Everyone that reads this blog since the beginning knows that I have a bit of a man-crush on the work of Mark Bittman. I own his book “How To Cook Everything” in hardcover, I own his iPad app, “How To Cook Everything“, I bought the book “VB6” where he takes on the food industry and tries to help us all lose weight. Now he has another project out there on a site called “Trello” that I had never heard of before. Bittman has put recipes for the entire month on the site. Trello is a way that you and your team mates can organize yourselves and collaborate. Bittman’s board is called “Mark Bittman Recipes Board”. It is divided into Vegetarian, Meat, Seafood and Sides. There is a monthly calendar associated with it that comes with shopping lists at the grocery. This is real help to get your kitchen organized enough to make your own non-processed foods to eat day after day. I plan on creating a similar TRELLO board around non-carb recipes and ideas for getting away from the industrial meat markets, too. I have bookmarked the Bittman board and plan to come back often.

People that are trying to limit their carb intake don’t have the luxury of everything that contains them being labeled. There are naturally occurring carbs in naturally occurring foods, the kind that don’t get labels at the produce counter, the kind that I am always recommend that you eat instead of the processed foods that claim to have natural ingredients thrown back in them. I am trying to limit my carb intake, it is the only way that I can lose fat. To quickly see if a food has carbs you can use a fitness app like “MyFitnessPal“, which I got last year to help me keep from starving myself to death when I first went on the 21 Day Sugar Detox.

MyFitnessPal has a feature where you can go into the settings and tell it how much of different ‘macronutrients’ like carbohydrate, protein or fats that you want your diet to consist of. I put down that I want 10% carbs, 60% fats, and 30% protein. It is hard to find out how many carbs are in a food though, like if you were at the grocery store trying to decide what to buy. For that, I have to have another app.

I am going to be trying out the iPhone app “Carb Manager“. It costs 2.99 and boasts a UPC scanner for people that buy foods with labels…I won’t be using that, but it will come in handy from time to time. It has also been recently updated by it’s developer, which shows continuing support, which means you won’t be paying almost three dollars for software that will soon be obsolete.

Even handier would be an app that I can use to quickly look up the carb information on any food in the store. Lots of calorie counting apps can do this, lots of nutrition apps can do this, I am looking for carbohydrate information specifically. I am going to try the app “ShopWell” out. It is free to try. You can scan items, you can see nutrition labels for foods that don’t come with them. It claims to personalize food scores based on my needs. Let’s see how that works.

Well, to recap, try out Bittman’s Trello page, I think you will find that handy. MyFitnessPal app is something you will find VERY handy as you transition into the world of alternative eating, and by that I mean trying to not eat like the rest of the Western world eats. I am trying two new tracking programs for counting carbs. I will let you know how I like what I got today.