Oceans of Energy

Best way to be healthy, lose weight, support your exercise, and feel great?

Eat your salad.

Salad is one of the ultimate superfoods. (The others are fruit, nuts, steamed veggies, and beans.) Raw veggies prevent disease, provide the chemicals you need to convert carbs and fats into energy, and satisfy your hunger, thanks to their dense nutritional value and bulk.

Recently ("Salad Wars"), I talked about strategies for making salad a regular part of your diet. Here’s another one. It’s my favorite.

Think "salad" and the image that appears is of a wimpy, tasteless non-food. Lettuce? Not food. Nope.

The secret to making salads more food-like is to make them chunky. As I write this, I’m tickling the keyboard and munching on lunch, defined not as a Bob’s Big Boy Burger but a salad that tastes more like a main dish than an unfortunate veggie add-on. My salad started with organic Romaine and shredded carrots from Whole Foods and organic baby spinach from Trader Joe.

The only "chunk" I added was a half-can of organic kidney beans. (I know - not everybody loves KB’s, but just about any other bean would do.) Beans are satisfying - they turn a salad instantly into a main dish. But, of course, the thing that really makes a difference is the dressing.

Some foods cry out to have FAT added, writ large, and salad surely is one of them. Salad dressings have a bad rap for being full of unhealthy Omega-3 fats, if not actually (yikes!) saturated fat. But dig the dressing I’m eating as I write:

• 1 organic orange
• 1 tbsp Vegenaise (great-tasting mayo substitute made with grapeseed oil, available at most  health food stores)
• 1 1/2 tbsp raw almond butter (cheap at Trader Joe)
• Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, to taste

Hey, did you know that salad is moral food? In his wonderful book, Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t, J. Donald Walters shows that values aren’t fixed, as fundamentalists believe. They’re directional. A lazy slob gets up and goes out to find a job as a used-car salesman, and all his friends applaud? Why? Because he’s taking a step in a positive direction - expanding the range of his awareness. But if Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi had done the same thing, everyone would have exclaimed, "This person has fallen!"

Saints and sinners have different priorities. What’s this got to do with salad? Some foods can drag you down - they’ll kill your energy, make you irritable, lazy, or depressed, or destroy your concentration. Other foods will give you energy that you’ll be able to apply to go out and get that used-car salesman’s job, if that’s your gig - or help save the world. So salad is a very, very expansive food. Therefore it’s moral. Quod erat demonstrandum.

If your body doesn’t tolerate salads, I recommend The Ayurvedic Cookbook. It’ll help you understand your body type, choose appropriate foods, and find substitutes that will give you the nutrition you’re missing by avoiding raw greens.

I’ve about finished my salad. Feels like I’ve had a real meal.