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MEET THE KROCKS: We are a married couple who started on a life-changing whole food, plant-based weight loss journey in June 2018. To date, we have lost over 240 pounds combined and we aren’t done yet! Read Our Story
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We eat a LOT of salad! Every night for dinner we have a giant salad, and it has been a huge part of our weight loss success. We learned very early on that being prepared is THE KEY to staying on track when switching to a whole food, plant-based diet. After we get home from a long day at work, we need a quick and easy dinner that we can look forward to!
When we first decided to switch to a whole food, plant-based diet, we were following the 6 week plan from Eat To Live (also referred to as a “Nutritarian diet”). After reading that book, we felt pretty overwhelmed and didn’t really know where to start. While we were still eating potatoes, Brian discovered this wonderful resource HelloNutritarian.com. Kristen, who runs the website, put together an amazingly detailed, broken down step-by-step guide to switching to a Nutritarian diet. We purchased her prep plan, and although we actually never ended up following any of the weeks she has the plan broken down into, we did gather a lot of inspiration and tips from her plan. We definitely recommend purchasing it. Even if you don’t end up following her plan, you will definitely gain some knowledge of where to start and how to make this work for your lifestyle. As an added bonus, when you purchase her plan, you get access to her Facebook group, which is another amazing resource! She is not sponsoring this post – we just wanted to share since we have learned so much from her plan and website.
One of Kristen’s ideas was to create your own “salad bar” in your refrigerator each week. We started out doing this and have continued to tweak the process to make it fit our lifestyle and tastes.
The first step is to pick which veggies you want for your salads. Below are some of our favorite things to prep, along with a guide of how much we prepare for one week of salad for two people. We don’t prep all of these every week, but usually pick at least 5-6 and always include beans. Check out the video for a more detailed look at how we prep some of our favorite veggies!
Pick a time each week that you can set aside an hour (or two when you first start) to prep your veggies. We like to do this on Sundays. Wash and rinse everything first, and then get to chopping, slicing, dicing, etc. In the video, we show you a few of our favorite tools. Scroll down for links to some of them!
We like to store our veggies in glass Pyrex bowls. Glass makes a huge difference when trying to keep your veggies fresh throughout the week. The most useful size has been the 4-cup containers, which are also perfect for a lunch size portion of soups and more! Scroll down for a link to purchase these.
Each night when we get home, we take out all of our bowls of veggies, chop up a bunch of lettuce and assemble our salads! For lettuce, we usually use a combination of baby spinach, kale, butter lettuce and a spring mix. We like to use our super smoky oil-free hummus as the “dressing” on our salads. Check out our video on how to make it and let us know if you test it out!
Here are a few other things we like to include in our salads:
1 oz of nuts and/or seeds (walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds)
1 tablespoon of ground flax seed
1 tablespoon of nutritional yeast
1-2 chopped dates OR 1-2 tablespoons of raisins
You can get started with just replacing one meal a day with a giant whole food, plant-based, oil-free salad. Simplifying our dinners in this way has not only helped us stack on track with our weight loss goals, but also saved us time and money in the process!
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Even though I know we are not counting calories, I’m curious if you could guess how many might be in that heaping tablespoon of your hummus. I suck at math! Thanks! Love you guys!
I have no idea but I will try to figure this out!
Hi,
I live in Sweden and didn’t find Jicama. What would be a good replacement for it? Maybe beets?
I think your journey is amazing!
It is more similar to apple in texture! Thanks for watching!
Try turnip. Jicama is a root vegetable. Tastes sweeter than turnips, but same texture.
I’m looking for new salad bowls. How big are the ones you use?
We use pretty giant ones so there is plenty of room to mix everything up! Usually around 4 to 4.5 quarts!
Hey Jessica! I just found you guys and I’m loving the info you’re sharing! It’s just me and hubby now and I’m thinking of using your salad prep idea. My question is, how many bags of salad do you think you guys buy per week? This is going to be a BIG change for us and I literally have no clue have much greens we might need.
Thanks so much!
Why yeast?
I LOVE how organized you are. This is very helpful to me!
Thank you so much!
I’m having a hard time finding recipes for a WPB diet. There are many ingredients that I can’t eat (allergy or my stomach doesn’t “like” them (such as spices like cumin, chili pepper, jalapeno peppers, etc), some things I can’t find and some things I really don’t like (cauliflower). Is it ok to just eat a salad twice a day along with other veggies plus the recommended amount of other items (like beans, legumes, etc)? I’ve only been able to find 2 recipes that I can eat after looking online for about 3 months. I’ll keep looking of course, but can I just eat salads in the meantime until I find more? Thanks! Love your channel and I’m trying the Super Smoky Hummus today! I’ve tried other hummus recipes and they’re too bland. Keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll be great because I’m also having a hard time finding good dressing recipes for the salad.
Have you visited the blog Hello Nutritarian? She has lots of good recipes that do not use the spices you are sensitive to, I think. https://hellonutritarian.com/
Many years ago, Alton Brown settled the mushroom washing debate on his Good Eats show.
He weighed the mushrooms and the water, then soaked mushrooms for various lengths of time (up to 15 minutes I think).
Then he weighed mushrooms and water afterwards and concluded that the mushrooms soaked up very little water.
It is okay to wash them.
Of course nobody paid attention and the myth lives on.
Interesting! Brian loves Alton Brown.. sending him this 😉
Can you tell me if you eat pasta and bread . Awaiting your email . Love your show
We do eat pasta and bread in small amounts. For pasta, we use either whole grain or bean pasta like Banza. For bread, we mostly eat Ezekiel bread.
I really envy that you both are on board at the same time and work together toward your health goals. I have been working on a Nutritarian/WFPB lifestyle for several years but keep getting sidetracked by my spouse. He has been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes but feels deprived when he can’t eat meat. I have FINALLY, after all these years (6 years!) decided to add some animal protein to his meals while I follow the plan as written. So far, it is going fine. It has been about two weeks. Thanks for your content; it is very encouraging to someone who knows what to do but just needs someone to tell her it is worth the effort!