Salad Days

salad days

pl.n.

A time of youth, innocence, and inexperience:

Ah, yes.  Those days when we were young and happily ignorant.  Was it just then or are most of us blissfully ignorant today?  Probably a little of both when it comes to the things we eat.  I am a firm believer that we ignore our gut instincts and throw things down our pie hole that we inherently know aren't good for us.  Enter Mr. Salad.

One of the things I like about Panera Bread is that they list the caloric content of each and every menu item right up on the menu board.  I spend less time there these days due to the overwhelming desire to eat everything in their bakery, but for lunch and some mobile office time, it's a good choice.  Today's choice for me was "You PICK 2" option, which included their low-fat chicken noodle soup and the new Roasted Turkey Wheatberry Salad (Wheatberries are delish!  Who knew?)  The YP2 offerings are roughly a 2/3 sized soup and a 1/2 sized salad or sandwich.  My salad, as listed on the board, was 230 calories. The soup only 80.  Add in an apple as a side and I'd be getting a very tasty and fairly nutritious lunch for around 390 calories and 16g of fat.

Now, my wife, being the nutritionally savvy person that she is, has always said that salads are traps.  What she is usually referring to are the calories and fat in salad dressing.  People think they are eating responsibly and all they are doing is making the healthy bits a delivery system for a ride to Cholesterolville.  This wasn't necessarily the case today, but the theory is the same.  I spotted the trap and defused it.

I received my lunch tray and what I saw was a gorgeous salad with copious amounts of bleu cheese covering the top.  The "Salad Artist" of the day painted my creation with a little too much bleu.  When I extracted the offending cheese-bombs, they amounted to about an extra two tablespoons of crumbles, which equals an additional 110 calories and 9g of fat.  That's a far cry from the posted menu board promise.

The lesson here is that you need to be your own defender of dietary intake.  It's great that mindful restaurants such as Panera are listing the caloric content of their menu items freely (except in NYC where it is law), but the $8.00 an hour food prep kid, isn't as concerned with staying within those guidelines.  Don't lie to yourself when you see the mountain of bleu cheesy goodness or a salad drenched in dressing and think, "Cool!  Who'd have known you can get all this for only 210 calories?!"  You can't and your bathroom scale will know, that's who.  110 extra calories is no big deal, but the habit it stems from means that 110 is multiplied many times over the course of a month, or even a week.

Cya tomorrow,

M

What I ate today and how I exercised:

Breakfast ~ Cereal w/almond milk

Lunch ~ My very tasty, yet dissected salad, soup and coffee

Dinner ~ Homemade broccoli soup and a grilled chicken breast

Exercise ~ A 30-minute PF Express workout