Hi Ace

Well I must thank Vicki for the plug. Now I am here!!!!!

I know what you mean about cups. I found this a nightmare at first. No I don't have a book, but this is how I got round the problem.

When I started I did not know about Fitday.com. This is a great site and I now use it all the time. The basic foods on there you can usually add in in ounces, provided you have a scale that will weight them, however, you can customise it and add things in grammes. I use a mixture of both.

But before then I got to inspect packets very carefully. I looked at meat to see if there were any carbs in it. Careful with sausages and beefburgers - you can get low carb ones, but many have lots of extra filler. On the vegetable front, Sainsburys does not tend to label its veggies and so what I did was went into the Sainsburys to Go and Tesco on line websites and looked up the product information for main stream items. I then kept a list at the back of my book of how many carbs each vegetable had per 100g. I still use that list today as I compare my own count with the carb count from Fitday.

I found the US carb values confusing at first as they tend to include fibre in the carb count which we do not in the UK. What you need to do is take the fibre away from the total carbs, in this case, to get the effective carbohydrate count (ECC). Fitday does this automatically for you when it does its calculations.

There is also a carb counter in the bar to the right of this forum. Have you used that at all. This uses 100g as the base measure so it will give you an idea of basic products.

Hope that helps and you enjoy low carbing. I have been on this lifestyle for over a year now and would not go back to old habits.

I see you are starting at the weight I hope to be this weekend when I weight. Mind you, you will probably get to your target long before I get to 154, if you stick to it.

Every success. Any other questions why not pop into my journal and ask.