calories in fruit and veg???

kajalpoit wrote: »

Wow i love NYC would love to visit someday again.
Ardita you look amazing! Whats ur secret?

ha, thanks. I ate at a deficit, logged all my food, used a food scale and definitely WEIGHED my fruits and veggies I ate whatever I wanted, dessert every night-wine on the weekends.

I lifted heavy all throughout my weight loss, with minimal cardio, and ate an adequate amount of protein to help save LBM.

WW make fruit and veg 0 Points to encourage people to eat them instead of something else. If you could have a banana for 2 points, or a cookie, lots of people would go for the cookie. The points allotments are geared to take into consideration that you will be eating fruit and veg along with your daily points - kind of like if MFP didn't count veg, your calorie allotment would be a couple hundred less. So WW DO count fruit and veg, they just do it for you on averages when calculating how many points you should eat rather than getting you to do it.

I recently made a batch of the "Free" soup that WW used to tout all the time - it is 140 cals a bowl, and I used to eat 2-3 bowls a day on top of the rest of the veg I ate. It's actually quite odd that they don't count fruit and veg, fruit especially, because it gives people a really skewed idea of their intake.

stevencloser wrote: »

Susieq_1994 wrote: »

arditarose wrote: »

Susieq_1994 wrote: »

arditarose wrote: »

Susieq_1994 wrote: »

Veggies and fruits have plenty of calories. One large salad for me, with no dressing, contains 100 calories. Bananas contain more than 100 PER PIECE. A large, ripe pomegranate contains around 400 calories. They aren't as low in calories as you might think!

I didn't know pomegranate was so high. Dang.

Yup, it made me sad. Nearly 70 calories per 100 grams, if I recall correctly, and most of my pomegranates clocked in at around 500 grams after removing the skin. Phooey

Wait, so you weighed just the little seeds right?

Yup. I don't eat the skin, after all With skin, my pomegranates weighed anywhere between 700 grams and a kilo!

Hmm, I wonder if the calorie count for my melon was for just the flesh or a piece with the rind still attached. Same I always wonder when wanting to eat chicken legs.

USDA information always refers only to the edible parts of food, "with bone and gristle removed", according to their guidelines. That includes fruit skins, eggshells, and bones in meat, fish, and poultry.

Excess calories cause weight gain. If you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight no matter where the calories come from. So does fruit make you fat? It can in the sense that if you eat too much of it (or too much of anything) you will gain weight. If you eat higher calorie fruits like bananas you will be more likely to put on weight than if you eat lower calorie fruits like strawberries.

Fruit is packed with nutrients, has a high water content that makes it filling, and contains fiber. In moderation, fruit is an excellent choice as a healthy source of carbohydrates.

Fructose found in fruits, like any other form of calories, will cause weight gain when over-eaten, but doesn’t have magical fat storage powers, and it doesn’t damage your liver at low-moderate consumption levels. While regular fruit eaters don’t have anything to worry about, but it’s worth noting that regular eaters of refined sugars like high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose can reach unhealthy levels very easily.

First of all, it’s important to understand how we really measure the sugars in fruit. We don’t actually take a piece of fruit, examine it in the lab, and quantify the grams of sugar in each portion. What actually happens is that we measure the effect that that fruit has on our blood sugar levels. There are two ways to represent this – Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL). First I’ll explain how these measures work, and at the end of article I have included two tables with the numbers for various fruits.

GLYCEMIC LOAD IS A MORE USEFUL MEASURE THAN GLYCEMIC INDEX

The Glycemic Index of a food is a numerical unit describing how far eating a food will raise one’s blood sugar level; effectively, it represents how ‘sugary’ the food is. The Glycemic Index uses a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is pure glucose. A food which has a high GI will cause a large increase in blood sugar, while a food with a lower GI will not have much impact at all. As a rough basis, mid-50s to mid-60s in a food’s GI is considered average, while 70 and above is considered high. Foods with a GI of less than 55 are considered to have a low glycemic index, and thus will have smaller impact on blood sugar levels.

The main problem with the Glycemic Index is that it does not factor in typical portion sizes. In fact, it standardizes each food to include 50 grams of carbohydrates. This leads to some peculiar distortions. For example, to obtain 50 grams of carbohydrates you would need either 2.8 ounces of a Snickers bar or 35 ounces of pumpkin. It hardly seems fair to compare the two when these portion sizes are so unrealistic!

In 1997, researchers at Harvard University introduced the concept of Glycemic Load with the aim of solving this problem. The Glycemic Load seeks to balance the Glycemic Index by accounting for serving size. Let’s take a watermelon as an example. It has a high GI, as the carbohydrate will increase blood sugar levels rapidly, but it contains a relatively small amount of the carbohydrate, meaning that it has a low glycemic load.

A food’s Glycemic Load is calculated directly from its Glycemic Index. We simply take the food’s Glycemic Index, divide it by 100, and multiply it by the grams of carbohydrate (excluding fiber) in a typical serving size. A GL of above 20 is considered high, the 11-19 range is considered average, and below 11 is low.

Let’s look again at watermelon. It has a Glycemic Index of 72, which is relatively high. However, a typical serving size only has 5 grams of carbohydrate. This means we can calculate the Glycemic Load like this: 72/100*5 = 3.6. Although the Glycemic Index is high, the Glycemic Load is relatively low. Which one is more useful to us? The Glycemic Load.

Watermelons are an unusual case, insofar as they have a high Glycemic Index (above 70 is considered high), yet have a low Glycemic Load (below 11 is low). This is not common, as most foods with a high GI will have a correspondingly high GL. As long as u eat fruits in proportion considering how they will spike your insulin levels as mentioned above you should be fine. Hope this helps

kami3006 wrote: »

arditarose wrote: »

kajalpoit wrote: »

Whats recomp? Sorry if its a silly qn

It's changing your body composition. Weight training to try to lose fat and gain muscle. It's a long process as you can't typically gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. So, I always question my choice lol.

LoL. There's just no wiggle room for calories.

And it plays mind games on me! I always shave off 100 from a few days out of the week so I can eat more on the weekend, so I still feel like I'm in a deficit sometimes. And I'm struggling to find maintenance. This week I'm going to try to go a little past what MFP gives me.

kajalpoit wrote: »

I find it strange that it adds up when you eat veges as snacks and as part of a smoothie or dinner.

its food. its not strange they have calories. what is strange, are systems NOT counting those calories.

I am pretty sure the only thing that doesn't have calories is water.

Pretty sure everything from coke zero to apples have calories. I'm sure you could even find the calories on a box of tissues or a cup of dirt if you were into eating that.

kajalpoit wrote: »

How are you all getting along with MFP? Where are you guys all from?

I like it, helps me track my food and gives me goals to stay under or exceed. I'm from Australia.