newbie question..carbs and vietnamese food.

[bonmy]

Hi, i have about 10 lbs to lose,
Living in Vietnam. i have an abundance of fruits and vegetables to play with
along with great seafood, my question concerns portion size and a few Vietnamese dishes along with a few i could not find in the book,

okay olives..any carbs? the actual Greek olives?

Rice pancakes called banh xeo in vietnamese they are small about the size of a very small taco filled with shrimp and vegetables. these will be my carb treat in the evening with seafood. i don't know what the carb counts would be like for these..any ideas? i am staying away from all the rice products in this country,

Heineken and or italian red wine. i cannot locate any miller lite here. and i enjoy Either two beers with the seafood OR two glasses of italian red, (similar to cabernet)

Orange juice? fresh squeezed is the carb count the same as eating the actual orange?

i will be eating large amounts of broccoli and bak choy here for my greens along with a small servings or carrot and tomatoes, my big question is whether i will be going over for my dinner meals, i decided to stick to the 55 gram carb daily requirement

These are the few question i am having difficulty with answering after reviewing the book, i have a scale and will be monitoring the carbs very carefully, as i will try this program for 8 weeks and judge my results,

Please chime in with info on the above questions, and good luck with your goals

thanks

bonmy

[Frank Hagan]

Welcome to the forums! I took a look online and found some carb counts:

5 large olives (http://www.carbs-information.com/carb-vegetables/carbs-in-olives.htm): net carbs .7 grams (carbs minus fiber)

Your rice cakes are going to be hard to find on the 'net; the same source above has 1 rice cake at 6.9 grams net carbs, but they don't indicate how large a rice cake it is. I suspect they are talking about American rice cakes, which are a snack food about 3" in diameter. You might weigh one of the rice cakes and calculate it based on that weight of plain rice. Typically, rice is pretty high on the carb scale. But a small, pita-style rice cake may not have that many carbs (especially if you're dividing up 55 grams of carbs over the day).

Dry red wine is better than sweet red wine. Most dry reds will have about a gram of carb in a 4 ounce glass. Beer will be higher in carb count

Heineken beer (http://www.carbs-information.com/carbs-in-beers/heineken-beer.htm): 16 grams carbs in a 12 ounce glass. Ouch! Light beers usually have 4.5 to 5 grams carbs per 12 ounce glass.

Orange juice: (http://www.carb-counter.org/fruit/search/Orange%20juice/0900) Forget it. About 20 grams carbs for raw (unsweetened) orange juice per 7 ounces. Orange juice is one of the things diabetics use to quickly raise their blood sugar if they crash.

Dark green veggies are usually low carb, so you are OK with broccoli. Bok Choy is low carb ... a cup of shredded bok choy (http://nutrition.about.com/od/fruitsandvegetables/p/BokChoy.htm) is less than a gram of carbs. Carrots (http://www.carbs-information.com/carb-vegetables/carbs-in-carrots.htm) are higher in carbs, with about 5 net grams of carbs in a carrot.

You can find carbs in foods by using Google to search for "carbs in xxxxx"; you usually get several links. Sometimes you have to average them :confused: but I think the various choices get you into the ballpark.

[maxlharris]

Hi Bonmy,

Let's go through how you could figure these out.
Nutritiondata.com is a good place to work from. I will work through your questions using that site (unless otherwise noted).

Olives:
per 100g:
Pickled, Large Green - 4g carb, 3g fiber, therefore 1g net carb.
Ripe, canned - carb 6g, fiber 3g, 3g net carb.

Orange Juice:
1 Cup, Raw - 26g of carbs. (I am afraid this is out on Protein Power except in very small doses. To get that down to <10g of carbs, you're talking 3 ounces of juice. Very small serve.

Nutrition Data puts a 12 ounce can of beer at 12g, which is a fair rule of thumb for most conventional Pilsner type beers.
A quick google search for Heineken carbs yields this link:
http://www.carbs-information.com/carbs-in-beers/heineken-beer.htm
Which puts Heinie at 16g of carbs to a 12 ounce serving.
2 Heinies are out. Try half a heinie with straight protein/fat for dinner, like a half chicken.

Nutrition Data puts a 5 ounce pour of Red Wine, Table, at 4g per 5 ounces. This can vary quite a bit. When someone enables your search function on this board, you can find a very detailed thread about the amount of carbs in wines of all types. Since wines vary from year to year, by varietal, by terroir, by any number of additional factors, the best you are ever going to do is make an informed estimate.

For Banh Xao, I had to go to google. It turned up TheDailyPlate.com (a site that I do not like that much). It reports 41g of carbs per serving. Myfitnesspal.com reports 60 net carbs per serving. I could look for a few others, but I thought working backwards from a recipe would make this easier. http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com/2007/02/banh-xeo-recipe.html. Amy reports that Banh Xao start with a cup of rice flour. I know, from years of low carbing, that Rice is very high in carbs, as it's basically pure starch. Rice flour is grains of rice reduced to dust, which basically means it has a higher carb content than the equivalent measure of rice (less air as powder packs tighter than grain). I am afraid that Banh Xao are out.

This raises a bigger question. If eating as you have been eating has gotten you to where you are, it's going to take some changes to get you to where you want to be.

This is not an easy way to eat. It involves giving up a number of things, which you get to replace with a number of things you may not have been eating, and you may enjoy more. But really, ditching things like multiple beer dinners and bread type wrappings is kind of central to the program and is not exactly easy, especially in the beginning.