How I Make My Daily Salad: 700 Calories, $4 a Bowl, Fresh for 7 Days

This salad is my most important nutrition habit. I break my fast with it nearly every day, it costs about $4 a bowl, and one prep session gives me a week of salads that stay fresh for 7 days.

The short version: build it from four parts (raw vegetables, protein, a few tasty toppings, and an olive oil dressing you mix right in the bowl), chop as little as possible on prep day, and store it in sealed glass containers. Here is exactly how I do it.

Why a daily salad is my number one habit

I practice intermittent fasting, so I don’t eat until about 2 PM. How you break that fast matters a lot. If your first meal is a pile of carbs, sugar or, worst of all, alcohol, the fast does far less for you. If your first meal is low carb, like this salad, the fast works much better for fat loss and for how you feel. I wrote more about the fasting side in why I skip breakfast every single day.

Before the pandemic, I got my salad from the Whole Foods salad bar every single day. It had three problems. I had to drive 10 minutes each way, so I basically never did it on weekends and sometimes skipped it during the week. And it cost about $20 a salad. Making it myself costs about $4 a salad, and it’s already in my fridge.

The 4 parts of the perfect daily salad

1. Raw vegetables. The base of the salad.
2. Protein. You want a good amount when you break your fast. I use a Costco rotisserie chicken (cheap, and it tastes much better than pre-shredded chicken at about half the price) plus hard-boiled eggs, which also bring healthy fats.
3. Toppings. A few olives and some pico de gallo. Not many calories, and they make the salad a lot more tasty.
4. Dressing. Olive oil and vinegar. Skip store-bought dressing: it’s usually made with soybean or rapeseed oil built for shelf life. Olive oil is, in my opinion, the healthiest and best tasting fat you can eat.

Building the salad

I set out seven bowls and go ingredient by ingredient.

• Arugula. I like it better than spinach or lettuce, it has a nice peppery flavor, and it’s one of the most nutritious greens. Put a little less in each bowl than you think you need, then spread the extra into whichever bowl looks lowest.
• Shredded carrots. Vitamin A, beta carotene, fiber, and a lot of color. I use about half a bag across the week.
• Grape tomatoes. They stay fresh much longer than regular tomatoes because you don’t cut them yet.
• Broccolini. Think of it as upgraded broccoli: the stems are actually delicious. I chop the stems now and leave the florets whole until the day I eat it.
• English cucumber. Thinner than an American cucumber and no seeds. Peeled, it’s still firm and tastes good seven days later, where a regular cucumber goes mushy. I peel it and cut it into seven chunks, one per bowl.
• Red onion, last. I like it really oniony. Do the onion last so your eyes water less, use a sharp knife (a dull one makes it worse), and only cut it into segments now. The final chop happens on the day you eat.

How to keep your salads fresh for 7 days

Two things keep a week of salads fresh.

First, minimal chopping on prep day. Whole tomatoes, big onion segments, uncut florets and cucumber chunks all last far longer than finely chopped vegetables.

Second, sealed glass containers. If you throw everything into one big bowl or leave it unsealed, the salads go bad in a couple of days. I use OXO glass containers with sealing lids. They run about $20 each and they’re worth it: the food sits in glass instead of plastic, and the seal keeps everything fresh much longer than cheap plastic Tupperware.

How I finish the salad on the day I eat it

1. Take out the cucumber, tomato and broccolini and do the final chopping. Dice the last piece of onion.
2. Add the dressing now, not at the end. At the end the bowl is too full to mix. You don’t need to pre-make a dressing.
3. Season right on the vegetables: a good amount of black pepper, about a tablespoon of garlic powder, and just a few sprinkles of adobo (it’s mostly salt).
4. Measure the oil and vinegar. Olive oil is 120 calories a tablespoon and it’s easy to over-pour, so I use two tablespoons. Vinegar is measured for taste: about two tablespoons. Too much or too little changes the whole salad.
5. Seal the lid and shake it so every vegetable is coated.
6. Add the protein: about a third of one side of the chicken breast, cut lengthwise then diced, plus two chopped hard-boiled eggs. Individually packaged eggs stay fresh longer.
7. Top with a small handful of olives and some pico de gallo (shake the jar first, the juice settles), then toss it all together.

Make it your own

Don’t copy my exact ingredients. Copy the structure.

• Swap the greens: kale, spinach, baby oak, whatever you like.
• Keep one cruciferous vegetable: broccoli, kale or cabbage all work if you don’t like broccolini.
• Swap the protein: salmon, steak or any protein you like is just as good.
• Spend on the olive oil and vinegar. A great olive oil, even $30 for a small bottle, really does change the taste. Try a few premium vinegars and keep the one you like.
• Keep some salt and some pepper; the rest of the spices are up to you.

How I track the whole week of salads with one set of photos

Track your macros when you meal prep. With AI there’s no excuse not to. In the Abs By AI app I tap Meal Prep, take photos of the batch and the olive oil (spices and vinegar don’t need a photo), and add a short note: 7 salads, all vegetables eaten, 2 eggs per salad, 80% of the chicken eaten, 2 tablespoons of olive oil per salad. That context matters, because a photo alone can’t know how much oil you poured or that you won’t eat the chicken down to the bone.

The app asked me a follow-up (did I use the whole jar of olives? No, a few per salad) and came back with 683 calories per salad. When I tracked it by hand, I got about 720. That’s close, from a few photos, and it covers a third to two thirds of my meals for the week in one go. More on this in you don’t need a food scale anymore, just a photo.

If you want your own plan built around foods you actually like, try Abs By AI free for 7 days and get a nutrition plan to make it real. Don’t like chicken or arugula? The plan swaps them.

This is general fitness information, not medical advice.