Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS
We get asked, pretty regularly, why we don’t put macros in our recipes. And the answer might surprise you. The bottom line, though, is that it’s because we like you.
If you want a really good place to find out nutrition information about food, check out the USDA Nutrition Database
9:46 – Why Carrie’s recipes don’t have macros, and why recipes that have macro information are inaccurate
14:22 – Why My Fitness Pal and other tracking apps are not accurate
18:34 – Why Carrie’s recipes don’t have serving sizes
Any vegetarian recipes minus eggs and seafood?
Hi, I am brand new to Keto and my DR. has said I MUST lose weight. She wants me to plan my meals for the week and for each day around a certain number of carbs but with some calorie limit. She said not to go below 30 carbs for the day nor above 1300 to 1500 calories and she would agree to letting me try a modified Keto. She approves of all the subs in flours, fats and oils, etc. I have read some of your wonderful recipes and would love to use them for planning for the week, i.e. also grocery shopping, but without know what the macros are for each recipe, I have to spend FOREVER on the computer looking up each item individually even from a good source for that info. I JUST DO NOT HAVE THAT KIND OF TIME AVAILABLE! If you put the info in for us, I could just pick recipes, put them together according to my limits and have everything done! Then go shopping for the ingredients included. I know there are “menu plan sites” that do this, but I am finding either I or my husband does not like those foods, or I am just not in the mood for them. I would rather find recipes that sound yummy TO ME, select the ones I want for the week and shop and prepare from there. Won’t you PLEASE RECONSIDER your take on this. It would be SO HELPFUL (!) and would cause me to come to YOUR SITE MUCH MORE OFTEN for recipes and guidance. PLEASE, PLEASE PL…E…A..S..E????????
Hi Guion! We hear you – but us giving you macros will not help you, which is why we won’t do it. If it is that important for you to have accurate macros then you won’t use data provided by any other food bloggers or recipe creators, either. They are simply not accurate for what you make and eat, and we are not in the habit or providing inaccurate or misleading information to our lovely readers. We focus on using only KETO ingredients so you can be assured that the recipes are KETO. However, of course, the amount you eat also matters, and we can’t know that. Hope that helps!
That’s a pretty lame excuse. IMO.
IMHO, more information is better than less. Providing a best-guess at the macros or nutrition information provides a ballpark estimate of what the recipe is leading to. And serving size is obviously variable, but if you think a particular recipe should yield 10 servings and I make it and dish out 8, I can do that conversion easily. Simple math.
For my part, I already take the various factors you listed above into account – looking at the raw versus cooked nutrition information as well as an estimate of weight difference from cooking (for things where content boils or drips off); only pulling in the most official sources for the specific ingredients I am using; calculating totals for everything that went into / came out of the pan then dividing by the portion of that which I personally consumed. All of that is a best-guess final answer to what went into my body. Yes, it isn’t 100% accurate even so. I know this, and you know this; even down to the core theory level “4 kcal / g carbs” is a gross simplification which really depends on the specific carbohydrate and the specific individual and even the particular state of gut flora etc. But it gives me a ballpark estimate which lets me know if I’ve gone completely off the rails and keeps me within the overall lane of my eating goals.
All that said, the benefit of having a nutrition label on a recipe that I end up completely disregarding for my own calculation (because I want MY ingredients and MY specific quantities etc), having that nutritional information tells me at a glance – no, I won’t be able to have that today as a satisfying meal because the carbs per serving isn’t going to fit for me at all; or, that looks like something I can fit into this day with the rest of what I have or am planning to eat. It is easier to see a “net carbs” at the bottom of a recipe and start the what-to-eat decision with that than to look into each of the listed ingredients to make sure something higher-carb etc hasn’t slipped in.
Essentially, I hear you saying you can’t be perfect here. And I agree that some people will misuse that information. For fear of being inaccurate you are sacrificing utility, though, and that is a disservice to your readers.
Well said and I agree with you.
