And it turns out that some lettuces (like romaine) are also really good for you. If I can have a salad with spinach, romaine, or the spring lettuces (any darker green), I fill ‘er up!

Hopefully this nutrient approach will kick off, because right now all the food guides are geared primarily towards talking about macronutrient composition (how much protein, fat or carb foods have).

The World’s Healthiest Foods page is actually pretty helpful. Courtesy of an episode of Good Eats, I had been steering away from eggplant as a nutritionally useless food, but according to WHF, it too has some nutrients, as does cucumber (which is cool, ’cause I do love cucumber).

One of the caveats with veggies though is that in many cases, a lot of the nutrients are in the skin (this is why I buy the English cucumbers that come wrapped in plastic…no wax).

So, while celery, lettuce, and cucumbers aren’t super foods, they probably are more useful than you might think. But they probably shouldn’t be your sole go-tos for veggies, as you suggest!

I agree with the focus on nutrition vs. calories. One of the mistakes I always made when I tried to lose weight was eating a lot of “zero calorie” foods. Celery, lettuce, pickles, cucumbers, etc. There’s nothing wrong with those foods, but they’re nutritionally nearly useless, and the obvious problem is THEY DON’T FILL YOU UP! Not to mention you get no energy from them: that’s what calories ARE, energy. It can be a bit of a Catch-22, trying to find the balance between adequate or even optimum nutrition and losing weight. You’re almost always better off, health-wise, to choose the nutrition.