Hi,
I'm hoping someone can help me with this shake that I have been making. I go to the gym during lunch hour and enjoy this shake very much afterward.

It is mostly made up of fruit, and when I enter each item individually into my Points tracker, it comes out to 3 points. I decided since it was so good, I would enter the recipe and just use that instead of entering one by one. But it came to 9 points!!! I don't understand....

The smoothie contains:
1 cup skim milk
1/2 cup ff cottage cheese
1 cup mango
1 cup strawberry
1/2 banana

With such a difference in point counts, how should I be entering this, and why is there so many more points when they are combined???

I'm scared that I have been going over my points without knowing

You're right, it makes no sense. I think its a quirk of the recipe builder.

I enter my ingredients individually.

The way that I understand it is that the recipe builder is to be used for items that are shared - a pot of soup, a pan of lasagne, 2 dozen muffins, etc. The builder used the entire nutritional info to calculate the PP values. Although we count fruit as zero, it does have fat/cals/carbs so it will make a difference in recipes.

If you eat things together and it is single serving, then it goes into the journal as is. There should be a tab there that says "Save as Meal". You can then save your smoothie that way without having to always add each ingredient.

HTH!

Thanks, texscrapper. So I should just enter it at 3 points, since that is what it's worth individually?

I've had the same problem with an egg white omelete that I like to eat most mornings. Individually, the whole recipe is 5 points. However, if I add everything up in the recipe builder-it's 9 points. My portions are pretty exact so I'm not sure of the discrepancy. I've just been doing a quick add of 5 points for the recipe. Not sure if that helps but I think you should be okay!

I'm with Texscrapper: I use the recipe builder for things that will eventually be portioned out, like a casserole or whatever. The "quirk" in the recipe builder is that it reads the nutrition, not the points, so it doesn't recognize the 0 point fruit, it just sees the carbs/fat/protein, etc, of everything being entered.

For single servings of items (like an omelete or a smoothie) I just add each ingredient into the tracker one at a time and either save it as a meal or do a quick add the next time I have it.

I think the issue may be that when you eat fruit by itself, it has zero Points Plus Values. If you were to use the nutritional information of a banana, for example, you would see that it would indeed have a Points Plus Value greater than zero. They set most fruits and veggies at zero to encourage you to eat more of them.

Once you use those fruits or veggies in a dish or recipe, they have Points Plus Values associated with them, thus raising the total when in a recipe.

Clear as mud? That's the way my leader explained it when my meeting shared the same confusion. She said the recipe builder is absolutely correct, as you are not eating the fruits or veggies by themselves. They just didn't want someone to decide to have a cookie instead of fruit because of the Points Plus Values being the same.

If you cook a fruit, you should count the points because it changes the way your body digests and processes the sugars.

If you are blending in a smoothies, count the fruit as 0.

That is what I have done.

When you eat a whole fruit, it takes about as many calories to digest as the fruit is worth, which is why fruits are 0 points. The fruits gain points values when you blend them because they are now easier to digest and your body burns fewer calories to break them down. Also, if you were to eat all the fruit you put in your smoothie, it would be a lot more filling. I think WW gives points to fruit in smoothies so you don't go overboard and put too much fruit in there.

You have to count all of it. When you blend the fruit, it changes its composition and begins breaking it down so it takes less calories for your body to digest it. Free fruit is only in its raw, uncombined natural state.

If you use recipe builder it counts everything. If you enter it individually it doesn't. There is a case to be made to do it individually.

That said...your body doesn't know that something is zero point. If it is 3 points individually and 9 points through recipe builder then you are getting a couple of hundred calories in the fruit. Your body doesn't think it is getting zero calories. So count it how you want, but be reasonable. And the true test is how your weight loss is going

When I use recipe builder I enter everything and see what the points are then go back and remove the 0 point things just to see what are the difference in points.

I find it helpful to see what I'm actually eating, sometimes I'll enter all my foods as a recipe for a day just to see what I'm doing. It's not pretty for me, no wonder I'm only losing ~1 pound a month.

The recipe builder is for multi-serving recipes. With single-serving recipes you should list each item separately and then save as a meal.

Those saying that the consistency of the fruit changes when being combined - this is very true so the recipe builder is most accurate.

Weight Watchers accepts either way. If you can get by with just using it as a meal, you're fine. But if you stop losing or start gaining...you may want to re-look at it.

Not true. Applesauce made without sugar is 0 points.

The Recipe Builder uses the Nutritional Information of the items you are entering it. It can't tell that it's fruit, it just knows the nutritional info. So it gives it points. It does the same with vegetables. I only add things that have points into the recipe builder to get the true point reading. Even casseroles etc. Vegetables are still vegetables even in a recipe. They are still 0 points.

No matter what you do to fruit, it's still 0 points as long as you don't add anything to it eg: sugar etc.

Fresh fruit is 0 points. It doesn't matter if you blend it, cook it etc. 0 points.