Counting food groups?

jlefton1212

Hello! I have been seeing a dietician, who has recommended counting my food groups using the diabetic food exchange. Once I started doing this I realized that even when I was within a healthy calorie range, my usual diet consisted of mostly protein, carbs, and fat.... and not nearly enough dairy, fruits and vegetables.

I've found it to be very helpful because I am focusing on what I need to ADD to my diet (fruits, veggies, yogurt, etc.) and thus I feel less deprived. The only problem is that it can be hard to calculate my servings if I am eating out or buying processed foods. I've got a cookbook (Betty Crocker) that I've had for years that I just realized has the exchange info for each recipe (in addition to the calories, fat, fiber, etc.) but most of the time foods that I eat do not have the exchange info on them. If I eat raw or plain fruits or veggies I am okay, but as soon as I recreate a recipe it becomes a lot of work!

Does anyone else here count food groups or use the diabetic exchange? And does anyone know of a great source for exchange information?

:-)

TrainingWithTonya

I have a list of foods by the groups that I use. It is a huge spreadsheet, though, and not something I can post on here. If you PM me your email address, I'll be glad to email it to you. It has everything broken down into exchanges by category and since dairy is protein, some things are listed in both categories, but it has been very helpful for my clients.

Another thing I do is add up the servings from my groups as I'm putting together a recipe and then divide by the servings. So, I'll look at a recipe and write down x servings of fruits, y servings of veggies, etc. and then divide them all by the number of servings of the finished dish. Then I just log what I eat based on how many servings I have had. I use to use this method a lot when I was logging manually. Since I've started using MFP, I've pretty much stopped doing that. I can still do it in the notes section, though, so I really should get back to it as it is very effective.

frenchee40

I do the Richard Simmons Food Mover which is based on food exchanges. It's great to have and you can put in your purse. Check it out on Richard's website. I think it's $20 for the food mover set.


http://www.richardsimmons.com