Why I Don’t Count Carbs
(and what I do instead)

NOTE: If counting carbs or calories works for you. If you’re happy with your health and food habits then I’m totally not suggesting you need to change. Skip on to the next page!

But if you aren’t happy with your situation, you might like to try my approach. Or at the very least gain an understanding of why I don’t count carbs or calories. And why I haven’t included nutritional information in this book.

Why I Don’t Count Carbs

1. Counting takes the joy out of eating.
This is the biggest reason for me. Food, especially sharing it with loved ones, is one of the great pleasures that should enrich our lives, not require a spreadsheet and an app.

2. Counting doesn’t guarantee you’re getting the nutrients you need.
As with most of life, getting the quantity right doesn’t mean the quality is also where it should be. Optimum nutrition is super complex, especially if you start trying to micro-manage your intake of each nutrient. No fun.

3. It takes so much time.
Entering everything you eat into an app is time consuming. Since time is our only truly non-renewable resource, I’d rather spend it cooking or reading or gardening or sleeping!

What I Do Instead

1. Focus on real food.
As Michael Pollan puts it in his brilliant book, ‘In Defense of Food’, we are designed to eat food. We’re not designed to eat nutrients and not the highly-processed food-like-stuff that lines our supermarket shelves.

2. Stick to low-carb ingredients.
If I didn’t have diabetes, I wouldn’t be as strict with my use of low-carb ingredients. But my blood sugar control isn’t where it should be, so rather than worry about calculating and tracking my carb intake, I focus on using ingredients I know are fine from a carb perspective.

Occasionally I will treat myself to some roast beets, a slice of proper sourdough bread or a scoop of salted caramel ice cream but these are rare. The less carbs I eat, the less I crave.

There are a handful of recipes using higher-carb real food ingredients in this book. Things like dates and sweet potato. They’ve each been marked with a ‘carb alert’ icon so you’ll know to tread lightly with these goodies.

3. Monitor my blood sugar.
Again if I didn’t have diabetes, I wouldn’t bother. I test my fasting blood sugar every morning. It’s my way of checking in to know I’m on track. Sometimes the results are surprisingly high, and other times they’re lower than expected. I don’t obsess but just use it as a data point.

I also have my HbA1C tested every 6 months. So far that feels like enough tracking.