Health Tips

Many individuals believe that dieting without salad leads to unsuccessful results. In actuality, there are many different approaches for dieting without salad where weight loss and a fit physique can be achieved. The key to shedding unwanted pounds is increasing the amount of exercise throughout a day, as well as substituting some of your everyday foods with low-fat or fat-free options.

Sometimes dieting without salad is not recommended for those who feel they can eat whatever they want in a salad and believe they are not consuming a high amount of calories. To the contrary, one of the important parts to creating and eating a salad may be the most damaging. Topping off most salads is the salad dressing, which can add tons of unnecessary calories without a second thought. Sometimes this diet selection becomes fattier than a McDonald’s cheeseburger. Beginner salad eaters also like to drench their greens with dressing to disguise the taste of something they’d rather not be eating.

Dieting without salad dressing may be the way to go if you are bent on consuming salad as your main meal. One tablespoon of a creamy salad dressing has between 50-75 calories and let’s face it, no one eats just one tablespoon on a salad. The average amount of salad dressing used, whether or not the individual is dieting is about 5 tablespoons. That could add close to 300 calories or more to your “healthy” eating choice.

The items that you add to your salad could also increase the amount of unwanted calories you consume. Some of the ingredients to avoid when making a salad include feta cheese, olive oil, eggs and bacon. Another salad choice to stay away from is a taco salad, which could possess around 350-400 calories, depending on the size.

If you can’t stick to just fat-free dressings, lettuce and vegetables, then dieting without salad is not as hard as you think. There are many lower calorie, lower fat food alternatives to consider when thinking of dieting without salad. For starters, fruits are quite low in calories, such as the naval orange, which possesses 65 calories.

Additional low-fat, low calorie food choices, include:

Low-fat (1%), reduced-fat (2%), or fat-free (skim) milk; sorbet, sherbet, low fat or fat-free frozen yogurt, or ice milk; plain low-fat yogurt, low-fat (1%) or reduced-fat (2%) cottage cheese; part-skim milk ricotta cheese, bran flakes, crispy rice, reduced-fat granola, lower-fat hot dogs, lean ham, extra lean ground beef (ground round or ground turkey; chicken or turkey without skin (white meat), low-fat crackers, angel food cake, gingerbread, reduced-fat or fat-free cookies (graham crackers, ginger snaps, fig bars), popcorn (air-popped or light microwave), frozen yogurt, frozen fruit or chocolate pudding bars, canned broth-based soups, as well as salsa.