Atkins Diet Error, Starting Over!

I am so annoyed with myself – today I discovered that I have been miscalculating my carb count all week and that in fact I have had around 26g of carbs a day instead of 20g! The confusion arose from the way ‘net carbs’ are calculated, or labelled I should say. This happened because I read US literature but I am in the UK and use a UK food database online.

In the US, food labels list total carbohydrate and they also list fiber but the total carb count also includes the fiber. Fiber is indigestible so it passes through the body without affecting blood sugar levels and thus we don’t need to count it. In the US you need to calculate ‘net carbs’ by subtracting the fiber amount from the total carb count but UK food labels list them separately and the carb count already has the fiber subtracted.

I realised the mistake when looking at a recipe and the carbs minus the fiber gave me a negative value. Huh? I googled around and found the answer pretty quickly. So all week I had been subtracting the fiber and I shouldn’t have.

Okay so how much of a disaster is it? Well it depends on the way you look at it – considering before this week I was eating around 80g carbs a day and before Paleo I was probably around 200g, a mere 6g does not seem like much. But the problem is that I am doing this as a personal experiment and I can only truly know the results if I follow the diet to the letter. Plus, for me personally I am really bad at following anything – I always cheat so it’s important for me psychologically to really do this right. So I’m starting over today.

Today should be day 5 but instead, I’m now counting it as the new day 1. There is an advantage of doing this actully – the Atkins diet does not allow Caffeine and I am a regular coffee drinker. Not wanting to suffer withdrawls, I decided to wean myself off the caffeine gradually but I’m nearly there now so I reckon I can just cut it out completely from today so then I will well and truly be doing it 100% correctly.

It’s irritating starting on a Friday but no big deal really. Better than having a 4 day cheat.