On a diet? Avoid the salad bar

Why skinny chicks don’t eat salads
Back in 1999, I was 30 pounds overweight, and it seemed like nothing could help me lose the extra pounds. Now, after learning about how food works in the body, I am in the best shape of my life. I’ve come to realize that weight loss is not accomplished through a fad diet or TV exercise gimmick; it is a matter first and foremost of the heart. Once your heart is onboard, it is a matter of educating yourself about sensible nutrition.

One day, two friends and I were dining at a popular LA eatery. Deep in conversation, I didn’t take time to study the menu carefully, and when the waiter asked for my order, I just went with a salad. As is often the case, my two girlfriends echoed my order, assuming that I—a nutritionist—had made a healthy choice. When our meals arrived, all three of us looked at the salads and back at each other . . . and burst out laughing. They looked like erupting volcanoes, massive piles of breaded chicken strips and chunks of three different kinds of cheese, all smothered in a creamy dressing.

We were embarrassed by the sheer quantity of food in front of us. The salads were not only unhealthy, they were definitely not conducive to losing weight. In fact, these “healthy” dishes probably contained more than 1,000 calories! I told my friends that anybody “dieting” on these salads would become obese within weeks, and then blurted out, “I’ll tell you one thing . . . skinny chicks don’t eat salads!”

We think of salads as a very light meal (as opposed to a big steak or a plate of lasagna), and indeed, half a head of iceberg lettuce contains only about 39 calories, with trace amounts of vitamins and no fat. No wonder most people believe that eating salad is a healthy alternative to high-calorie foods and a basic building block of any weight loss plan.

But when it comes to nutrition and weight loss, all salads are not created equal. For our grandparents, a salad usually consisted of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, drizzled with a bit of vinegar and olive oil.

Have you watched a cooking show lately? Or eaten in a restaurant?

Everything comes super-sized with a list of ingredients that takes up half the menu page.

Nowadays, when you order a salad from any restaurant, be it a fast-food pot or an upscale eatery, you are going to get a huge amount of lettuce topped with two or three kinds of cheese, candied pecans or slivered almonds, breaded and fried chicken, bacon bits or dried cranberries, and fried tortilla strips or buttery fried croutons—all drenched with calorie-laden dressing.

After the volcano salad incident, I decided to do a little field research.

I ordered salads from several popular restaurants and had them pack every ingredient separately. I weighed all the individual toppings, plugged them into my food database, and added up the calories in each salad. What I found out was that there were actually more calories in a Cobb salad than a frosting-smothered Cinnabon! The results were so unbelievable—shocking in fact—that E! News did a story on them.

In contrast, here are some fast foods that we would never dare touch while dieting, yet actually contain fewer calories than the typical restaurant salad.

Of course, a small salad with a little bit of dressing before or after a meal is just fine. But substituting a salad for a more diverse variety of healthy and satisfying foods, and then chowing down on sugary treats as a reward for that “sacrifice,” causes erratic blood sugar levels—just the opposite of what we need to lose weight.

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