A Big Meal, not many calories

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I said before that my version of portion control was the lower in calories something was, the more of it I ate. Lunch is a good example. I nearly always have a salad, and I eat it from a big bowl. It's a really big bowl – it holds 1,300ml (two-and-a-quarter pints), and I fill it with salad, which takes 30 minutes to eat. After that lot, I don't get hungry until well into the evening, and it takes a lot to stop me getting hungry!

I enjoy my daily salad, because I can vary what goes into it so much. The photo is today's meal, and that has lettuce (two types), watercress, spinach, celery, apple, tomato, celeriac, courgette, red pepper, radish, carrot, sugar snaps and spring onion. There are also small amounts of smoked salmon and ham, and splashes of soy sauce and lime juice.

For something that is such a big meal, today's salad comes in at only 310 calories, and gives me 14 portions of fruit and veg. It makes shopping fun, looking for ingredients that are new to me (like celeriac) and also ingredients I had never thought of eating raw (like courgette). Of course the success of this depends on liking salad, but for me it works brilliantly!