Post Punk Kitchen Forum

First off, I have every Isa book and am in serious looove... I am a weight watchers member, and just got Appetite for Reduction and was beyond geeked when I found out the nutrition info was in there. My question is, I noticed only some of the receipes have the carb count, which is needed to figure out the WW points with the new program. Is there a reason for this?

I don't know why it's missing from a lot of recipes, but I noticed it too. I'm typing a shiitake ton of recipes into WW to make meal planning next week easier, and so far I've noticed that total carbs is missing from:

pg # Recipe
18 Spicy Blue Potato & Corn Salad
31 Quinoa Salad w/Black Beans & Cumin
45 Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad
54 Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes
63 Ginger Mashed Sweet Potatoes & Apples
65 Brussels Sprout-Potato Hash
67 Cranberry-Cashew Biryani
69 Scarlet Barley
70 Unfried Fried Rice
75 Quinoa Puttanesca
80 Butternut Coconut Rice

Ok, I'm not crazy . I was really tired when I was trying to figure out the points and I thought maybe my mind was just blurring them in. I bought it last week when it was still the old plan, and thought I was golden. Now I'm stuck.

Ugh I'm mad that I still haven't gotten my copy. I ordered it with a coworker's amazon stuff so I could get free shipping and it's taking forever to come in. I'll look inside on amazon and figure out the points for some of those when I get home.

On the upside, I didn't notice a single one in the veggies chapter that was missing carb info. (All of those are great on points too, by the way. You know what else is great on points? ALL of the dressings except for the romesco.)

ETA: Main Event Beans are complete too, and also awesome. Most of them are 5 pts for a hearty serving.

Tofu & Tempeh is complete except for one recipe, and also mainly super awesome pointwise. I love this book more with every chapter I calculate points for.

I figured out points for some of the missing ones, but uh, only the ones I really want to eat soon, heh. I listed them per serving as outlined in the book. They are:

Caulipots - 5 pts
Brussels Sprouts-Potato Hash - 4 pts
Cranberry-Cashew Biryani - 8 pts
Scarlet Barley - 4 pts
Unfried Fried Rice - 5 pts
Tamarind BBQ Tempeh & Sweet Potatoes - 10 pts (making this the single most pointful recipe I've noticed so far. New WW system is really hard on tempeh.)

So, here's how you can figure out how many grams of carbohydrate there are in a recipe:

Keep in mind that:
carbohydrate = 4 calories/gram
protein = 4 calories/gram
fat = 9 calories/gram

So, if a recipe such as Caulipots has 190 calories and 35 calories from fat and 6 g of protein we would figure out carbohydrates like this:
1) subtract the fat calories from total calories: 190-35= 155 calories
2) calculate the protein calories by multiplying grams of protein by 4: 6 g protein x 4 calories/gram = 24 calories from protein
3) subtract the protein calories from remaining total calories: 155 - 24 = 131
4) the remaining calories are from carbohydrate, so if you divide that number by 4 you will get grams of carbohydrate:
131 calories / 4 calories per gram = 32.75, which is about 33 g of carbohydrate when rounded.

I hope that this helps everyone when calculating total carbohydrates. When it comes to calculating amounts of fiber and sugar that becomes a bit more tricky. We would have to go back to the original nutritional information from each ingredient.

I'll get up the missing carb info soon! Not sure why it was omitted on some recipes. But yeah, if you enter the recipe into the recipe builder you can get it for now.

Thanks so much for that carb tutorial! Awesome!

am i crazy or do the calorie counts not match up to the derived calorie count amounts....i know you round most of the time but is fiber taken into account nowadays? How do you calculate it now?
I don't mean to be anal I'll still use the listed calorie counts, but i'm just wondering if it changed (calculating) and i missed the memo.

what do you mean by derived calorie count amounts? are you saying the calories listed for each nutrient don't add up to the total amount of calories for a serving?
can you give an example from the book of what you're talking about?

I think they're talking about the weight watchers recipes, which makes sense.

I use livestrong.com to track my intakes and they don't match either, so I just try to estimate.

oh, ok!

Phee, i hope I didn't sound mean there. I was just really curious because I really like figuring out calorie stuff, so if there was a mystery I wanted to solve it.

You didn't sound mean, i just didn't respond because i haven't been on since i posted