Yep, it's hard to do. A lot of the things you
should eat, even on a low carb diet (such as fruit and veg) contain carbs. So you have to be mindful of every bite you take. We've been told that having protein at the same time as your carb will slow the digestion of the carb somewhat, so lessen it's impact on blood sugar. But you still need to watch portion sizes of everything. And pre-made foods, things out of cans or boxes, are a nightmare.
For home-baking treats, such as cookies, cakes, or brownies, blanched almond flour is my go to now. I also use rolled oats, which contain carbs but have enough fiber that it cuts down the carb impact a bit. Flax meal is almost completely devoid of carb count, high in fiber, but the resulting baked good resembles horse feed.
If you like old style, scrape-your-throat-as-they-go-down muffins, flax meal is your ticket. Healthy, but only marginally edible. (You can sneak a small amount of it into other recipes, though, to pull up the fiber content.)
What we've been told is that you can subtract the grams of fiber in a food from the total carb count, and use the result as the "true" carb count. And if there are sugar alcohols used as sweetener (maltitol, etc - they usually end with a "tol") you can subtract 1/2 of the grams of sweetener from the total carb count as well.
You can get almond meal, which is not as finely ground and still has bits of the brown part of the nut, and it works well in cookies, but they have a more dense texture than the almond flour. I've tried coconut flour, not too impressed with it. You have to use strong flavors in the recipe or everything tastes vaguely of coconut. And it's a moisture hog - you have to add extra moisture to your mix or it comes out a brick when done. Oh, the one catch with the Almond flour/meal - low carb does not equate to low-calorie.
I did find a link to a program that will show the nutrition of any food or recipe you put in
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/recipe/calculator . It has a box to put in the number of servings for the total amount you enter, so you can calculate, say, the carbs in a single muffin if you just add the amounts of every ingredient into it. It's really handy - I've developed a recipe for nice chocolate cookies that comes in at about 5 carbs per cookie so feel no guilt about having a couple with tea in the evening.
As far as artificial sweeteners, we've tried stevia, xylitol, and erythritol (which, apparently, is zero carbs in the counting scheme). Truvia makes a baking mix that is a combination of stevia, erythritol, and a bit of cane sugar, so baked goods come out properly. It's supposedly got 70% less calories than "real" sugar, but I've yet to be able to find out the exact proportions of actual sugar in it from any source. It does work well, though. I find that xylitol leaves a weird aftertaste, as does most stevia. The kiddo has bad reactions to Aspertame/Splenda, so we can't use those.
In the recent past some of the stevia companies seem to have found a way to reduce the aftertaste - not sure what they are doing, but I've had a few commercially made items (Hubert's lemonade, for one) made with it lately that I could not tell contained it. (YEA!)
