Does Salad Help You Lose Weight?
Eating healthy is automatically thought of as the thing to do by almost everyone when it’s weight loss time, and salad is always the food of choice to meet that objective. That’s because salad has a reputation as a weight loss food. But is it warranted?
Does salad help you lose weight?
The answer is abso-freakin’-lutely!
Eating salad is one of the most effective things you can do if you’re trying to lose weight or better manage it. More specifically, starting your meals with salad can increase satiety and reduce the amount of calories eaten during that meal, thus driving down total calorie intake for the day. The simple explanation for that result is that when you eat salad first, the high fiber content from many of the leafy greens and various produce can make you feel full, helping to cut calorie consumption by making less room for the adding of more calories later in the meal.
So exactly how many calories can you expect to cut from your intake by simply beginning your meal with a salad?
Well, research says a small salad before a meal can reduce calories by 7 percent. For a more pronounced effect, a large salad eaten ahead can cut intake for that meal by 12 percent.
Yeah, I know, as if any further proof were needed that size is important!
Anyway, while it appears that the bigger the salad is the better it is for calorie reduction, you should be made aware that the size should be big by volume, NOT calories! In the study above, the more calorically dense the salad was, the more participants ate during the meal.1Calorie intake for the subsequent meal increased by 17 percent when a large high-calorie salad was eaten first. A small high-calorie salad yielded an 8 percent increase. A reduction in meal intake was only observed when subjects consumed a large low-calorie salad.2In numbers, the portion size was 300g for a large salad. A small salad was 150g. That means that when eating salad as a first-course, it should have a lot of spinach, lettuce, tomato, mushrooms, and other ingredients that provide a lot of nutrition with a limited number of calories. Cheese, nuts, dressing, bacon bits, crunchy noodles, wontons, tortilla strips, croutons, dried fruit, and other ingredients that pack unnecessary calories should be used sparingly, if at all.
Lastly, when eating salad as a starter for weight loss purposes, you should wait at least 20 minutes before proceeding to the rest of the meal. That break is to allow the brain time to listen to the body’s hunger and fullness cues so it can process that not as much food is needed to supply its energy needs. Eating the rest of the meal before these signals get picked up can easily result in taking in more calories than necessary, thus defeating the point of subjecting yourself to a blah salad.
Eating salad to start lunch or dinner is a great way to restrict calories, especially if you have no interest in counting calories or doing anything else to track your intake to make sure that you’re in a calorie deficit. Because of these calorie-restrictive benefits, it can be easy to be tempted to take it to the extreme and eat only large but light salads for all of your meals. As much as you may want to do that, DON’T!!!
While you’re likely to experience weight loss from the deficit created by salads replacing higher calorie fare, you’re also likely to experience fatigue and nutrient deficiencies from the overall lack of protein, fat, and carbs. Restrictive dieting of that nature where only one type of food is consumed and all else is excluded can also have the opposite effect of weight loss because the foods that aren’t allowed become more desirous and when you succumb to a craving, you’ll more than likely go off the rails and binge eat. Multiply several episodes of that occurring and it’s easy to see how weight gain can occur.
Another reason not to eat nothing but salad is that doing so may increase the risk for suicide. There are no cold, hard stats to back me up on that possibility but who can wake up every day and eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner without eventually wanting to blow their brains out?
Exactly, no one!
SO DON’T DO IT!!!
Glossary: caloric deficit, calories, diet, dietary fat
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