Veggie calories

sobit1970
sobit1970 Posts: 39 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Does anyone not count low carb keto friendly veggies and still lose?

Replies

  • MostlyWater
    MostlyWater Posts: 4,294 Member
    weight watchers does that. but we all know that every food has calories!
  • earlnabby
    earlnabby Posts: 8,171 Member
    penguinmama87 wrote: »
    I weigh most of my food, but there are some veggies I don't bother weighing carefully like lettuce, especially eaten raw where even a large quantity is only going to be tens of calories if that - it's probably within a usual margin of error. My usual strategy is that whatever I'm doing is fine as long as my weight is going down at the rate I want it to. But increasing your accuracy in food logging is a good strategy if you experience a stall or plateau.

    When doing leafy greens like lettuce and raw spinach I eyeball the cups and use an entry for that. The calories are so few that if I way underestimate I will only be off by 10-20 calories.

    All other veggies get weighed, raw unless they are frozen.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,974 Member
    I don't keto, but I eat hundreds of calories worth of low-carb veggies (plus a bunch of starchy ones) every day. If I didn't log veggie calories - even if it was just non-starchy veggies - my counts would be way, way off. I wouldn't find that helpful.

    I recognize that people on a keto diet can reach sensible minimums of veggie intake, and still be in ketosis, no worries. But I like eating many more veggies that keto constraints would permit for me, personally. YMMV. I'd still count them. If nothing else, that makes your carb counts more accurate, lets you maximize your veggie intake while managing the carbs, rather than maybe lowballing veggies just to be safe, maybe?

    Wishing you much success, whatever you decide!
  • wunderkindking
    wunderkindking Posts: 1,615 Member
    edited October 2021
    Really depends.

    I'm don't do the kitchen scale thing (one of the few here), but I'll still measure and count any vegetable that I eat in quantity as a base of a meal, or a serious side - even if it's broccoli or something.

    I do not, however, even bother logging what amounts to edible garnish. Ie: There's a slice of tomato and few leaves of lettuce on a sandwich.

    Also I am 300% not keto. I went fairly low carb early on in loss because those were easy calories to give up/didn't add much to me and my satiety or meals, but never keto levels of low.
  • Mazintrov13
    Mazintrov13 Posts: 133 Member
    Loads of people don’t count veggie calories and still lose ( in fact lots of people don’t count ANY calories and still lose)
    BUT MFP is designed for you to count everything and that definitely includes veggies as they certainly contain calories and as other have mentioned can take up a decent portion of your day.
    I count everything because that method works best for me and I like to have all the data, but there are other methods if that doesn’t suit you
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    edited October 2021
    I think you will be fine not to count them if your weight loss is going fine without counting. You're not very likely to overeat them since keto puts a cap on how much of them you can eat anyway. I personally count them because I don't do low carb and I can easily exceed the net carb allowance for keto in tomatoes alone, so I have to count them. Yesterday, for example, I had 120 calories of tomatoes and a couple hundred more in other non-starchy vegetables. If I chose not to count them without adjusting my targets I would be hundreds of calories over my allowance. Plus, I really like seeing a more complete overview of my micronutrients.
  • earlnabby
    earlnabby Posts: 8,171 Member
    wunderkindking wrote: »

    I do not, however, even bother logging what amounts to edible garnish. Ie: There's a slice of tomato and few leaves of lettuce on a sandwich.

    Hmmmm . . . edible garnish. I like that term. I will be shamelessly stealing it.

    I also don't count the edible garnish and no, the lettuce and tomato on a BLT does NOT count as edible garnish. That gets logged since I can use a whole medium tomato on just one sandwich.

  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,876 Member
    I don't do keto and I haven't logged anything in ages, but when I did, I did log my veggies but I was pretty loose with that. For example, I created a recipe in the recipe builder called "garden salad" and just used that anytime I had a green salad as I usually put the same stuff in it veggie wise. It wasn't exact as maybe there was a little more cucumber this time or a little more radish that time, but it was close enough for me. Then I would just log the dressing and anything extra I would put on it like avocado or chicken or something separately.

