Of Ledgers and Balance Sheets.

Hello again and welcome to the new people. Thank you for coming in. If you are new and haven't read all of the prior posts I would highly recommend that you scroll down to the very start and not skip any of the entries. I'm glad to see some increased interest in the blog. I am on duty at the fire station so if I get a call, I will just drop where ever I am and pick it up later. So if you see a drop out in the middle of a sentence you will know the reason why.

Tonight we are going to take a preliminary look at the mathematics involved in our Wells Fargo Carbohydrate Bank Account.

But 1st I would like to finish up talking about a few other diet strategies that others out there are doing that I did not mention in my prior post. The really famous ones are the pre-packaged food delivery diets. These include Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig and I'm sure that there are other similar ones. The concept of these plans is that you as the consumer don't have to do anything but eat their food and loose weight. The food is balanced in lowering carbs and gives reduced portion size but that is probably about it. I have never tried any of these nor would I ever care to in the future. They take the approach that you are just too dumb to ever figure things out so they are going to do it for you, and they want you to be totally dependant on them for your food source which I would guess has a very high profit margin built in for them. The other problem is there is no way to include fresh fruits and vegetables in their system and that my friends.... really sucks!

Another diet system that is new and very innovative is the P90X. It comes as a workout video set and also includes the nutritional component. I have done a few of the workouts (they really kicked my buttinski) and I looked over the nutritional side and it is all very rock solid. The main difference between P 90X and what we are doing is as follows. They predominately promote the intense hard exercise portion to chisel and shape the body-that's about 75%, while nutrition is about 25% We are going to do the inverse of that. 75% nutrition and 25% exercise. I will also put a wide array on just how intense you want to be on the exercise part. If you only want to do low impact stuff I am absolutely fine with that. If you want to go high octane, I am good with that too.

OK now the math. We are going to count carbs... I bet that was not a surprise to you ;^)
Many other diet plans want you to count exact daily total calorie intake and weigh your food on a scale. I personally don't like that because it is cumbersome and you can easily loose track of where you are at. It also tends to make you "religious" about being exact and can also lead to being guilt driven if you aren't perfect. In case you haven't noticed, I hate guilt ridden things!! I am not under law, I am under grace!!! So we use a counting system to estimate carb intake, and we are also careful about how much fat intake and in the end we end up fairly close to the calorie counters with out all the headache.

So every 15 grams of carbohydrate equals 1 carb choice. When you look at a food package label you need to look at the portion size and the number of grams of carbs. If it contains 30 grams of carbohydrate that would be 2 carb choices. This also is going to be estimated. For example lets say a slice of wheat bread contains 17 grams of carbs, that's pretty close so we are just going to say that's 1 carb. So on our daily mental ledger we are going to keep track of how many carb choices we have accumulated. This might sound a little tricky at first but it really is not hard.

This is now the part of the blog where the moderator needs to make sure that everyone understands the prior paragraph. I need each of you to reply back to me by clicking the comment button and tell me yes I got it or no I am lost. This will end my post until I get your replies.