No Salads

1. I am obese and have always preferred to eat vegetables. When I started eating healthy, I was stoked that salads were the main recommendation. I do not use dressing on my salads except for vinegar and olive oil. For some reason, I have never lost significant weight through years of eating salads. I am still as obese as I have always been. The only good thing is that I haven't gone significantly up in weight. What’s going on? I thought salads were healthy.

They aren't.

I always get a kick out of watching the most obese people on earth walk around with a plate full of salad at a buffet. Some are like you, who simply "love vegetables", and others just want to virtue signal that they "eat healthy" and shouldn't be blamed for being obese. It's almost as if they are ashamed of being seen eating anything else. God forbid they are seen walking around with an actual meal instead.

I remember some years ago dietitians were baffled that salads seemed to be the preferred food of many obese people, yet they were still obese. It was mind boggling to them as salads have always been the number one prescribed meal for "eating healthy" and "losing weight". After all, they are so “low calorie” and "low fat".

The dietitians started blaming all kinds of things for the fattening effects of salads except the actual cause. They blamed the dressings. They blamed the accompanying soda. They blamed the burger dinner. They even resorted to blaming the obese themselves and claimed they were all lying about eating salads. At the end of all this blaming though, they were never able to come to a consensus as to what was the true problem since the obese ate salads in many different ways but the salad was still the common denominator. This is why we have not seen anymore salad pushing when it comes to weight loss advice because it didn’t work then and will not work now.

In order to decipher this curious conundrum you have to understand obesity and dietitians either do not or they act like they don't. Obesity is the chronic under expression of leptin. Period. This chronic under expression of leptin can be initiated by multiple factors but the end result remains the same – obesity. Leptin is a starvation hormone. It is regulated by long term nutrient availability.

What was the main problem with vegan/vegetarian diets? That vegetables do not have sufficient calories to keep you alive. That means that when you eat them, you are technically starving. It doesn’t matter how much they bloat your stomach with gas and fiber making you feel full. It doesn't matter how "woke", chic and self controlled you appear while eating them. You can flog yourself all you want by eating salads but you are still starving as they don’t have enough calories or nutrients to keep you alive. Starvation causes an even further under expression of leptin. You are now getting fatter the more salads you eat.

This matches your experience to a T. You haven't gotten significantly fatter but you haven't lost a pound with all that salad eating. It makes sense because you aren't burning any body fat. Leptin won't allow it. Then whenever you eat anything else, you will store it and leptin will never burn it so you are getting fatter over time.

The only time that salad is benign is when you are doing a protein sparing modified fast. Then salads are great because they are accompanied by sufficient protein. Protein is the antidote to starvation. A green salad topped with a chicken breast is still the king of all the anti-obesogenic meals you could ever have. A salad with only a slew of different “veggies” and olive oil is a very fattening meal. Not only did you just eat nothing but air, which means starvation, adding olive oil to your struggle plate makes things even worse because all of that fat will now be stored. After all, you are starving and need to continue fattening up for survival. Under expression of leptin doesn't just mean you can't burn body fat, but you will store more fat as insulin is a slave to leptin and vice versa.

I have said many times before how metabolic syndrome is the result of blood glucose dysregulation. Well food isn't the only thing that causes this. Starvation does too. You cannot properly regulate blood glucose while starving. So ditch the salads and eat a real meal.