    Even to lose weight I can have a relatively substantial amount of calories, so I really didn't worry about being too exact with veggies and even fruit I just logged by size. I was much more meticulous about calorie dense foods. YMMV.
  • WholeFoods4Lyfe
    WholeFoods4Lyfe Posts: 1,517 Member
    I count my veggies, but I very rarely measure or weigh them. I just eyeball for the most part. Since they are generally low carb veggies that I eat, even if I'm off in my estimate, it's not like I'll be off hundreds of calories or anything so I just take the risk and I'm losing weight just fine. If I do eat something higher carb like potatoes, melon, carrots, etc I will measure because for myself it is very easy to overdo them.
  • caseylizbeth
    caseylizbeth Posts: 112 Member
    I count all my veggies. First off, all those little calories add up to be a pretty big chunk of my day. Second, I like being able to look over my food logs to see if I'm missing out on any major food groups. If I notice I've been skimping on the vegetables I can add some more into my diet. That being said I don't measure my veggies super accurately. I'm not going to get out the measuring cups or the food scale for a couple cups of spinach. If I overestimate the amount I'm sure my diet can handle the extra 4 calories.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,978 Member
    SamiF2102 wrote: »
    Coming back to MFP from the WW world, I will tell you, COUNT your veggie calories. Yes WW lets you have zero point foods, but that does not mean that they are zero calories. If you are counting calories, or nutrients or whatever, COUNT THEM ALL!!!

    I disagree with this

    You can count them all if you want.

    Or you can decide what things you need to count and how tightly, to acheive your goals.

    I never counted things like a bit of lettuce or a a few cherry tomatoes or a few carrot sticks

  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,978 Member
    rosebarnalice wrote: »
    I'm a veg weigher as they account for about 70% of my calories.

    And yes, I weigh garnish veg and a handful of carrot sticks because lying to myself about how much I ate is a big part of what made me fat in the first place, and being honest by weighing and logging is what helped me reach and maintain my goal.

    You be you!


    well I wouldnt call not counting a few carrot sticks as lying to myself - I dont see a moral value in how people log, I would see it as deciding how tightly you want and need to log to acheive your goals (in my case not very tightly at all, in yours tighter )

    But I agree with the sentiment of You be you - meaning each individual decide how and what to log to acheive their goals - hence I disagreed with previous poster who seemed to be saying as a universal instruction COUNT THEM ALL!!
  • wunderkindking
    wunderkindking Posts: 1,615 Member
    edited November 2021
    paperpudding wrote: »
    rosebarnalice wrote: »
    I'm a veg weigher as they account for about 70% of my calories.

    And yes, I weigh garnish veg and a handful of carrot sticks because lying to myself about how much I ate is a big part of what made me fat in the first place, and being honest by weighing and logging is what helped me reach and maintain my goal.

    You be you!


    well I wouldnt call not counting a few carrot sticks as lying to myself - I dont see a moral value in how people log, I would see it as deciding how tightly you want and need to log to acheive your goals (in my case not very tightly at all, in yours tighter )

    But I agree with the sentiment of You be you - meaning each individual decide how and what to log to acheive their goals - hence I disagreed with previous poster who seemed to be saying as a universal instruction COUNT THEM ALL!!

    Yeah, this. Do what works. I got closer to goal and started measuring/counting more of my veg when it's substantial but I don't use a scale (horror of horrors here) to weigh food, I don't count small amounts of veg. And it was never an issue.

    I was FULLY PREPARED to have to either get more precise or 'settle' for a higher weight than I wanted, but that never turned out to be the case. I got curious about it once though and weighed out my measured tablespoon of peanut butter. By weight it was about 2/3 of a tablespoon. In short I OVERestimate amounts when I use volume. Meaning I still had a margin of error greater than any number of slices of tomato on a sandwich.

    I'm not a volume eater, though and this is relevant. Me trying to get 70% of my calories from (nonstarchy and not avocado) fruit and veg would likely make me throw up from being overfull LONG before I got CLOSE to eating enough calories. I have no desire to lose more. That would be a problem.

    People are not all the same.

    (I will shock some contingent of MFP further by saying I now only basically log OR measure calorie dense things or things with easy nutrition labels on the back of a single serve package. This is admittedly an experiment but seems to be working just fine for me. If it stops, I'll just go back to what I was doing before.)
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    I log more loosely on low calorie foods. Nut butter, probably better weigh it, otherwise I have a tendency for a “tablespoon” to creep larger and larger. Broccoli, meh, log it the same as last time, it’s probably in the ballpark.

    If you want to lose without logging vegetables, you can always try leaving a couple hundred calories on the table and see what your results are. If your loss isn’t as expected tighten up your logging.

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