Tracked as a goal
Carbohydrate tracking
- Unit
- g
- Default goal
- 220 g
- Direction
- Reach
What it is, and why people track it
Carbohydrate is the body's most readily used energy source. It is also the macro where a single total hides the most, because starch, sugar and fiber behave very differently and are all carbohydrate.
AIM tracks fiber and sugar as their own metrics for exactly this reason. If you care about net carbs, that is total carbohydrate minus fiber — both numbers are on every meal.
Setting your number
AIM starts at 220 g a day, roughly 45% of a 2,000 kcal day. Low-carb and ketogenic approaches run far below that; endurance training runs above it. This is a default to replace, not advice.
How good is the estimate?
Good for identifiable starches — rice, bread, pasta, potato — where portion drives the number. Weakest on sauces and dressings, which carry more sugar than they look like they do.
Questions
- Does AIM track net carbs?
- It tracks total carbohydrate and fiber separately on every meal, so net carbs is the subtraction of two numbers you already have. You can also add net carbs as a custom metric with its own goal.
Also in this group
Protein
Protein is the metric most people open a tracker for. AIM estimates it per ingredient rather than per meal, so a swap of chicken for tofu shows up where it happened.
Fat
Total fat per meal, with saturated fat tracked separately as a cap — because they are two different questions and one number cannot answer both.
Fiber
Fiber is the nutrient most people are short on and least likely to have a field for. In AIM it is a standard metric with its own goal and its own color on every chart.
Sugar
Sugar is a cap in AIM, not a goal — a number to stay under, with a warning at the meal that takes you past it rather than a bar that keeps cheerfully filling.
Track carbs without a database search
AIM estimates it on every meal from a photo or a sentence, and lets you correct anything it got wrong just by saying so.