thoughts after a month of salad

Well guys, January has come and gone, and I am happy to report that I was able to stick to my New Year's resolution of salad every weekday.  I thought I would report on some things I learned.

A few things before I dole out my nuggets of wisdom... I wound up not being very experimental with toppings during the second half of the month.  The only thing I tried that wasn't listed on my first post was shredded turkey (I think it was the pepper flavor of Hillshire Farm), which was a tasty way to add some protein.  But I only did it once, so clearly I wasn't in love.  The last week I got lazy and ate Caesar salad every day when I worked at school.  It just doesn't get easier than lettuce, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and dressing (I use Ken's Lite Creamy Caesar.)

I was kinda lame about making my own dressing throughout this thing, BUT, on my last salad post, Sarah described an easy dressing in one of the comments.  All you need is olive oil, apple cider vinegar, honey, and salt and pepper.  Nothing fancy and it's so easy!  It is seriously SO GOOD!  Both of the salads above are dressed using that combination, and they were so tasty.  It's tangy and light, and I highly recommend it.  Note: I like my salad dressing cold, so I didn't like it as much the first time.  I refrigerated the vinegar and that made it perfect!

THINGS I LEARNED

1. Buy the set of three romaine hearts... ditch the bag!  The bag may seem convenient, but economically it just doesn't make sense.  It also seems to go bad faster, which is not good.  No one likes limp salad.  (Note: I really like baby spinach, so I would consider buying that too, but I just didn't because Brian doesn't like it as much and we've been eating side salads with dinner, too)
2. CHOP THAT ROMAINE.  Cut off the end, rinse the lettuce, and then use your knife and chop the lettuce into thin strips.  You'll be happier.
3. Plan ahead.  Before I committed to this I thought that eating salad every day would be way more complicated than bringing a sandwich for lunch.  FALSE.  It's all about having everything on hand.  As long as the lettuce is chopped the night before, throwing a salad together in the morning is easy!
4. Salad is good.  I didn't get sick of salad!  There are just so many things you can do with it.  I even had it on the weekends once or twice, and there was only one weekend day where I was like "PASTAAA!"  Just vary your ingredients and you should be good!  It's also wayyy more satisfying than the sandwich that I used to eat every day.
5. ... and good for you.  I'm going to tell you something, and then I'm going to regret it: when we got back from Christmas break, I weighed five pounds more than I did this summer before our wedding. Since we got back from Christmas break, I've lost four of those pounds.  This is all the result of changes in my eating habits, because I've worked out less this month than any other month practically ever (not like my eating habits have been stellar all month either!)   HOWEVER, eating salad was not the only change I made, so please don't think that I am saying that I lost weight entirely as a result of eating salad for lunch during the week.  That being said, I am NOT in the same shape that I was this summer, which basically means that weight is stupid.

Basically, even though my month of salad is over, I still plan on eating salad as my go-to weekday lunch.  It's delicious!  I'm really glad that I picked this as one of my New Year's resolutions.