zero cal foods, count them or no?

dfwesq

The estimate of the calories you burn every day just by being alive and conscious already includes calories needed for activities like eating, chewing, digesting, etc. If you treated vegetables on some list as zero-calorie or negative-calorie, you'd be deducting those same calories a second time.

MommaGem2017

ritzvin wrote: »

MommaGem2017 wrote: »

ninavalentine wrote: »

I take it a step further. I don't count low calorie green vegetables like lettuce, broccoli, spinach, etc. I figure I eat more of them that way (don't have to make "room" for them in my calorie count) and if I go over 100 calories or so on green veggies it will be a tiny (and healthy) blip on the overall radar. I've lost 60 lbs. so far and it seems to work well for me.

The only problem would be if someone is tracking fiber intake, then the amount of fiber our veggies eaten is important to track.

The ~nil calorie stuff usually doesn't have much fiber (like lettuce..I track fiber and would log it if it did). Bananas, beans, green beans, which do have a good quantity of fiber all have significant calories. Exception probably being (a small amount of) sugar-free stuff that uses locust bean gum.

The poster I was responded to specifically said broccoli and spinach which do have a good amount of fiber. A good amount of my daily fiber does come from low cal veggies.

kaygold

Even though I know they aren't zero calories, I don't log splenda (unless granulated), walden farm products, pam, gum, liquid water flavoring, or spray butter. Honestly, I don't eat huge volumes of these items, nor do I eat them every day...well with the exception of splenda packets in my coffee, and gum. I think the amount of calories they have are negligible in the big picture. I've continued to loose weight despite not logging these items.