ZeroPoint cheat sheet: fruit

While “zero” usually means “nothing,” at WeightWatchers®, ZeroPoint® foods are everything! If you’ve got questions about ZeroPoint fruit, you’re in the right place.

Not necessarily. A fruit is a ZeroPoint food if it’s:

• Fresh or frozen without added sugars or fat

• Canned in water

• Canned in sugar-free syrup

A fruit isnota ZeroPoint food if it’s:

• Dried

• Blended into a smoothie

• Juiced

While theyaretechnically types of fruit, avocado and coconut contain more calories and fat than other types of fruit, so it’s important to track them.

Whole fruit is a ZeroPoint food, but once it becomes part of a smoothie, the experience of “eating” it changes. Research shows that liquids don’t promote the same feeling of fullness and satisfaction that solid foods do. When you drink something, you’re not actually chewing it, which can affect the signals between your belly and brain. Plus you can wind up putting a lot more fruit in a smoothie than you’d ever eat in one sitting without necessarily getting the same amount of fiber. In short, drinking a smoothie or juice doesn’t make or keep you full the way eating that fruit might.

Nope. But if it’s cooked with any ingredients that do have Points values (e.g., honey or butter), you’ll want to track those ingredients. If you track a WeightWatchers’ recipe that includes fruit and it’s one of your ZeroPoint foods, the app will automatically subtract it from the Points value of the recipe for you.

Use the natural sugars and moisture in fruit to replace added sugars and saturated fats in desserts and baked goods. We love bananas as the base of avegan “nice” creamand theseflourless pancakes, and we use unsweetened applesauce to sweeten theseno-sugar-added blueberry muffinsand to cut the amount of butter and sugar in theseapple bars.