Does Salad makes you skinny?

There seems to be a lot of confusion around weight loss and weight gain. We’ve all heard that excessive intake of fat, sugar, sweets, snacks, and candy will lead to weight gain while eating salads, vegetables, and fruits will help us shed those extra pounds. But how accurate is that?

We now live in a world with information overload. In a world where it is easy to get lost in the maze of do’s and don’ts. In a world where one influencer tells you to eat salad to lose weight, while another tells you that you can lose weight by eating donuts.

The reality? Both have a grain of truth. But in reality, weight management is far more nuanced and complex than simply choosing between donuts or salads. It involves understanding calorie balance and how factors like metabolism, genetics, and activity levels play a role.

What Regulates Weight Gain & Weight Loss?

The truth about weight loss boils down to caloric balance—the classic concept of calories in versus calories out. To put it simply, if you consume more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. This is called being in a calorie surplus. If you burn more than you consume, you’ll lose weight. This is called being in a calorie deficit.

This principle is the foundation of weight management.

What Is Calories?

There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to calories. One example is that most people use the word completely wrong. When someone says they ate 500 calories, they actually mean 500 kilocalories. Technically, 500 kilocalories is 500,000 calories.

Because a single calorie is too small to be practical for measuring food energy, we use kilocalories and just shorten it to “calories” for convenience — and will continue to use the term for the rest of the article to meet society where it’s currently at.

Calories measure energy, much like a gas gauge measures fuel in your car. Your body uses this energy to maintain essential functions. This means your body burns a stable number of calories every day, known as your “baseline” calorie expenditure. This baseline includes everything from simple tasks like breathing and putting on socks to more active ones like walking to work and digesting food.

The number of calories you burn daily varies based on factors like age, genetics, gender, height, and weight. Generally, it ranges from about 2,000 to 2,450 calories for men and 1,600 to 1,950 for women. To find a more specific number, you can use an online calorie calculator that takes these factors into account, but keep in mind that these aren’t 100% either. They are a rough estimate and need to be taken with a grain of salt.

How Weight Gain & Weight Loss Works In Practice

To lose weight, you need to create a calorie deficit. For example, one kilogram of body fat is roughly equivalent to 7,000 calories. So, to lose one kilogram of fat, you need to be in a 7,000-calorie deficit. Let’s say you weigh 90 kilograms and want to reduce to 85 kilograms. That’s a loss of 5 kilograms or 35,000 calories. If you burn 2,500 calories a day and consume 2,000 calories, you’re in a 500-calorie deficit daily. Dividing 35,000 by 500 gives you 70 days of 500-calorie deficits to lose 5 kilograms.

In reality, you will lose even more weight due to additional factors like water loss from the deficit.

Conclusion

So, the myth that “Salad Makes You Skinny” is, well, a bit of a flop. Sure, salads are great, but if you drown them in dressing or pile on croutons, they can be just as calorie-packed as a burger. In practice, this means you could technically lose weight eating only chocolate—if you manage to eat fewer calories worth of chocolate than you burn. And yes, you could gain weight from eating too much salad.

The key is to maintain a calorie deficit, regardless of whether your meals include salads or donuts. I like to think of calorie balance as managing a budget. Imagine you have $200 to spend for the day. If you decide to spend $100 of that on donuts, you’ll have $100 left to spend on other things. Similarly, if you use a large portion of your daily calorie ‘budget’ on high-calorie foods like donuts, you’ll have fewer calories left for other foods throughout the day. It essentially comes down to math:

Overall calories in vs. overall calories out, not donuts vs. salad.