What would happen if you just ate fast food Cobb Salads to lose weight?

Factual Questions
1

That Jared guy and Subway got me to thinking of other fast-food places and simplified weight-loss diets. I guess the attraction of eating the same thing all the time is you don’t have to think about your diet too much as long as it was well-balanced.

Would eating something like one of those new McDonald’s salads all the time provide enough nutrients? I’m thinking 3 salads a day would be a reasonable amount. Each Cobb Salad with dressing is 400-450 calories.
It includes a few tomatoes, and dark greens, along with chicken and a bit of cheese and bacon and egg. Another advantage is that this is also a low-carb regimen.

A disclaimer: I’m not a fan of McDonald’s by any stretch of the imagination.

2

Perhaps a visit to the McDonalds Nutrition web site would be a place to start. Select your foods and read the nutritional information. Then chomp on over to the Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a joint publication of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture.

A true weight-loss diet means a well-balanced diet and appropriate exercise. Only you and your doctor can adequately determine that.

3

Well, I knew about the basic nutrional stuff, but for example, there’s no rda for protein, and there’s absolutely nothing on the vitamins and minerals.

Why doesn’t nutritional information tell you how much protein is a recommended daily allowence?

My basic question is, if you eat something like a salad all the time, are you going to be running into any deficiencies?

You don’t need carbs or fats to survive, just enough of the right kinds of amino acids and vitamins.

4

This isn’t true. You absolutely need some carbs and fats. Atkins, whether you believe it works or not, isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates from your diet, only about lowering their intake. There’s far more to good nutrition than “the right kinds of amino acids and vitamins”. Iron, for example, isn’t found in any vitamin or amino acid, but if you don’t get any, you’ll die.

5

Are you going to get enough fiber from fast food lettuce?

I bet there’s a good bit of extra sodium in those things too, from the bacon and chicken.

6

Almost all the calories and fat in a salad are in the dressing. Some McD salads have more fat and calories than a BigMac®. There are two good ways to get around that.

  1. Bring your own fat-free dressing, and don’t use much.

  2. Don’t put the dressing on the salad. Instead, keep the dressing on the side. Dip your fork in it before each bite, and eat only the dressing that clings to the fork.

You can also skip the dressing, using only pepper, salt, and a little sugar. Well, sure, but what fun is that?

7

If you kept it up, you would lose weight at 1400 calories a day. But it would make for such a bland diet that you would likely cheat.

In dieting, the good is the enemy of the great. People clearly lose weight on Atkins, but this does not make it a perfect diet. It can have high quantities of fat depending on choices some dieters make – and this has implications for heart health. Lowering carbs and fat, increasing fiber and eating more fruits and vegetables will help regardless of other particularities of the diet. I certainly disagree with Atkins about the need for supplement vitamins, the long-term complications of ketosis and some other items – and the fact that I don’t think it is ideal does not mean it doesn;t have a lot of good points or that people don’t lose weight on it.

I like the “G.I. Diet” better. It makes more medical sense and it works well.