Fat Loss Pitfalls of Salads - 3 Reasons Why So Many Salad Eaters Fail to Lose Fat

By Steve Gaidi
Steve's Fitness Blog
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Salads are great, aren't they? I love salads. They are fresh, juicy, a great source of all sorts of vitamins and minerals.

Many people today also eat salads as replacement for other foods, as part of their fat loss diets. They make up their salads with vegetables, lettuce, cabbage, and other leaves of all kinds. Vegetables and edible leaves are filling, fat-free, and just looking at them - they seem to glimmer with the maximum health nature has to offer.

If that is so, where are the pitfalls?

The pitfalls are the additives.

People on diets add lots of stuff to their salads, and who can blame them? Green leaves, over time, tend to be monotonous in flavor. The additives add diversity and depth to the flavor of salads - there's no argument on that.

The thing is, people don't pay much attention to what they add to their salads, and what these additives contain. They think that since this is a salad, and its main ingredients are vegetables or leaves, it helps their diet by definition. They couldn't be more wrong.

So what are the things people add to their salads that actually make their salads bad for their diet?



Cheese - many people add cubes of cheese to their salads. Blue cheeses, such as Roquefort or Gorgonzola, are very popular for that. Did you know that Roquefort is over 30% fat? That's even worse, considering that fat is responsible for about 75% of the calories in Roquefort cheese. That's right, seventy five percents of the calories in Roquefort cheese come from direct fat consumption.

Salad dressing - many people use all kinds of salad dressing. Dressing adds moisture to the salad, adds to the flavor, and makes the salad go down more easily. But what are these dressings made of? Many of them contain all kinds of oils and sugars. Your typical thousand island dressing is one example - it's actually mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together. It's typically 35% fat, plus a whole lot of sugar, glucose, and other simple form sweeteners that can quickly turn to extra fat. Again, people are counting on the false belief that dressing is negligible compared to the abundance of vegetables and leaves. Wrong again!

Nuts (especially roasted nuts) - many kinds of nuts are used in salads - pecans, cashews, walnuts, peanuts, pine nuts, and many more. They are all great sources of protein and minerals, and are generally good for you, with many health benefits. But if you're out to lose fat as your primary goal, beware of them in your salad. Roasted cashews, for example, contain almost 50% of fat!


So what do we learn from that? Two things: one is that salads can be traps for dieters who wish to lose fat as their primary objective, as they tend to overlook some of the additives they put in their salads. And second is that in general, you shouldn't fall for one ingredient thinking it immunes you from bad effects of other ones. And that's something that's true not only to salads.

Steve Gaidi has gained over 50 pounds of lean muscle without adding any fat whatsoever, over years of trial and error on various training programs, despite spending little of his time at the gym. Click to read his reviews of leading fat loss and muscle gain programs, or Click to read his review of the Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet and Calorie Shifting.