Although I managed to get through the holidays without gaining weight, I’ve slipped a little bit off the wagon in early January. As a result, I started this week closer to 140 pounds than 135. Not a huge increase, but the way five pounds turns into ten and then into twenty is by not paying attention. So I’ve been following a 1500-calorie-per-day diet (plus more on days that I work out) this week.

I went into this week thinking, “I hate salad.” But eating fresh, relatively unadorned vegetables gets you a lot of nutritional impact for very few calories, so I decided to suck it up.

After four days of this, I think it’s not that I hate salad. I just hate bad salad, and there’s a lot of it out there. You know what I’m talking about: soggy yellowish lettuce, tomatoes that aren’t even close to bright red, gloppy dressing applied in mass quantities to hide the fact that the vegetables are no good.

Instead, I’ve eaten several times at Mooncake Foods, a great little Asian fusion restaurant near my office, for lunch. On Monday I had their chicken sausage/Asian pear salad. Wow! So much better than what I usually think of when I think of salad. The greens were actually green, the chicken sausage popped with flavor, and the pear added crunch and sweetness without a ton of extra calories.

After having a bad salad the next day, I went back to Mooncake yesterday and today — yesterday, for the lemongrass shrimp with greens and today for steak with cilantro pesto and greens. (Each dish came with rice, of which I kept my consumption to 1/2 cup or so.) And you know what? I always thought 1500 calories for a day was practically nothing, but when you eat meat and greens, it isn’t! I’ve had plenty of leftover calories to spend on snacks, which I’ve mostly been using on the delectable dark chocolate-covered almonds sold in one of the office vending machines. And I’ve lost two pounds.

This is not to say that I’m going to quit having quesadillas from Calexico for lunch (ZOMG AWESOME) once the weight comes off, but I suppose being more paleo at lunchtime wouldn’t hurt.

Also, if you live in NYC…Mooncake Foods RULES. None of the dishes I’ve mentioned costs more than $10!

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