Difficulty: Easy

Salads are an easy way to add fruit and vegetables to your meal plan and are staple meals in our body transformation clients’ diets.

Pros

• Low-calorie and high in fibre, which makes them very filling.
• An easy way to add variety to your meal plan (and use up leftovers by swapping in different ingredients).
• Minimal preparation time needed and easy to make multiple servings in one go.
• There is almost an unlimited number of potential salad combinations to try. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Check out our handy template below that you can use to build a variety of flavour combinations.

Cons

• When eating out, don’t assume that all restaurant salads are low-calorie options. The easiest way to limit hidden calories is to ask for the dressing to be served on the side.

Create your perfect salad

You can prepare a salad to eat as a starter, side dish or as a main meal.

Build your perfect salad dish by plugging in your favourite flavours from the table below.

There are no exact portion sizes required for each component and you can customise them to meet your nutrition targets for a given meal.

If time is tight, buy pre-washed and shredded salad bases and add extra ingredients on top.

Blend a delicious dressing

Once you have made your salad, the next step is to add a dressing. You can use store-bought dressings for convenience. However, if you really want to pack some extra flavour (and health benefits along the way).

Alternatively, you can try making a dressing from scratch. To make a simple salad dressing, all you need is an oil (e.g., olive oil), acid (e.g. balsamic vinegar) and a selection of herbs (e.g. parsley) and/or sweet ingredients (e.g. honey for added flavour.

For a quick, easy and mega-tasty dressing, select one ingredient from each column in the table below. Then add everything to a mixing bowl and whisk with a fork for 30 seconds to combine.