Salad Diet Won't Help With Weight Loss, Here’s Why

People often mistake dieting with salads as the best and healthiest way to do so. However, not all salads are made equal and definitely not all of them will help you with your weight loss regime. If you’re not careful about what you put in your salad, even if it’s mostly a bunch of greens and plants, you won’t be able to achieve your goals. A wrongly assembled salad can amount to more calories than you intend and can even pack on the pounds.

Understanding Calories In Salads

Weight loss experts say that eating right is the best way to lose weight; not exercising. In fact, managing calories by watching what you consume is more effective in terms of shedding the excess fat. Exercise is just a means to tone up and build muscle. If you really want to lose weight, it’s all about the food.

Take this comparison between a burger with a small side of French fries versus a Southwest salad with ranch dressing and topped with grilled chicken. The burger combo will have around 19 grams of fat and 480 calories. Meanwhile, the innocent-looking salad actually contains 28 grams of fat and 530 calories. The calorie count is even higher if you order your salads from fast food chains. If you love your dressing, it gets worse.

Watch Your Toppings

Losing weight by eating salads is a more complicated strategy because it’s very easy to toss in whatever item with your greens -- and that’s not to mention the type of dressing you use. Salad bars are dangerous to dieters because it can very tempting to just pile on the toppings, thinking that a salad is a salad however which way it is prepared. Some of the ingredients that will not do your waistline any good are dried fruits, almonds or walnuts, croutons, and cheese. Remember that not all toppings on the salad bar are healthy.

Truth About Fat-Free Dressing

Just because the dressing is fat-free doesn’t mean you can pile it onto your salad for weight loss. Usually this type of dressing is higher in fructose sugars, sodium and carbohydrates because they are more processed. Health experts say that when manufacturers take out fat from their ingredients, they replace it with something else to make it taste better; and often, the substitute will be something that will not favor your weight loss plan.