Let’s face it. Whenever there’s a choice between a cheesy snack and a salad, we’d generally gravitate towards the cheesy ones rather than the greens. This is especially true for someone who follows a diabetes diet simply because temptation is heavier than discipline.
People need to go on a diabetes diet to cut down excess carbs and to include the right amount of macro and micronutrients. This way they will not pressurize their bodies any further. As such higher blood sugar levels are damaging blood vessels daily, and now it’s a fight against temptation to stick to a diet plan and avoid junk food.
Coming back to salads, ever wondered why you gave up on salads after about a fortnight of chomping into listless greens? Yes, you gave them up because salads are supposed to be healthy but not tasty!
If you have tried to infuse some life into your salads and failed, you might most likely have tried it the wrong way! Here’s a tried and tested salad composition that never fails.
Salad + Aesthetics + Diabetes Diet
Seems weird? But, it’s true. Salads are all about color, flavor, zest, and crunch!
It’s a secret technique used by food photographers. A pleasant blend of colors – the right proportion of greens, reds, yellows, and whites. This is what tantalizes you and creates a craving to gorge!
A mélange of flavor in the air! That’s what makes you gobble-gobble, and crunch munch! The right amount of vinegar, and a hint of cinnamon creates waves of hunger!
Making a perfect tasty salad is a work of art that you too can master! This is how you build the perfect salad!
Building a Perfect Salad:
Most of you are used to unwillingly bite into raw onions and radish just to do justice to your diabetes diet. Let’s put an end to this torture and turn that salad into a complete meal!
A perfect salad needs a base, something crunchy to bite into, something soft to reassure you, the right amount of protein, a decent dressing, and a bit of creativity to add something new and unexpected.
Let’s begin from the beginning. The base of your salad should be something green. You may indulge in the good old spinach, lettuce, the humble cabbage, broccoli, and kale.
For the crunch, you can experiment with carrots, cucumbers, bell peppers, nuts & seeds, zucchini, or even apples!
While crunching away to glory, you might want something soft in between just to give the right consistency. For this you can trust dry fruits, a bit of cottage cheese, a sweet potato, a hint of mayo, tomatoes, avocados; or heck, for that matter why not watermelons?
To make the salad a complete meal, you need the right amount of protein content in it. Each day, you can try out eggs, tuna, chicken, peas, quinoa, tofu, nuts, and beans.
To add flavor, there are a host of herbs and spices that can make your salad hot, fruity, astringent, piquant, or zesty – it’s all depends upon your mood!
Finally for the dressing, there are a host of options that can make you tired experimenting. You can try vinaigrette dressing with either balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar. You can go Italian with the classic Italian dressing. Try ginger dressing for an antioxidant detox. Go mustard for that selenium rush and just get naughty with experimentation!
Remember, if you have diabetes, you don’t need to avoid tasty food! It’s all about making your diabetes diet colorful, flavorsome, and crunchy with that perfect salad. Is your salad spinner on?
