You can easily go to a salad bar, pour on the croutons, meats and other toppings, add the ranch or russian salad dressing and end up with a meal of over 1,500 calories.

On the other hand, you can also just add vegetables with no dressing and eat nothing else for lunch and wonder why you’re binge eating by mid-afternoon.

The fact is, all over the world, people eat salads with their meals; yet, we Americans eat salads for our meals. That’s fine if it’s for dinner, but for lunch, when we still need to fuel our bodies for the entire afternoon, evening and night, chances are that we need more than just a salad to fuel us properly.

I qualify by saying that during the spring and warmer weather, eating salad for a meal may be OK, but during the colder months, think twice. Salads are cold food and, in the middle of the winter when we need hot foods, eating a salad may actually be detrimental to our weight and health.

What is the healthiest way to eat a salad?  Load on the vegetables and add a healthy oil based dressing with vinegar, an unprocessed sea salt and perhaps some lemon and other spices.

Adding a bid of good fat, such as in olive oil, satiates you so that you do not have such a compulsion to binge. In addition, there are many health benefits to consuming olive oil and studies are actually finding that it can help you lose weight.

Suggestion: Throw in some sprouts and beans for an even healthier punch.