Five Tips for Healthier Eating at Restaurants
Eating out can be a large part of people’s lives. Today’s lifestyle of entertaining clients, social gatherings and traveling means that you will have some huge barriers to overcome to maintain your healthy, lean body lifestyle when eating out.
To make life easier for you I have put together a list of some easy-to-implement tips to keep your diet on track even when you aren’t in charge of the food preparation.
1. Keep the liquid calories to zero. This means no soda (soft drinks), juices or alcohol. For maximum benefit stick to water and green tea.
2. Minimise starchy carbs. Go for salads instead of potatoes, rice or potatoes.
3. Avoid the fry up! Anything deep fried is going to be full of unhealthy fats and calories that will take forever to burn off back in the gym.
4. Say no to desert. Whist there are some balanced, nutritious deserts available, 99% of the time you will have to make them yourself. At the restaurant they will be full of sugar and saturated fats which won’t help your waistline.
5. Be smart with portion control. Eating out doesn’t always have to be about getting the best value for money! Getting the all you can eat buffet will cost you more time and effort in the long run. Be sensible and don’t be afraid to leave some food on the plate.
So putting this all into practice means that you will be having a moderate sized (lean protein/meat based) main accompanied by a glass or two of water. Always try to get the inevitable side of fries changed over for a serve of salad or vegetables. You want to skip the free bread, garlic bread or herb bread whilst you are waiting for your meal. This is a surefire way to add processed calories to your diet and inches to your waistline.
If we have a look at the improvements you have made with meal selection, you will see how much of a positive impact it will have on your body.
Option A – The regular menu
- Garlic Bread
- Burger or pasta dish
- Chips / Fries
- Soft Drink (soda), beer or other sugary / alcoholic drink.
If you care about your health and your body, a much smarter alternative would be:
- Lean meat or chicken dish
- Salad or vegetables, or both
- Water and green tea.
These small changes will result in a saving of between 400 and 800 calories every time you eat out. Even more if you tend to have more drinks or upsize all the options. You will also be eliminating almost all of the bad fats and processed carbs along the way.
It doesn’t have to be hard, and you don’t have to go without. Just a few small changes applied frequently will make a massive difference in the long run.
What tips or strategies do you use? Share with us by leaving a comment below.
April 12th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Eating out ‘successfully’ can be done quite easily these days. Good restaurants will allow customisation of their dishes, and if they don’t, well then that’s one restaurant you won’t visit or recommend in the future.
Chefs cater to people with a broad range of food allergies and ‘intollerances’, so your request to remove the ‘steak diane’sauce or replace the chips with veggies isn’t terribly inconvenient for them.
Also, should you be unable to avoid the ‘fast food’ chains, many of them, McDonalds particularly, have extensive nutrition details allowing you to select low fat, low cal or low cholesterol meals very easily, and again, they will ‘customise’ your meal somewhat if your polite and understand that your meal may take an extra minute or two to prepare. Stick with seared chicken, eat half the bun if any at all, use balsamic dressings and salads (skip the cheese) and you can still enjoy your Maccas with your full-fat mates
April 12th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Great advice there Brett. Although whilst eating out successfully can be easy, it does take that extra little bit of effort. The good new is that the extra effort will reward you exponentially.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:13 am
Sorry it is not that easy to do this in Australia. I ordered a salad – yep great choice and veggis – the salad came covered in oil and vinegar dressing and the veggies came covered in butter – stupid me! i find it difficult and painful – the poeple you sit with make comments the waiting staff act like you are trying to make there life difficult and what is the point of eating out if you are going to have what you have every other night at home yourself??
April 13th, 2009 at 1:52 am
It’s not all bad. Hopefully the oil was half decent, butter is better than margarine, and even then it would be better than the rancid oils the fries would have come in!
I wouldn’t be overly concerned with what the wait staff might think. They are probably the same people that think to themselves ‘Wow she looks great, I wonder what her secret is’ as you leave!
April 16th, 2009 at 5:33 am
Hey James,
Found you thru twitter. Great advice, especially avoiding the fry up. Grilled is always the way to go. Looking forward to future articles.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:28 am
You seem to forget one very valuable idea: sharing entrees. I now do that whenever I eat out with friends. Most restaurants allow it; some will charge you a small sharing charge, but they do that when they divide the entree, and usually if they do that, then they allow a small amount extra on each plate so that in the end it’s worth the added charge. At 62, I now find that finishing a meal is difficult in restaurants, and one of my problems is getting exactly what I want to eat. I also try to eat 5 small meals a day rather than 3 larger ones.
I like this site a lot. Of all the “body” sites I’ve seen, it’s one of the best.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Fair point. It seems that some restaurants have missed the medium sized meal. They are either waaaay to big or equally as small…