[Radii]

Originally Posted by corbes

I want to experiment with keto

Dude, talk to me in daychat, I can give you more info than you ever wanted to know I should be in there all day tomorrow/thursday. Or PM me here if you have 1000 questions, I am certain I can point you in the right direction as far as resources go.

I cook almost all my own food and haven't the foggiest how many calories are in anything. Anytime I've tried to calculate this, it feels like the website wants me to put in how many grams of rice I ate and all I can think is, you cannot be serious, I have no idea.

I did spend a couple months obsessively weighing everything out of curiosity, but you have a few options here. If you go strict keto (say, 25g carbs or less a day), you can try just counting carbs at the start and not worry at all about calories. That doesn't mean that calories don't matter. But after the first few weeks, most people on keto find that they just simply are not all that hungry, even someone like myself who has huge hunger spikes and diabetes and can eat 5000 calories a day and still feel hungry... when i'm on carbs. When I'm succeeding on keto I don't have to count anything, because fat is filling and my body's hunger cues work and I naturally eat a more appropriate amount of food without trying.

There are a lot of people on keto who never count calories and lose tons of weight. There are also folks who obsessively weigh their food forever.

You should probably obsessively count carbs for awhile, at least to get a general feel. If something like a salad dressing has 4g carbs/serving, and your goal is 25g carbs a day or less, the difference between 1 serving and 3 servings on a salad matters a ton. But the difference between something that you know has virtually no carbs, like a steak, or green veggies where all of the carbs are fiber, meh, no need to obsess there if you don't want. I really don't care if my steak is 8 oz or 16, but if I decide to put a little Thousand Island dressing on a burger (no bun!), the difference between 1 tablespoon and 2 of the dressing is important to me. Its a little counter intuitive at first (or maybe a lot), but after seeing how my body reacts to things I eat, it feels obvious.

Since you cook for yourself, start looking at everything you put in your food to get a general idea of how many carbs are in things even if you aren't ready to start tomorrow, just to see.

Is there a reasonable carb/fat website that people use?

As far as getting info on specific items, I use one of three ways:

1) myfitnesspal - easy starting point since many brands/labels are plugged in there
2) google - especially for generic items like fruits/nuts/veggies. "carbs in almonds" returns a nice generic nutrition label.
3) NDL/FNIC Food Composition Database Home Page <-- USDA nutrition database. I don't end up here often, typically I end up here when I'm cooking a cut of meat and don't have a label for it. With myfitnesspal and sometimes even google looking into meat, its hard to get information I feel comfortable with. Are the numbers for cooked or pre-cooked weights, etc. USDA database seems the best for searching for exactly the type/cut of meat and making sure I get the info I want.


If you mean what types of ratios you might be trying to eat for yourself, instead of carb/fat/calorie counting in individual foods:

Keto Calculator - Learn Your Macros on the Ketogenic Diet



Anyway, feel free to ask questions here, or PM me, or look for me in chat if you want more info