How important is it to measure out fresh veggies for salads

Beth70068

I have a habit of not measuring my veggies I put in my salad. My salad is usually overloaded with romaine, green leafy, red leafy, spinach, cucumber, green onion, carrots, and purple cabbage. For lettuce and spinach when counting i count as a cup each. The other items are general counted as 1/4 a cup. Does it really matter?

hesn92

Meh, all those things are so low in calories I would just guesstimate. But that's just me. The difference from actual would be so small.

TheVirgoddess

What I did was measure my salad ingredients out a few times, figured an average with those and created a recipe for it with the averages.

Sabine_Stroehm

TheVirgoddess wrote: »

What I did was measure my salad ingredients out a few times, figured an average with those and created a recipe for it with the averages.

^^this sounds smart^^

jpaulie

I track my nutrients like potassium so I weigh veggies

shearnerve

I feel everything that goes in your mouth so to speak should he weighted or measured.

cajuntank

Well, all food has caloric content. It's just going to be a matter of how detailed "you" want or need to be. At the end of the day, it might only be a matter of 50-100 calories (based on the info you provided) so you will need to decide if the 50-100 rough calorie variance is what you need to focus on or not. Maybe you could build your normal salad and accurately measure it in grams one time, put it in your recipe builder, and just use it as your go to food item from here on out. Then as long as you are roughly close to those amounts (eye-balling it based on the volume in your bowl/plate), you're probably fairly close to really matter too much.

DawnieB1977

shearnerve wrote: »

I feel everything that goes in your mouth so to speak should he weighted or measured.

Bit extreme. Weigh stuff like lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber etc a couple of times then you get the idea, but to be honest, even if you ate twice as much lettuce as you logged, you might be over by 2 calories.

I don't eat back exercise calories so I'm fairly sure 2 calories wouldn't do me any harm lol.

I lost 66lbs without being obsessive about weighing and measuring.

Sabine_Stroehm

shearnerve wrote: »

I feel everything that goes in your mouth so to speak should he weighted or measured.

Not me. We each need to do what works for us.

marx4

You know, measuring can be helpful in "tricking" your appetite--look at the bagged lettuce mixes, most are 2-2.5 servings, so measure out one serving and you're about 1/2 the bag!! You get all of that spinach, kale, lettuce, whatever---a whopping amount--you're eating FOREVER!!! Measuring veggies illustrates how MUCH you get and can eat for little to no calories!! This works for me, but everyone has their systems and since I LOVE to eat, I'll do ANYTHING to trick me into thinking that I'm eating from an eternal buffet at every meal!!!

Francl27

I weigh it because really, it doesn't take any time. I'm going to put the things one at a time in the bowl anyway, so all I have to do is put the bowl on the scale and hit the 'tare' button between each ingredient (and remember the number, obviously). Hardly a hassle, and then I don't have to worry about eyeballing or being over or whatever (the veggies in my huge salad at lunch were about 80 calories worth, by the way, lol).

Beth70068

Thanks for all the input it helps a lot.