Tip O' the Week

Learn how to solve for X. You're gonna need it. Seriously, dust off that brain of yours. You really should have listened when your math teacher told you that you would need this someday! Because Elise is on such small carb amounts for her meals, every carb counts! And so I can get an accurate idea of how many carbs are in that 32g bowl of pasta, I need to solve for X. Here's a basic lesson:

Look on that package of pasta. How much does a serving weigh? 58g? Okay, now look where it shows you the amount of carbs in that serving... great, 41g. This is what the equation will look like (and yes, I had to physically write it out each time in the beginning):

58 - 41
__________
32 - x

(the way I would say it in my brain is: if 58 grams of pasta equals 41 grams of carbs, then 32 g of pasta equals what?)

To solve it, you multiply 32 by 41 and divide by 58. So in this case x= 23 (I rounded up) That 32g bowl of pasta has 23 grams of carbs. Ta da.

And the formula is always the same, whether you weigh in grams, ounces, stones... whatever. Once you've memorized the formula, the rest is easy as cake and simple as pie. Mmmmmm, cake and pie.

***there is something called carb factors that you can also use to figure out carb counts, but my brain just isn't ready to tackle that yet. I'll let you know when I get there.

Edited to add: This comment from Gail, who nicely informs me I was using carb factors already... go me! She explains it rather well, and also has a tip about figuring out the carbs in pasta.

Gail said...
You're essentially using carb factors already. You can think of carb factors as just the amount of carbs in 1 gram of the food. So if a food has a carb factor of 0.71, for example, you just weigh the food (say you get 32 grams) and multiply the weight by the carb factor. For 32 grams of that food, 32 X 0.71 = 22.7. That's for the pasta in your example.

One caution - if you're using numbers from a pasta package, they're usually for the pasta UNCOOKED. So make sure you also weigh your pasta dry since the weight will change when you cook it.
January 5, 2009 6:49 AM