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Great Big Salad - The Easy Diet Plan Lunch & Dinner Menus

The Easy Diet Plan - Weight Loss Plan #2 - Part 1 Here

Salad is a dieter's delight! The bed is naturally low in fat and calories and usually consists of lettuce or spring greens or raw baby spinach. And because the greens are ridiculously low in caloric content, we can eat quite a lot of this healthy vegetable without consuming a substantial number of calories.

Great Salad Recipe Suggestions for the Dieter

Almost-any green vegetable tends to make a beautiful, delicious bed for the salad. Here are a few of our favorites: all varieties of lettuce, spinach, shredded cabbage, dandelion greens and other spring greens, finely chopped raw broccoli and yes - even chopped celery or green bell peppers.

Speaking of bell peppers, they are just one of the super vegetables which are available in multiple colors and which can add expression to your salad as well as eye appeal. Cabbage is yet another vegetable available in more than one color - as are onions.

For a colorful salad mix, try the following: a bed of baby spinach (green), chopped purple onions, shredded orange carrots, chopped red and yellow bell peppers, a few red cherry tomatoes and shredded purple cabbage. This is one very colorful salad which is ready for yet another layer of flavors - proteins.

For the proteins add one sliced boiled egg (yellow and white) and some lean deli meat such as baked ham, roasted turkey or oven baked chicken. Just one serving will suffice. You can also toss in one chopped walnut, pecan or sunflower or pumpkin seeds that have been removed from their shells.

Let's add a colorful dash of dairy. We can go with a white color by adding just a bit of shredded skim-based mozzarella cheese or we can go yellow by adding fat reduced Colby cheese. We can even add a dash of black by adding a few rinsed black beans or a few whole or sliced black olives.

If we want our salad to have a tangy taste, we can even squirt on a bit of fresh citrus juice from a lime, lemon, orange or grapefruit. What about adding fruit to the lunch salad? We can do that to in way of either fresh or dried fruits. Dried cranberries go wonderfully well in chef salads. The fruit will add a sweet taste to the salad.

What if we're seeking a sour flavor to the salad? We can add pickles or green olives - or a few capers. Or we can achieve the flavor with our choice of light, reduced fat salad dressing.

As to other favorite salad additions such as croutons and bacon bits, checking the labels ensures that you won't go overboard with your total calories for the day. While salads with green beds typically tend to be very low in calories as a base, they can grow to Dietzilla proportions when fatty ingredients are part of the mix OR when they aren't kept to moderation.

Our delicious bean salad mix contains no lettuce or green things. Simply mix the following cans of thoroughly drained canned beans together: chickpeas, dark or light kidney beans and pinto or red beans. You may need to rinse the beans using a strainer over the sink to remove all of the liquid.

Add light Italian dressing to the beans and enjoy with a wedge of golden brown cornbread, a serving of reduced fat margarine, a serving of pickled beets or pickled okra and a glass of unsweetened tea or a serving of skim milk.