Totally agree with this reader’s reply! The BASE nutrition information you could provide could be accurate. What the preparer/consumer does with the recipe beyond that point is not your responsibility. No one has time to take your recipe, enter it into a nutritional database and evaluate it as a total recipe AND decide “Will this work in my meal plan for the day?” I’ll be looking for a different source.
Totally agree with you. A ball park result is better than nothing. I use both calorie and carb macros for my foods. I got rid of 23 kgs in under 3 months by doing both. I am giving myself a break from logging my foods over winter so I don’t have to buy new clothes (winter clothes cost more because you need more 🙂 ). I have been able to maintain my loss and swing 200g either side for 2 1/2 months. Very proud of myself. Eating low or no carbs is the magic to Keto. Log your foods and you cannot go wrong. Honesty with yourself is paramount for weight loss.
I use the KetoDiet app which has hundreds of yummy recipes all with accurate serving sizes and macros. I also use chronometer.com to enter things. I agree about the macros. I just got Carrie’s soup book and have tagged several recipes to try, but I’m not looking forward to entering all the ingredients into chronometer.com. But I know that once I do, it will be there for the next time I make the soup.
Hi Sheryl! I can guarantee you that those macros are not particularly accurate. I have spent days of my life plugging recipes into a variety of different apps and getting completely different results from each app for the exact same recipe. Also, what is an ‘accurate’ serving size? A serving size is how much someone eats, not how much some random blogger tells you it is. I would happily do the math for the recipes if there were any chance it was going to give an accurate idea of what was actually being consumed. But sadly, there isn’t.
We appreciate you very much for supporting our work by purchasing our cookbooks. We hope you love them! They will help you stay the course longterm! KETO On and take care!
A serving size is whatever you say it is. If you make your serving size 2 Tbsp then I know the amount in 3 Tbsp. If I use four I double. If house 1 I cut in half. It doesn’t matter who says what about Serving size. It’s just a marker for reference.
Hi
I am also nrw to Keto and just feeling my way through. The only way I can guage whether I am on the right track is macros. Sure, you might bevright tgat thry aren’t completely accurate, but when you have no idea what you are doing, a little bit of inaccurate knowledge is better than none at all. This lack of information may make the difference between choosing and using your program or one of the *hundreds* of others available. Please reconsider.
(Sorry about the typos – fat fingers, small phone)
I don’t trust any food combination that the creator doesn’t label.
Looks like you will be losing out on some incredible recipes! Personally I refuse to count anything I eat, so annoying! I know what I can and can’t eat and that’s all I do, works great for me! The recipes here are keto, and that’s really all you should need to know.
So I read all the comments about why most macros are not accurate. So, how do we know how much to eat to stay under 20g carbs? What if we ate a very large slice of pie or 2 tartlets? Though it may be keto, it still could put us over. How can we judge how much to eat?
Not to overkill on the macros posting, but I too would appreciate having that info as I’m doing the SANE diet and while I can tell if each ingredient is SANE or inSANE, I can’t tell how to classify a biscuit. Is it a fat? Is it a protein? Is it a little of both? I know we’re not supposed to stress out about our food (raising the cortisol levels!) but not knowing what these biscuits are doing to my body makes me hesitate to eat them, even though they sound delicious. If you’re not sure of a serving size, maybe you could just post info for the entire recipe and let us break it down ourselves with a calculator – lots easier to do than to have to look everything up and add it together, then break it down with a calculator.
Hi Lisa – if you look at the ingredients you can typically tell what to classify it as. In this case it is mostly nuts – so a fat. As we explained in the podcast, providing inaccurate macro data is not a goal of ours. For any accuracy you would need to plug the actual ingredients you use into a calculator and then divide by the amount you actually ate. You also need to make sure you’re using a very accurate calculator. We recommend the USDA database or http://nutritiondata.self.com/, but even then, you’ll quickly work out how difficult it is to produce accurate macros from these calculators. I hope that helps at least a little!
Carrie xytol and me do not get along. What would the substitution of erythritol?