On a diet? Avoid the salad bar

In her book “Skinny Chicks Don’t Eat Salads: Stop Starving, Start Eating and Losing,” clinical and sports nutritionist Christine Avanti talks about how eating salads wrecked her diets in the past, and shares advice on how you can eat all of your favorites foods and still lose weight.

4:00 on a Tuesday morning
I roll my puffy body off the edge of my warm, fluffy pillow-top bed. I’m suffering from a “food hangover.” Why? Because last night, while discussing the ex-boyfriend with my beloved Aunt Sandra, I munched through an entire box of Ritz crackers, a jar of marshmallow cream, and a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Now I’m bloated from all that sodium and feel like a huge brick is sitting in my lower stomach.

So I do what I do every morning: gulp down two pots of coffee. Not two cups, two pots. That’s why I need to wake up so very early; I need enough time to drink the coffee and visit the bathroom several times before heading to the gym to teach my hour-long Spinning class. Of course, I skip breakfast—I have to make up for all the calories consumed during last night’s cracker–peanut butter–marshmallow sandwich binge.

I go to the gym and teach my Spin class, and work out as hard as I can.

8:30 a.m.
After class I’m famished and shaking because my blood sugar is so low.

I’m so mad about bingeing last night, though, that I decide to skip breakfast, resist my hunger, and head home to take a shower. Afterward, I go down into the kitchen to prepare the lunch I’ll take to the office: a BIG salad. It’s gotta be BIG because I’m starving like an abandoned alley kitten and I still have hours to go before lunchtime, so I use a whole head of iceberg lettuce, a bell pepper, half of a cucumber, three stalks of celery, one large beefsteak tomato, one broccoli crown, one cauliflower crown, artichoke hearts (canned in water, not oil, of course), sprouts, and a half a bottle of low-cal ranch dressing.

1:00 p.m.
Nine hours after waking up, I’m finally ready to eat my first meal. At this point, I am really forgetful, agitated, and feeling so shaky I can barely remember my own name. I am so excited to take my first bite, because (a) it’s healthier than what I ate last night and (b) I’m finally on the right track with my eating! Now I’m sure to lose weight.

3:00 p.m.
I’m still full from my lunch salad and I feel pretty good. And yet . . . I feel like I need to have something sweet. I find myself fantasizing about a chocolate chip cookie; don’t I deserve at least one? After all, I’ve been awake since 4:00 a.m., I worked out like a banshee, and the only thing I’ve eaten all day is a salad! How much damage can one cookie do? I’m going for that cookie and then—I promise—I will get back on track.

3:30 p.m.
At the deli, my special chocolate chip cookie is warm, soft, moist, and smells like fresh-baked heaven. I love it. I need it. Hey—it’s gone already!

That wasn’t even close to enough. I buy a mini lemon cake (it’s made with fruit, right? It must be healthy) and as I devour it, the battle inside my head begins:

Christine . . . what the $%#@ are you doing? This is not on your diet.

You’re such a loser, you can’t even resist sweets for less than 24 hours.

Your diet is shot.

So what? Fine. I’m a loser. Who cares!

I buy two more mini lemon cakes and four more chocolate chip cookies and sneak them back to the office in my handbag. I eat them all within 2 hours, keeping the door to my office—where I work as the aerobics manager of a popular LA health club—closed.

10:00 p.m.
I decided not to eat dinner because I had so many calories during my afternoon diet meltdown. Around 10:00 p.m., I have a small serving of nonfat frozen yogurt, figuring that that must be okay since I haven’t had dinner. I decide I can have a second serving because the first one was so small, and this time I add some caramel syrup. (The caramel syrup bottle reads “fat free,” after all.) The rest of the evening continues with more sweets, and I honestly can’t stop myself. More than I crave love, companionship, or any emotional need—I crave sugar. The more I eat, the more I crave. These are not subtle cravings; they rule my every thought as well as my actions. Sugar is my significant other—like a toxic boyfriend that I can’t break up with.

As I down these treats, I carry on a running argument with myself:

Am I a sugar addict? How can I be, when I’m so good that I exercise, skip meals, and eat only salad? I want to sleep, but I’m so wired from all the sugar that I can’t turn off the voices in my head.

I am completely out of control.

What I didn’t realize was that I craved sugar because I basically fasted for the first 9 hours of my day. I had convinced myself that if I skipped breakfast, ate a BIG salad for lunch, skipped dinner, and ate “just a few” sweets during the day, I would finally lose weight. I kept this up for several years.

It may have been a twisted way of thinking, but it was my reality.

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And that is how salads got me into big fat trouble. I believe this is how salads get lots of girls into big fat trouble. Guys don’t do this ... it’s only girls who eat this way and convince ourselves that it’s “low-calorie eating.” When we see slim women eating “real” food, we think to ourselves, “Oh, she has a special blessing from God, and that’s why she can eat normal meals and I’m stuck with eating rabbit food.” Let me be the first to tell you that you can eat “normal” food and be thin, too. It all starts with stepping away from the salad mentality and learning the truth about what makes us crave what we shouldn’t eat and why eating what we shouldn’t is so bad for us.

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