Are YOU Having Troubles Eating Out?
While trying to lose weight, one of the hardest things to navigate is meals away from home. Meals that you have little control over can make it a little more challenging to ensure that you are getting in enough total proteins, fat and carbs. Sometimes with restaurants and fast food places, there will be variability with their recipes and they won’t exactly match what the website or nutrition facts say. This could be due to the chef or cook adding more sugar, oil, butter, flour than the recipe calls for, or eye-balling the amount plated. Working in foodservice for the past few years I have learned that variability from one meal to the other can be fairly large even when weighing and measuring the items. My best advice in a situation like this where you are out and trying to choose a healthier, lower calorie meal (I say lower calorie because each meal out has about 1,000 calories (1)) is to stick with your normal portion sizes of your meats, vegetables and starches, and go for the plain items.
Meats (1 -2 palm sized amounts) - Choose lower fat meats like turkey or chicken breast (boneless, skinless, grilled).
Vegetables (1-2 hand sized amounts) - Choose steamed or grilled vegetables instead of fried or sauteed.
Starches (1-2 cupped hand sized amounts) - Baked potato or baked sweet potato without the butter.
Dressing/Sauces - on the side and use as little as possible.
The reason for this seemingly bland selection is because everything that isn’t one of these items has extra calories from sugars or fats that you may not be accounting for. Here are a few examples:
Fried chicken breast has added flour and oil adding an extra 50-150 calories per serving.
Chicken with the skin has 20-80 more calories per serving from the fat in the skin.
French fries have 50-150 additional calories compared to the same weight of a baked potato.
Steamed broccoli has about 100 less calories than the same quantity of sauteed broccoli.
Dressing has between 200-300 calories per 2 ounce serving.
The list goes on, but as you can see, just those few items can really add up for a single meal out. The temptation of the restaurant and the dessert offerings also make it very difficult to manage calorie control while eating out, so let’s see if we can bypass that with this little tip:
Look at the menu beforehand and choose 2-3 go-to menu items from that restaurant that align with your goals, and don’t look at the menu when you get there. Simply stick with one of the items you have pre chosen and eat it slowly and intentionally.
HOMEWORK: Choose a favorite restaurant, look through their menu online and choose 3 dishes they serve. See if there is calorie information available for those 3 dishes online. If the calories are higher than you need, see if the restaurant can either: swap the fried chicken with grilled chicken OR put the dressing on the side, OR swap the starch for a baked potato or baked yam, OR do steamed vegetables instead of sauteed. Put this meal in your mind and order it the next time you go to the restaurant and see if you like it or need to choose one of the other options next time.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1687517
