Will a salad a day melt my spare pounds away?

If you've been paying attention, you know that as part of my effort to be fit and healthy I've been trying to lose weight. Those of you who know me know I'm not overweight; in fact, I'm nearly smack dab in the middle of the "healthy weight" range for my height on all the charts. But I'm much more physically comfortable when I'm at the lower end of that category, and my clothes fit better. In fact, I'm down to two pairs of pants that fit me. (I just had a denim casualty: a pair of jeans ripped in the butt. RIP, favorite jeans.) So my goal is to lose a pants size, as I have stacks of pants in my closet that I will then be able to wear. All I should need to lose are about 10 pounds to achieve this (though I'd like to lose 15, giving me a little room in the butt so they don't rip).



So I track my daily food intake at FitDay.com, and my daily calorie goal had been 1200-1500 for some time. That amount of food worked for weight loss. I wasn't losing quickly but I was losing consistently, and if I had a "bad" day when I splurged, it didn't even really register. (Thus avoiding the mental setback involved when one "gains" a few pounds overnight.)

But I was always hungry. Not quite as hungry as I was when I tried NutriSystem for several months last year, but hungry enough to notice. It was sometimes hard to concentrate, hard to sleep. And I tended to have more than my fair share of "bad" days.

So a few weeks ago I adjusted my calorie goal. Instead of 1200-1500 calories a day, I started aiming for 1400-1600 calories.

It fixed my hunger problem. As soon as I hit 1500 calories, as long as I spread my food intake out over the entire day, I was in a safe place where I knew I'd make it to bedtime without hunger pangs. It felt good.

But for my first two weeks at that level, I gained weight. This was right before my trip to Hawaii, so you can imagine how put out I was. I had stuck to my diet guidelines (minus one splurge day, which wasn't particularly bad) and exercised 5 days/week, so I really can't figure out what the problem can be other than to say: my metabolism sucks. If I had any disposable income, I'd hire a nutritionist right about now to help me out of this rut. But I don't, so I need to figure something out on my own.

But I'm not going to lower my calorie goal again. Well, I think I'm going to tighten up the range to 1400-1500 calories/day, just to try to get my ass a little more disciplined. But going back to starvation is just not a part of my plan. Instead, I've decided to try replacing some of the calories I've been consuming with different calories.

I eat pretty decently, at least for an American. Cookies, chips, candy, donuts, and even crackers make up a miniscule portion of my diet. I don't ever buy those items when I go grocery shopping, so the only times I have them these days are on a purely opportunistic basis. Such as when I'm at a party, or at a friend's house, or when I'm stuck at work late and the only food available lives in the vending machine. A routine day's diet for me goes something like this:

Breakfast: 2 hard boiled eggs
Morning snacks: 1 banana, 1 nutrition bar (Balance, Zone, etc.)
Lunch: Frozen meal (I know, this isn't high cuisine)
Afternoon snacks: 1 pear, 1 apple
Dinner: This varies drastically from day to day. My only real guidelines are that I won't repeat a frozen meal if I've already had one, and I only have around 400 calories left to play with. Because I'm not cooking for anyone besides myself I don't cook as often as I'd like, so sometimes dinner will be a hodgepodge of things like some yogurt, another nutrition bar, more fruit. Sometimes I'll have a big bowl of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. Sometimes I'll have some fish. It's a daily puzzle: "What does Jen have in her kitchen that she can put together for 400 calories?"

So I'm thinking: I can't cut calories, and I can't cut junk food. But I can cut processed food and add more natural foods. Namely: vegetables.

If you've been paying attention you also already know that I've been trying to add veggies in to my diet. Looking at my sample day's diet above, you can see that I haven't done a good job. But sometimes I do. It's a matter of good planning. The last time I bought vegetables for myself at the grocery store I wound up spending ungodly amounts of money on several pounds of organic spinach, much of which didn't get eaten, so I went a bit gun-shy after that.

And my vegetable garden is ... not doing well. (That's another post for another day.)

But I figure, I'll cut down on my nutrition bar spending, and use that money toward veggies instead. Then I need to find some good veggie dishes. To start, I'm going to concentrate mainly on salads. The thing is, I don't like salad. Because to most people, "salad" is a tiny plate with a few lettuce leaves, onion slices, tomato wedges, radish bits, and if you're lucky, carrot shavings, and the only good thing about it is that it acts as a dressing delivery vehicle. Yuck. My salad needs are much more sophisticated than that, and much larger. I'll eat my salads out of mixing bowls. On the ingredients front I know where to start, and that's with more interesting greens (spinach, arugula, or at least, for the love of god, baby field greens, NOT just lettuce leaves), avocado, onions, but maybe cooked a little, tomatoes, but sliced thinly so their juices can marinade their neighbors, and ... after that I'm at a loss. At the start, I'm keeping it to veggies-only, so no eggs, meat, nuts, raisins, etc. I'll use tiny amounts of dressing, I'm thinking a little virgin olive oil and extra vinegar. And pepper. Amazingly, this is sounding good right now.

But before I do any shopping I need to scour my cookbooks for some firm ideas. I don't want to waste any more vegetables. If you have a recipe for a good salad, please share it here!

To sum: I hope to replace one meal a day with a big, honkin' salad of comparable calories. Because I can't cut my calories any further, and I already exercise about 5 days/week, so I don't know what else to do.