Vegetable calories

Schmoopy11

I've never done any commercial weight loss programs like WW or Jenny Craig but I think I've heard that fruits and vegetables are "free"?

Do we need to track vegetable calories? I can see tracking salad dressing and legumes or dairy on a salad, but what about the lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and onions, etc.....?

KriscoOil

I log EVERYTHING - good or bad!

ElizabethRoad

If you eat it, you should track it. There is no such thing as a "free" calorie.

Jorra

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig don't count calories. MFP counts calories. Count them!

tanniew78

"There is no such thing as a free lunch" They invented that saying for a reason....

Stormyyy

Yeah i would count them as i can put 3 or 4 different veggies into a meal and it mounts up over the day and still would if it was one or two. Goodluck on ur weightloss journey.

vim_n_vigor

You should log everything you eat. If you do forget to log a few bites of lettuce or cucumber or tomato, it won't have as big of an affect on the calories you track as if you miss some chips, cake, cookies, etc., because the calories are so low, but you can eat too many calories of veggies and fruits too!

Mama_CAEI

Fruits are not freebies...they have a lot of sugars in them which ups their calorie count.

I do log my veggies, though it's really just a blip in the overall scheme of things. For example, if you have a salad that has about 2 cups of lettuce in it, that's only about 15 calories.

mleipe

If you ate 100 lb. of broccoli every day you would gain weight, guaranteed.

Vegetables have calories, too, and calories are what make you gain weight.

kekl

I personally don't log my vegetables, aslong as they are the non starchy kind and not in sauce.

MinnieInMaine

Definitely log everything. WW allows for free fruit and most veggies but their plan is set up to allow for that. I don't know about Jenny Craig or any of the others but bottom line, this isn't one of those programs, this is MFP and here you account for everything you eat. And if you don't, the only person you're cheating is yourself.

asyouseefit

If you are following WW, then don't count fruit and vegetables. If you are counting calories only, take them into account.

Huffdogg

You ought to log it all. Personally, I use the base database figures for fresh veggies most of the time and weigh them in increments of 100g. It takes a bit of fiddling to get used to the naming conventions used for this stuff, but generally speaking, if you type in something like:

apples, raw
or
Broccoli, raw

You'll get a result with a bunch of serving options, and one of them will be in increments of 100g. Then you can enter decimal values and get pretty accurate results.

It is generally true that you'd have to consume a TON of veggies to be gaining weight, but if you load up your full calorie diary every day with other foods AND eat a bunch of unlogged fruits and vegetables, too, you're no longer going to be in a deficit. Fruits, in particular, are surprisingly high-calorie and full of sugars that can rack up undesirable results if overdone.

jilljuly

Technically you should log everything as the other posters said, but I found it hard to do when you eat something like, say, a mixed chopped salad. It's easy for me to get lazy about logging, which in turn makes it easy to be lazy about eating and staying under my limits. Not good. So, I take some shortcuts so that the logging task is not too painful. For example, if I had 2 c. of a mix of several steamed vegetables, I might only log 2 c. broccoli and assume that broccoli = (more or less) = carrots = califlower etc. Or I might ONLY log the salad dressing and not the salad, but increase the salad dressing a bit (say to 1.5 servings instead of 1 serving) to account for the salad itself. Not 100% accurate, but keeps me from having to spend half the day logging foods.

dancingj2

I did like that about WW - vegies and fruits were "free". It encouraged me to eat more of them.

But MFP is all about counting calories so I add them in. Doing this allows me to track protien, fiber, etc too.

starshine420

If it gets digested, even gum, if it goes in your mouth, log it. those small calories add up. As everyone else said, here we track calories, while WW you track points. If you want to save on calories, fill up on low calories veggies, but either way, track them

Diary_Queen

For me on WW, I felt the reason they let you not count the veggies & fruit were that they wanted to teach people in a sort of sly way to make a better choice. If you eat 100 calories of broccoli, you get a lot more in your stomach than if you eat 100 calories of a donut. It's still 100 calories, but you feel more full and you're giving your body better nutrition by making that choice.

rileysowner

Yes you need to track veggies. They have calories as well, and no they don't take more energy to digest than they provide. The proof of that is people who eat vegetarian and are fat.

khotch1

I track absolutely everything. I do eyeball my lettuce as far as cups go but everything else is measured or weighed!

khk2010

I wasn't tracking my veggies at first. Then I got more serious and started tracking them. I was surprised at how many calories some veggies have, like an onion, peas, or tomato. I don't always track the celery or some of the other almost "free" veggies but I track the ones that have more than a few calories.

RhonndaJ

If it has calories, track it.