Best Salads For Weight Loss

The best salads for weight loss are the ones that taste good and add little, if anything, to your overall calorie count. They're also the recipes that make you feel like you're on an exotic vacation. Unfortunately, too often, salads are associated with fat-laden food that's not nutritious. You may have come across the following misconception: Most salads are low in calories.

Fact is, even healthy salads contain calories. Even the leanest salads have calories. A medium-size salad consisting of romaine lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and a dab of reduced fat may contain about 140 calories. And that doesn't count the dressing!

The best salads for weight loss contain no-fat dressings or reduced-calorie toppings. The most popular dressings are ranch dressing (my personal favorite), garlic powder, some dried cranberry sauce, and pepper or vinegar (your choice). My grandmother used to make "red cabbage" sandwiches filled with bread crumbs and cooked with her red cabbage salad dressing. I've also made "vegetarian" chili with canned pea soup, bean sprouts, shredded carrots, some dried red or green chilies, and reduced-calorie guacamole. The vegetables in these dishes provide essential vitamins and minerals, which make them satisfying as well as less fattening.

My friend Melissa created a delicious raw vegetable salad with avocados, corn, tomato, cilantro, and lime juice. She served it with tortilla chips and did not add any cheese. Her recipe called for either an avocado or mango; however, her tasted like both. It was definitely a satisfying dish. I thought her version was delicious and went over well with my husband. He also did not add any cheese, which added another bonus!

Tom was the host at our house BBQ and loved to entertain. One of his favorite vegetables is cabbage. Since he adores cabbage, we went through quite a few recipes before we found one that we really like. We chose to make a dinner salad using steamed vegetables (steamed baby broccoli and Swiss chard) with a tomato and bean cocktail sauce. The best salads for weight loss can be prepared in 20 minutes or less!

For our second recipe, we chose to prepare a chicken salad with spinach, cauliflower, mushrooms, and bacon (thinly sliced). It was a delicious entree that was not too heavy. We served it with steamed broccoli and cherry tomato salad. Surprisingly, this was a lighter meal than some of the other chicken salads we have made before. Although, we still had some soup leftover, it was much tastier when served on its own.

Our third and final recipe was a side of baked potatoes, asparagus, and broccoli with a mushroom cream sauce. Again, we were a bit surprised at the results. The potatoes were a bit tricky to eat as an actual vegetable as they had been cooked too much (not to mentioned that they were purple in color). However, once simmering with the other ingredients, they became very tender and tasty, and combined well with the asparagus and broccoli.

For our final recipe, we used a delicious dressing and had to do without the asparagus and broccoli. We substituted our usual cabbages for romaine lettuce, tossed in some bell pepper and garlic salt, and added some nutritional supplements (mealsense brand, crushed peanuts, flaxseed oil, etc.). After mixing all the ingredients together, we pureed it with a blender, adding about 2 tablespoons of dressing to the mixture, which we then mixed into the bowl of greens. Surprisingly, our best salads for weight loss turned out to be very simple!

The first thing we did was to prep the vegetables. We chose small handfuls of each of the three recipes and put them in small glass zip lock bags. Then, we put a large bowl of water on the stove to boil. Once the water started boiling, we dumped in the veggies in one at a time and swirled them around gently. When the water started to simmer, we took the small glass zip lock bags of dressing and placed them in the water.

For the chicken salad dressing, we combined four parts mayonnaise, one tablespoon of chicken bouillon, one teaspoon of lemon juice, and two tablespoons of cornstarch. To add a little bit of a tangy flavor to it, we used a small lemon wedge and also used a small spoonful of Cayenne pepper. Although this was a delicious and healthy salad dressing, it did nothing for us. In fact, we wondered why we didn't just use a whole lot of tomatoes and cut up some hamburger meat and add that to the mix.

When it came to the other two recipes, we decided to make a change, and used a fresh mixed cucumber instead of the crouton-like lettuce that we had used for the previous meals. Although the salad was not bad, we were not impressed. Perhaps this was because we were missing some of the flavor of the mayonnaise, and the chopped chicken that went into the salad dressing didn't have much flavor of its own to offer. Overall, these were not the best salads for weight loss that we have ever made; but we did manage to lose a few pounds over the next few months.