Introduction
The idea of net carbs is related to the fact that not all food that you consume actually gets absorbed and used by the body. There are certain carbs that the body will not absorb and does not count toward calories. This NutriWiki will cover exactly how to think about and track, your net carbs.
Summary
- Your body will absorb and use all carbohydrates as energy sources, except for fiber (soluble and insoluble) or non-caloric sweeteners (e.g. aspertame, acelsulfame K, stevia).
- Net carbs is simply: total carbs – non-usable carbohydrates.
- You can log them separately, but we recommend just logging all your carbohydrate intake.
Discussion
You can choose to remove these carbohydrates from your daily carbohydrate count. But we don’t really recommend it.
Why? After coaching thousands of people we find that most people don’t need to really worry about net carbs as the difference between total calorie intake in a day from net carbs and total carbs is fairly minimal.
What should you do? We recommend you log all your carbohydrates and treat all your carbohydrates as calorie-containing foods, this means that if anything, you are going to overestimate your caloric intake and you are probably more likely to succeed during a dieting cycle.