Tracking fruits and veggies

I'm not sure where you're hearing that, but it isn't true.

Fruits and vegetables have calories. If your plan is to lose weight by counting calories, why wouldn't you want to count them?

cmontes80 wrote: »

This might sound like a dumb question but do you track all fruits and veggies? I always hear how we burn the calories right away from most vegetables.

Fruits and veg have calories...I eat a ton of veg and a couple servings of fruit daily...to be essentially negative calorie would mean that fruit and veg have 100% TEF and their is no food that has 100% TEF...the highest is actually protein at around 30% TEF if I remember correctly.

You're ingesting calories...if your calorie target is 1500 calories and you hit that, say, with no fruit and veg...and then you eat 300 calories worth of veg and fruit on top of that...guess what?

WW and the like make these free foods in order to get people to eat more...but they also inflate the points of other things to make up the difference.

Veg are low calorie and you can eat a lot of them...but yeah...I just finished eating around 70 calories worth of veg...by the end of the day, I'll likely be between 200-300 calories in fruit and veg...if you think that doesn't count, you're crazy.

cmontes80 wrote: »

I was a weight watcher client and I guess they brain washed me hahha ok, thanks for the input!

It's not really brainwashing...they make them "free" to try to get people to eat more...which people should eat more...but they inflate the points of other things...calorie counting is not assigning arbitrary points to something...their are actual calories in those things.

I no longer weigh my low-cal veggies as precisely as I did at first. I now know about how much lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cucumber, etc I normally put in my salads and the differences are just a few calories either way. I still log them, but I don't worry about writing down every individual weight. There are other veggies that I know from having weighed/logged before that are higher in calories and I do weigh those every time.

Fruit, I always weigh/log.

serindipte wrote: »

I no longer weigh my low-cal veggies as precisely as I did at first. I now know about how much lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cucumber, etc I normally put in my salads and the differences are just a few calories either way. I still log them, but I don't worry about writing down every individual weight. There are other veggies that I know from having weighed/logged before that are higher in calories and I do weigh those every time.

Fruit, I always weigh/log.

When making a salad, I generally don't weigh my greens, but I do log them. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, and any other veggies that go into the salad get weighed.

earlnabby wrote: »

serindipte wrote: »

I no longer weigh my low-cal veggies as precisely as I did at first. I now know about how much lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cucumber, etc I normally put in my salads and the differences are just a few calories either way. I still log them, but I don't worry about writing down every individual weight. There are other veggies that I know from having weighed/logged before that are higher in calories and I do weigh those every time.

Fruit, I always weigh/log.

When making a salad, I generally don't weigh my greens, but I do log them. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, and any other veggies that go into the salad get weighed.

I went for 6 months that I weighed every piece of lettuce. I know that, when I get down further and my calorie deficit is more narrow, I can go back to weighing out the cucumbers, carrots, etc to be more precise.

A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. I track mine, not because I expect them to have a bunch of calories, but because I like to keep track of my nutrients. My diet also consists of a lot of fruits and veggies, as most diets should, so if I didn't track them that'd be easily a few hundred unaccounted for calories.

I record all fruit and those veggies higher in calories such as green peas, butternut squash, but not lettuce, tomatoes, celery, carrots, and I eat a ton of that. Six days a week a maintain a calorie-deficit from exercise, and while I eat a plethora of veggies, I figure off the record I've eaten no more than 100 calories worth each day. I've lost 61 pounds doing this, so it works for me.