When I was preparing to go on vacation with my husband last week, I packed some snacks and a couple of cold meals that I knew would hold up in a cooler, that would give me a healthy option to help me bypass the typical traveling drive thru stop. One of those meals was a salad, but when meal time came around, given all of the cycling and kayaking we had been doing, it never sounded like enough to build my energy supply back up. Finally, on the way home, the salad was all I had left, so I dug into it. And now I can't stop making/eating it. This is one of the most satisfying salads I've ever had, and it definitely fills my belly and gives me enough energy to not only make it until my next meal, but to get me through a tough workout in between, too.

The salad, altogether, is a little bit high fat, but it's all naturally occurring fat from clean sources. Here is some more information on why you may want to consider a lower carbohydrate, higher fat diet (to summarize, Harvard found that people who ate a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet lost more than those on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, even when they consumed 25,000 more calories over the course of 12 weeks).

Ingredients:
Salad:
2 oz. spinach (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 hard boiled eggs, quartered
1/2 red pepper, diced
2 green onions, slivered
1/4 cup Maple Nut Toasted Trail Mix
I've eaten this salad with goat cheese (1 oz), cheddar cheese (1 oz), and no cheese, and it tastes good every way. If you want to spare yourself 120 extra calories, 10 extra grams of fat, and 190 mg sodium, opt for no cheese.

Dressing:
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
Juice from 1/2 lemon
Salt, to taste

To make the salad last, I pack my dressing in a little container and tuck it into the bowl to drizzle on before I eat it. The dressing is very simple to make and saves you from a lot of unwanted, added ingredients in commercial dressings.

Nutrition Facts
523 calories // 21 g carbohydrates // 40 g fat // 20 g protein // 208 mg sodium // 13 g sugar