Track fruits and veggies or not?

I log everything I eat bc MFP is based off a calorie count not a points system. WW helps you to eat healthier by points, MFP helps by forcing you to eat more lower calorie foods or less bad foods to stay in your goal. Good luck!

If it has calories, you should log it.

I track because I'm trying to keep track of the sugars I'm eating. I know they're natural sugars (and I still don't know if I should worry if I go over in my sugars intake if its all in fruits and veggies) but I need to know what I'm taking in to try and make better choices.

You would be surprised. I track everything. It is a visual ticker of the things I've been eating all day. I am amazed by what I actually eat during the course of the day. I think it's a little easier for me since I don't dine out very often. My husband loves cooking. Just try to keep track of the things you are eating. You'll see. With MFP it doesn't just keep track, it gives you the dietary contents of what you're eating as well. WW doesn't do that, and MFP is free. Also, with MFP you van use the bar code and it will put it in your diary automatically. Trust me. Just try it. It will become a habit. I promise. Let me know how you're doing. We can do this together!

Track them. They all contain calories, even if they're low (like salad). Things like bananas are quite calorie dense (I have 100g banana most days, logs 103 cals), a small corn on the corn contains something like 136 cals.

When WW changed the program to "not" count points for fruits and most vegetables, they also altered the points of other foods to account for servings of fruits and vegetables in a customers meal plan.

I think the reasoning behind that was to get people to eat more fruits/vegetables and not to choose a 100-calorie pack of processed food over fresh produce.

That said, fruits and vegetables do contain calories and if you don't log fruits/vegetables in MFP, you aren't logging those calories when you log other food in your diary.

Count points or count calories, it really doesn't matter. But if you don't log calories for fruits and vegetables on MFP, you aren't getting a true picture of the number of calories you are eating every day.

the confusion comes in when people who dont use the program refer to them as " free " and assume

"ZOMG you cant lose if you dont track ever speck!"

basically when they created the system it included your full 3-5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day in the base points calculation...soooooo sort of like say if MFP gave you 100 cals for a day (small number to keep it easy) WW system would give you more like 75 but tell you hey ...dont count the fruits or veggies on the pre approved list! so although you don't track them daily in your point count, they aren't " free "...you are still supposed to list them in your food journal and also count how many servings you have each day.

is it possible to go over by say eating only really high cal produce choices? absolutely.
if you are really following the program the way it was intended and not trying to cheat the system/yourself and you have even the smallest bit of common sense then its pretty unlikely.

Well, I took in 1,100 calories today… in NOTHING but fresh (non-processed) fruits and vegetables. I've never understood the whole "free" foods thing. They have calories and affect your macros…

I track everything that goes into my mouth!! MFP has set a goal of 1800 calories per day. I try and hit 1500 instead. I started on 21 October 2012 @ 257 # and as of today (13 Jan 2013) weigh in @ 234.8. Not bad for 72 with COPD

Yes. Many fruit are very high in calories..its pure sugar. You need to track it.

Track everything. Everything!

Its a good habit to get in to. That includes drinks as well. If you have milk in tea/coffee you need to track that as well.

Fruit is good but should be limited (and not all fruit is equal), Veggies are better.

Weight Watchers likes to manipulate what you eat by giving you lower or free points for healthy foods. The problem is, that at it's heart, WW is a Calorie restricting program. Allowing "freebies" to a group of people that might have restraint issues isn't a smart idea.

A few years ago if you ate a lot of fiber with your meal it could lower the points down to almost nothing. So people took it too far and started putting fiber powder in stuff that they shouldn't be eating, and they wondered why they didn't lose weight. So weight watchers changed their calculation so that you could only count up to 4g fiber at a time, and you could only get the benefits of that 4g once per day (if you ate high fiber bread, you could only eat that bread once use the fiber, after that one time you had to calculate points without it). This made it harder to game the system. Of course people just found a ton of fiber rich snacks and ate a ton of different ones to keep their points low.

Veggies were already free and so were most condiments. But Weight watchers as a group noticed that because food with fiber was so low in points people were avoiding (even lean) proteins. They changed their program again to include Protein, and Carbs into their calculation. Their new calculation reduced the amount of points for a lean piece of meat. But it also caused another problem (in testing the new program). Because they were now measuring carbs, a bunch of fruits shot up in point value. We all know that fruits are good for us, but people with low points would not reach for a banana, they would reach for a processed snack that hadn't gone up in points. So weight watcher's idea was to reduce the amount of calories you received every day and allow you to have unlimited fruit.

Remember what I said above about restraint?

Yes I do...