Eating out tips

I try to look up the menu/nutrition info and make my choice ahead of time. I'm also a big fan of taking home half of my meal to eat the following day.

The last time I ate out I googled the restraunt and added "healthy options" to the search. People blog about everything! You can know what you are going to order before you even leave the house. Some of the search info included pictures so that I could see how the food looked.

Eat half. Make it work by ordering your 'To Go' box along with your entree, then put half the entree into the box before you eat any of it.

Watch out for mega calories in bread, salad dressing, and butter sauces. Bottomless fried potatoes also can have mega calories, so watch out for that, too.

My wife likes to eat at a restaurant where "half" is too much for my plan. On our most recent visit, her entree came with a side salad. I had her salad and she had half of her entree. We took most of the bread home and shared it with our family.

I take my own food with me lol

lucypstacy wrote: »

I look up the menu and figure out what I'm getting before I get there, and then (like many said before me) I eat about half.

Same, except I've been conditioned to clean my plate. What I've done is email the restaurant a couple of days before I plan to go and ask them about what I'm thinking of having on the menu. This has a couple of advantages:

1) When they check the email, it's probably not during the peak business time, so they've got time to give you a full answer.
2) They often have suggestions on how to make their dishes fit your plan better. Actual quotes from a Middle Eastern restaurant I contacted: "The shakshuka comes in a bread bun, but you can request to have it plain" I saw the bread bun when someone at a nearby table ordered it. Try "hollowed out round loaf of bread". "The grilled eggplant comes drizzled with tahini sauce, but you can ask to have it on the side." I wouldn't have thought about it coming with a sauce, but tahini is a healthy calorie bomb and it's helpful to know about it before I tuck in!
3) I firmly believe that if you ask the wait-staff about the menu, most servers will tell you the truth, not what they think you want to hear. But there are always exceptions. And there are the ones who offer to check with the cook—who is too busy working on getting the food out and just throws out an answer that may or may not be close to reality, but it gets the server out of the kitchen. Talk to the restaurant beforehand and you're probably going to get something more accurate.

Eating half is a good plan. Order with dressing/sauces on the side whenever possible. Order vegetables as a side instead of fries, limit the amount of rolls/bread eaten with your meal as those calories add up quickly. Split meals with others..many ways to make it all work.

In addition to suggestions above: Never be afraid to ask (politely) for reasonable variations of what you see on the menu. It usually works.

I've been vegetarian for over 40 years, before most restaurants even had vegetarian options, so I had a lot of practice with this even before trying to lose weight. If you want it, ask for the sandwich without the bread, no croutons on the salad, a plate with several of the side veggies on it, or some other variation, keeping in mind that some things will have been pre-combined ahead (like lasagna, say).

Some other options: For a planned special event, cut out a few (maybe 100) calories on each of several days before the event to create some calorie wiggle room, do an extra workout to buy some extra calories, and/or eat lightly at the other meals that day. (I don't recommend cutting calories on days after the event to make up calories - that's more likely to set up a restrict-then-overeat cycle, while the pre-event cut gets "repaid" at the event and evens things out.)

If it's a celebratory occasion, though, it's also an option to eat at maintenance calories for the day, or even to go over maintenance if you do it only very, very occasionally. If you're losing a pound a week, you're at a 500 calorie daily deficit. So, eating an extra 1000 calories over goal adds two days to reaching your ultimate goal weight. If you do this three times a week, it's gonna be a problem; if you do it once a month it's probably not a big deal.