Hi lovely people,
I am confused…some recipes with macro breakdown mention a Net Carbs and Carbs value. Now when I enter on My Fitness Pal, do I enter the net carbs for a certaib food or recipe or the carbs?
I don’t want to over do my carb allowance with my vain assumptions and google researches are overwhelming and unclear. I was hoping you can help.
Cheers,
N
As I’m familiar with it My Fitness Pal enters carbs & fiber separately. So when entering in a new recipe you can enter net if you prefer, just remember that recipes already loaded will likely be using total. Personally I load total & at the end of the day look at my carbs & fiber as part of the same equation.
Thanks for your reply.
So when I do my macros for the day, what matters…the net carbs or total carbs?
What matters is eating a small enough amount of carbohydrate to enter ketosis, so that your body can become fat-adapted. On these forums, we recommend eating less than 20 grams a day, but Dr. Stephen Phinney, who coined the term “nutritional ketosis,” talks about people entering ketosis while eating 100g or even 125g a day. So there is obviously some wiggle room for a lot of people. Here, we advise only 20g, because it’s a level at which anybody will most likely enter ketosis, no matter how insulin-resistant.
So do what works best for you. If you do net carbs and have trouble getting into ketosis, then switch to total. If you’re fine with 20 net, then once you’re fat-adapted you can experiment with eating a bit more and seeing what happens. The goal is to get your carb consumption down to a level at which your insulin will be low enough to allow your body to manufacture ketone bodies from your stored fat.
In general, unless you are very metabolically deranged, net carbs are fine to set your daily gram goal. It makes keto much easier and shouldn’t prevent ketosis.
Recording your food and building recipes depends on where in the world you are. In the US, your ingredient list for a recipe will be measuring total carbs (US food labeling laws) and you’ll need to deduct fiber. In Europe/Australasia the labels and probably the local MFP food database will only list net carbs (but also fiber). In that case you wouldn’t deduct fiber.
Good luck.
Just to say be wary of MFP- I’ve given up using it as it was so inaccurate! I compared the packets of specific brands with what MFP had stated, & it gave me carbs in carb free foods! I’m back to pen, paper & calculator (the last one because I haven’t found the mental clarity yet which everyone keeps talking about…)
I agree, I found MFP to be very inaccurate. Sometimes the entries only have total calories and fat grams. So, a food gets reported as having zero carbs, just because someone didn’t take the time to enter the whole nutrition label.
Because people are lazy idiots 
However, most things with a label DO have a correct entry as well as several (often poorly spelled) user generated values. The trick is finding it. At least once you have, it should be easier to reuse via whatever MFP uses for recent/your foods type thing.
On LoseIt, the same problem applies BUT the verified entries have a green tick/check next to it to make it easier to find. These values come from manufacturers or USDA or equivalents I believe.
Thank you, this helps heaps!
Will trial both out and stick with what works. X
I am not too fussed about that because I enter them manually or scan them from labels.