How Many Calories in This “Little Salad”?

In your attempts to quickly drop a few pounds in time for bathing suit season, you turn to salads for lunch. After all, they are low calorie … right? Maybe or maybe not. Some of them can have more calories than a cheeseburger!

The “tossed” salads in NYC are very popular (and $$!). You get to pick the kind of lettuce you want as well as add in a variety of ingredients and of course, salad dressing. So here is a typical salad that many of my clients eat:

Small romaine base
Grilled chicken
Broccoli, carrots, tomatoes
Goat cheese
Sunflower seeds
Balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

How many calories? 300 … 400?  Wrong – it is 600 calories. And this is a healthy salad! Imagine what it would have been if you had added the bacon and blue cheese that you were eyeballing…

The major calorie culprits at these “tossed salad” places are cheese, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, avocado, olive and of course – salad dressings. Some of those little salad containers or the one scoop that is added to your tossed salads can have over 300 calories (and yes, that goes for balsamic vinaigrette too!). I am not suggesting that you have to avoid all of these higher calorie ingredients as some of them are quite healthy, however I might suggest that you only pick one of them if you are trying to watch your weight.

I will be doing several posts on salads in the upcoming few days to provide you with more helpful tips on slimming your salad.  Stay on the lookout for my SALAD SURVIVAL GUIDE (free download) which will be coming out this week.