Day 6 with several questions

[krisanlove]

1) I haven't been taking any vitamins. Is this okay? (If you answer no, please tell me what you suggest)

2) I found fitday and love it except some of their carb totals are different from what I find on packages. Which amounts should I go by?
I drink a lot of decaf green tea. I though it was 0 carbs but fitday said otherwise.

3) Why can't my decaf green tea count towards my water intake?

[not2late]

Re: Day 6 with several questions

1) I haven't been taking any vitamins. Is this okay? (If you answer no, please tell me what you suggest)

2) I found fitday and love it except some of their carb totals are different from what I find on packages. Which amounts should I go by?
I drink a lot of decaf green tea. I though it was 0 carbs but fitday said otherwise.

3) Why can't my decaf green tea count towards my water intake?

1. Dr. Atkins wrote that we need to take a 'good multivitamin' without iron. He recommended Atkins Basic 3, which is no longer on the market. The closet thing that comes to it is Centrum Silver. The no iron thing is due to the fact that we should be getting enough iron through our foods so there is no need for that supplementation. The reason why we need vitamin supplementation is that in Dr. Atkins' experience with overweight people---many of us are vitamin deficient to begin with.

2. It depends....if you choose to use fitday.com, follow fitday. If you choose to follow the nutritional info on the packages use them. I'm not a regular fitday user, but the last time I saw it they seem to have
tightened up on their carbs and they aren't estimating the carb counts as much as they used to do.

US Manufacturers follow the USDA/FDA food labelling regulations. Basically, if a food contains 0-0.5 grams of carbs per serving, the manufacturer can legally label it as 0 carbs. So you decaf tea can have 0-0.5 grams per serving (usually 1 tea bag). That amount might not mean anything, but if you are drinking 4 or 6 servings of that tea, you are getting anywhere from 0 to 2 or 3 carb grams from the tea alone.

Same thing goes for Splenda in packets or the spoonable kind. Each packet of Splenda has 0.8 or 0.9 net carbs, each teaspoon of it has about the same amount.

3. Dr. Atkins wrote that the only thing that counts as water is water: filtered, tap, spring or mineral. Decaf beverages are not caffeine-free. The decaffeination process removes most of the caffeine but at least 25% remains. So even if it's decaf, it's still not "water".

[krisanlove]

Re: Day 6 with several questions

Thank you so much for your informative response! I started to think no one would respond. I was using one tea bag for several mugs of tea a day.

Also, I have some multi-vitamins but they do include iron. Would this hurt me?
Do I also have to take magneium and potassium?

[Elizellen]

Re: Day 6 with several questions

If you are using fitday.com you can get an idea of how well your food choices fill the nutritional requirement of vitamins and minerals by clicking on the 'reports' tab and choosing the 'Nutrition' option. It will show you if you are lacking in any of them so you can choose to add extra pills or different foods rich in what you are lacking.

As for the iron question, I am not sure what having too much of it would do to your health, maybe you can google for some info? Depending on what meats you choose (some have more iron in than others) you might be fine using your multi-vit with iron in it.

You can add your multivitamin as a custom food (typing in all the amounts of the different vitamins it contains) and look at the nutrition report for a day's food including vitamin pills to help you decide what to do. Or if you see your doctor you could ask for advice.