’t have to add of it up in your head. So, when my son won’t find the food on his NyNetDiary db, we look it up on ours.
It might depend upon the way you eat, though. We cook a lot from scratch so we are not as sensitive as finding prepared foods in an app, for instance. But we also eat out quite a bit, so being able to figure out carbs for what we eat at the restaurant is important too.
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Ill have to check that out. I’ve been using MyFitnessPal, but it’s not my favorite (thanks for asking this question, @Eric). Almost everything I eat is made from scratch as we don’t (can’t) eat out a lot, so you’re saying MyNetDiary is better for that?
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I use lose-it on my iPhone which is mostly designed for calorie counting for weight loss but it’s a very useful reference for carb counts
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I use it a lot! I like that I can vary quantities to get carb info for the portion I have weighed out.
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I usually just google “carb count food I am about to eat”. Usually either CalorieKing.com or MyFitnesspal.com pops up as well as fatsecret.com
For recipe analysis I use:
No ads and it works.
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We use the Calorie King app, and find it quick and efficient. With that said, I did no looking around before downloading it since it was recommended by a caregiver. It is nice because you can put in a restaurant and if it is in the database see all of the choices at once, and it seems very complete.
Like @Michel we do a lot of cooking, but I just use paper and pencil to keep track of everything and then annotate that on the recipe.
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Echo @Chris’ method. This is us in the nutshell also.
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I use both the CalorieKing website and app to look up carb counts for food. I don’t care about logging, because I do that either in my pump or in my fitbit app. I like CalorieKing for its simplicity. I also don’t often look up processed foods, since I don’t eat many of them, so for my needs it’s great.
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sorry, @Pianoplayer7008, it was a typo, MyFitnessPal’s food database is a lot better than MyNetDiary’s. But MyNetDiary’s totals your carbs per meal – we use it for logging.
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Do you guys do a straight carb count type of entry, or do you add a certain percentage for protein and fat?
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We do a straight count. But, when the proteins+carbs are VERY high, then we add more. I have a formula.
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I do straight carb count. I think my head might explode if I tried experimenting with yet another thing right now; Afrezza’s kicking my tail.
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Hang in there, it gets easier and easier, but it does take time. It is like a second order effect. First get the 1st order stuff down pat, then worry about second order. Then you can aim for Eric, who I swear is working on 4th order effects.
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I use the CalorieKing book when we’re out eating something totally random and unfamiliar as a ballpark.
I do use the MyFitnessPal website sometimes, but my problem is that there are a lot of random user-generated entries in there and so you have to be careful to be using an entry that is authenticated somehow.
We used to use MyFitnessPal when we were logging every single thing Samson ate. At this point we just occasionally log new recipes in it and refer to it when we want the carb count. Toddler diets are repetitive enough that he’s rarely eating things that are totally new.
Most often I just Google whatever the ingredients are and add things up on my computer’s calculator.
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I don’t use a phone, so I usually do it on paper, right on the recipe, calculator in hand, and if I’m feeling old-fashioned I even look up the carbs in books rather than online, like Bowes and Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used (I’m not a nerd; I use it for work). I also use the USDA database, and I like that with myfitnesspal you can import a recipe from another website and it will do the calculation. So where I go depends on what kind of info I need and how quickly/simply.
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