Adults should consume four to seven servings of vegetables each day for optimum health, notes the book "Contemporary Nutrition." It can be easy to accidentally overlook the calories in vegetables because they typically have relatively few calories per serving. However, when watching your weight and counting calories, it is important to count all calories, even those in your vegetables. Calculating the calories in your favorite vegetables only takes a few minutes of time.
Step 1
List the vegetables that you commonly eat on a piece of paper.
Step 2
Write down the calories in 100g of all the vegetables that you commonly eat. Using a measurement of 100g will allow you to determine the calorie content in other amounts of your favorite vegetables with some easy multiplication. For example, if you commonly eat romaine lettuce, write down that 100g of romaine lettuce is 17 calories, according to the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. In the future, if you have a 200g serving of romaine lettuce, you'll be able to quickly determine that your romaine lettuce has 34 calories.
Step 3
Weigh your vegetables prior to eating them. Calculate how may calories your portion of vegetables has based upon the values you previously wrote down. Over time, you will likely memorize the caloric value of many of the vegetables you commonly enjoy and will not always have to consult your list.
Things You'll Need
- Food scale
References
- "Contemporary Nutrition"; Gordon M. Wardlaw and Anne M Smith; 2007
- "Basic Nutrition and Diet Therapy"; Staci Nix; 2005
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