Counting Fruit and Veggies

Weight Watchers gives you a lower starting calorie goal so you can enjoy "free" foods. This is just a gimmick to encourage WW members to eat their fruits & veggies.

As lynn_glenmont pointed out.....calories are what matters for weight loss, not gimmicks.

If it has calories I track it.

Weight loss is all about eating a calorie deficit, so while skipping one 60 calorie orange won't affect your long-term results, omitting 60 calories in your food log, multiple times a day, day after day, will add up to big inaccuracies in your logging and pounds on the scale/body fat you can't lose. Log everything. You may be able to lose weight at first without being as accurate simply because you've increased your awareness of what you're eating, but this will become more difficult as you get closer to your goal. When that happens, it will be helpful if you have an accurate history of what you were eating along the way. Good logging habits now will set you up with good information to use later.

I log everything I eat, down to the last garlic clove. There are no free foods.

If I'm to eat at a calorie deficit, I can only do it by adding up all of my calories.

Like some others above, I frequently eat several hundred calories of fruit/veg in a day, and would have trouble managing my weight without counting them (particularly now that I'm maintaining).

But here's another thing: Let's say you can lose weight without counting them, as many people are able to do. When you reach your goal weight, how do you know how much more you can (and need to) eat in order to maintain your weight? Accurate logging is a helpful input to that thought process. (I'm not saying there's no other way; just that sound data is helpful.)

Also, some of us use the weight loss process as a way to improve the healthfulness of our overall way of eating. While the database has limited accuracy for micronutrients, it does have some data; and the macronutrient and fiber data tends to be pretty good. You sound like you're interested in eating more healthfully. Logging your veggies and fruits gives you a somewhat better picture of your daily nutrition, so more insight into what improvements in eating will be most helpful.

It's certainly possible to lose weight without logging at all, so I'm sure it's possible to lose without logging fruits/veg. But my point is that complete logging has side benefits even beyond weight loss, that might be worth considering as you make your decision about how to proceed.

WW is a way of eating that very much believes in "good" and "bad" foods. So called good foods are rewarded and bad foods are penalized in their points system. It may work for some people as a behavior modification to make better food choices with regards to nutrition and calorie content. But it's also part of the reason why a fair amount of people struggle on weight watchers. A calorie is a calorie, no matter where it comes from. You dont gain any more or less weight from a "good" or "bad" calories.

Fruits can be pretty caloric, so I would recommend against not counting them. 60 is pretty low for an orange, and would have to be a pretty small orange. I'd recommend not only counting them, but weighing them peeled to see how big they are. I tend to get large Navel oranges that are about 250 grams peeled weight. That makes them 120 calories. Large bananas tend to be similar. When I have a container of cut pineapple, that tends to be around 160 calories. Avocados can run 200 calories or more.

It's easy to rack up 500 calories or more a day from fruits. If you eat your whole calorie goal, plus that additional amount of calories from fruit, you are likely to see your weight loss significantly slow or stall.

Fruit yes. Vegetables don't worry about so much.

If you eat 5000 cals of veg a day, you're still going to get fat.

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