Did you start out summer with the best of intentions to eat a little bit lighter and healthier, but find yourself falling back into old habits? Refocus your diet by planning tasty, delicious salads that are colorful and inviting to eat. With the right mix of ingredients, salads don’t have to feel like diet food at all. Here are 10 salad recipes to get your diet back on track.
1. Arugula Fennel Salad with Creamy Lemon Dressing
Arugula has a spicy, peppery flavor that will add a zesty kick to any salad. Pair it with a creamy dressing made with lemon, tahini, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar and miso.
2. Carrot Ginger Dressing and a South Beach Salad
This South Beach salad is a well-balanced meal, containing protein from the chickpeas, healthy fat from the pumpkin seeds and avocado, and important vitamins from the spinach, broccoli, cabbage, and mulberries.
3. Kale Salad with Grilled Eggplant, White Beans and Fresh Figs
For this colorful salad, toss raw kale, grilled veggies, white beans and figs in a hummus-based dressing for a very non-bland and texturally exciting meal.
4. Sprouted Green (Moong) Lentils and Peanut Salad
Who says diet foods have to be all flavorless and boring? Toss savory sprouted lentils with spices and a fresh citrus dressing for this moong peanut salad.
5. Cheezy Kale Salad
Make the creamy dressing for this salad by processing hemp seeds, nutritional yeast, onion, garlic, dates, ginger, no-salt seasoning, coconut vinegar and turmeric in a high-speed blender.
6. Lemony Chickpea Salad
Chickpeas are a good choice for your dieting days since they can help you loose weight, lower your cholesterol, and raise your blood sugar.
7. Easy Seaweed Salad
Don’t think of seaweed as just the paper that holds your sushi together. Switch out your leafy greens for a seaweed salad, which will give you a dose of important DHA fatty acids.
8. Kale and Grilled Tomato Salad
You probably know how nutritious kale is, so load up a bowl with a few cups of this leafy green and enjoy with some roasted tomatoes. Using raw tomatoes on the salad is one thing, but roasting them really brings out the flavor.
9. Raw Massaged Kale Salad with Fresh Figs and Oranges
You wont need any oil for this dressing, but instead grab avocado, an orange, himalayan sea salt and cinnamon. The recipe calls for stevia, but you can always omit this in favor of cutting back on your sweets and sugar intake.
10. Red Quinoa and Mango Salad with Lime Dressing
Your taste buds will perk up at the varying tastes of this salad, which is a bit spicy, a bit tangy and also a bit sweet. The quinoa and black beans are enough to make this a whole meal that will fill you up in no time.
Lead image source: Kale and Grilled Tomato Salad
Thank you for sharing these salads. I wonder how the Kale Salad with Grilled Eggplant, White Beans and Fresh Figs for example tastes. It seems to me that way to enjoy food without necessarily having weight gain remorse could be to have some kind of plan or habits that may take care of the extra calories.
With that being said, the ability to lose weight without having to always say no to delicious food seems to be beneficial. I shared some of my thoughts on this page where I also linked to a video about a collection of recipes that may help you see what I mean: https://9nl.us/mrbj
I think that lawful food is here to be eaten. Thus, I do not believe in having to completely stop eating delicious, healthy and lawful food to lose weight.