Can I Eat As Much Salad As I Want?

katharineshalia

If I have five servings I'm getting onto the 200 calorie range but come on it's salad, no meat, no dressing - spinach, carrots, cherry tomato & bell pepper. I could eat the whole bowl I just made for family.. but would I gain weight? That's my question.

tehzephyrsong

If you stay under your calorie allotment, you will lose weight. Full stop. You could eat 1500 calories' worth of salad or 1500 calories' worth of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs (which is probably, what, two of them, tops?) and you'd lose weight as long as you have a calorie deficit. Similarly, you will gain weight if you eat too much of anything, be it salad or Sno-Balls. You'd have to eat a /hell/ of a lot of salad without meat, cheese, or dressing to surpass your daily calorie limit, but if you managed it, you'd gain weight.

kparks2

Ultimately it is still calories and it is about the dressing and what is in the salad. I love to use salad as a tool to fill me up for lunch for dinner because 2 cups is like 15 cals.

BackTatJIM

If you stay under your calorie allotment, you will lose weight. Full stop. You could eat 1500 calories' worth of salad or 1500 calories' worth of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs (which is probably, what, two of them, tops?) and you'd lose weight as long as you have a calorie deficit. Similarly, you will gain weight if you eat too much of anything, be it salad or Sno-Balls. You'd have to eat a /hell/ of a lot of salad without meat, cheese, or dressing to surpass your daily calorie limit, but if you managed it, you'd gain weight.

I would go with the 1500 of salad, I have noticed a huge difference with eating my calories with low fat foods rather than, junk food and when I eat salad I eat like 3 servings at a time

katharineshalia

ty! wgp, this is what I was thinking. If I ate 1500 in say pretzels instead of salad then wouldn't there be a big difference in weight loss or lack thereof? I've seen some ppl complain about not losing weight and looked at their food diary and thought to myself, well, yeah, you're starving yourself so you can allow for that doughnut every morning. This is just an example. I guess I'm still trying to figure this out, just seems to me that I could let myself splurge on a salad with no ill side effects.

jzaz903

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that! Just make sure you log it.

MileyClimb

the dressing is what makes the calories so if you have no dressing or any thing like that you can eat as much as you want

KetoBella

I think you might be sorry from a digestive point of view if you ate that much salad, it is mostly water and not much fiber....I speak from experience. Ha!

Qatsi

My neighborhood bar has a Cobb salad that comes in a bowl the size of my head. It has three kinds of meat, two kinds of cheese, eggs, avocado and creamy dressing. I estimate it to be around 1000 calories. But there's romaine lettuce in there too, so that makes it a SALAD, and therefore, it's HEALTHY for me, dammit!

BackTatJIM

only good thing about my terrible job at walmart is we sell single serving salads from 190-230 calories, I eat one almost everyday at work with my lunch

Qatsi

To answer your original question: "Can I eat as much salad as I want?" If you're making without meat, cheese, eggs and dressing, it would take you a LOT of salad to get to 1500 calories. You probably wouldn't WANT that much salad in one day.

By comparison, a 1-pound bag of California blend vegetables contains 150 calories. While healthy (as long as I don't add butter to it), I can't imagine trying to eat 10 bags of the stuff in one day.

istril

In general, calories are calories.

But then again, maybe not. Taken from http://www.dairyscience.info/packaging-/119-labelling-determination-of-the-energy-content-of-food.html:

"Classically the total energy content of a food was determined by burning the food in a bomb calorimeter and measuring the amount of energy released...The human body is not as efficient as a bomb calorimeter in converting food nutrients to energy and this is allowed for in calculating nutrient density. So-called coefficients of digestibility have been determined by several groups..."

I have read articles that suggest that current methods could be improved considerably (searched for them but couldn't find) in determining the energy our bodies get from different foods. These articles suggest that many vegetables would actually have much lower calories than are currently reported. Weight Watchers policy of "free" vegetables supports this.

While "negative calorie" foods have pretty much been disproven, there is some merit to the idea behind them. from mayo clinic:

"Food processing (thermogenesis). Digesting, absorbing, transporting and storing the food you consume also takes calories. This accounts for about 10 percent of the calories used each day. For the most part, your body's energy requirement to process food stays relatively steady and isn't easily changed."

One might wonder if foods that contain a higher amount of undigestable bulk actually make us work harder to digest them, and thus, actually be worth a net lower amount of calories. I don't know enough about food science to know if this is currently accounted for in calorie labels or not.

Tedebearduff

Walden farms makes fat free sugar free gluton free carb free ... pretty much everything free dressings and they taste alright/good when you feel like something different.