Strategies for post-Covid re-emergence

8. Only eat the "kids meals" at most fast food restaurants...

Here are some of the strategies I use when dining out.

* Plan ahead - most restaurants have menus available online, and a lot of them even have calorie information. Check out the menu ahead of time and pick what you want. Pre-log it in your diary, too, to make sure you have the calories for it. If this is going to be an apps-and-drinks-and-dinner-and-dessert affair, pick and pre-log those, too. You can always decide later you don't want them.
* Box up half right away - as soon as the food arrives, ask for a box and put away about half of what's on your plate. I find it much easier to do this than to eat half, stop, and ask for a box at that point. I also usually end up eating more like 2/3 if I do it that way.
* If you go over, it's not the end of the world. Indulging a bit more than you intended to once a month will not derail all the progress you've made.

If you find yourself in this situation often, then it's time to take a step back and look at the big picture: why do you keep finding yourself eating in restaurants? What's pushing you over your calorie budget? What can you change to make that stop happening?

Maybe your job requires a lot of travel so you can't cook at home as often as you might like, so maybe you focus on finding restaurants or menu items that better fit your calorie goals (baked over fried, sauce on the side, swap a starch for a green and drink water).

Maybe you find a lot of "reasons" to "celebrate," or you're just too dog-tired after work, and you keep deciding to go out instead of cook at home; perhaps look into meal prepping, so you have nutritious homecooked meals available that are easy to assemble/reheat and log when you get home and have no energy to cook.

Maybe you have a standing dinner date with friends or family at a place with few "good" options - all the food that tastes good is a thousand calories and all the food that isn't is miserable trash. If you know that every Wednesday night for the foreseeable future you're going to hit up the alehouse with the boys for trivia and loaded fries, cut your calories a little the rest of the week and add those to Wednesday's allotment (mentally, or create a custom exercise called "banked calories" and log that), maybe squeeze in a 20-minute walk on your lunch break that afternoon, and don't worry about it too much.

Eating out for my family isn't really a routine thing and never has been. If we're lucky, we get a date night maybe once per month. During soccer season we might go out for lunch after the kids' match if it's an earlier game...or like tomorrow, my wife and I are going to Placitas in the AM to mountain bike for a few hours and we'll most likely go to brunch or lunch afterwards. Basically stuff like that...it's pretty minimal and was so before COVID.

We get together with friends and family to socialize quite a bit, but that's usually at our or their homes. I can't recall ever going out to eat just to socialize with friends.

1. Weigh and measure your food one day a week.
2. Weigh food that you have measured. For example, a frequent breakfast for me is oatmeal. I measure the 1/2 cup carefully, making sure it is level and not heaping. One day I decided to weigh it and it came to 50g instead of the 40g stated on the package!
3. If you indulge on meal, don't think of it as starting over. It's just a blip. Don't use it as an an excuse to "start over" tomorrow or Monday (why is that a favorite day to start over?) and continue to overindulge the rest of the day or week.
4. Get used to being hungry sometimes! If it's an hour or to before the next meal, you will likely be getting hungry. Doesn't mean you need to eat something to "tide you over ".

steveko89 wrote: »

I'm endlessly frustrated with the general clambering to "get back to normal". Going out is overrated, working in an office is overrated, the level of manufactured busyness and rampant consumerism with which we are bombarded t makes me weary. By no means am I a minimalist but I'd hoped just a little bit of a silver lining from big 'rona would be a societal shift to permit the acceptance of living a little more quietly, slower, and simpler. I saw neighbors I'd never met go on leisurely walks, kids I didn't know lived around the corner rode their bikes all day, and I learned more names of people in our subdivision in less than 3 months than in the first 7 years we lived in our house. Sure, it's great that we again have the ability to safely enjoy all these external things, but that doesn't mean that we have to.

:: steps off introvert soap box ::

Also, some rampant speculation from a non-expert - this manifest destiny to return to "normal" is going to come back to bite us. Between the insufficient level of vaccinated people and the Delta variant quickly becoming the dominant strain we're not nearly as equipped to resume "normal" as everyone seems to want and I think it's being largely ignored by decision-makers because there's no longer an appetite to tolerate any caution from the public (i.e. voters).

Yes. This is absolutely the appropriate place to put this and entirely on topic for how to eat out without blowing your diet.

(I even agree with you, but TIME AND PLACE)

I’ve definitely regressed socially. I’m not an introvert, but definitely a homebody. My brain is putting out feelers for excuses to stay home, and derailing my diet is an easy reach. I’m lucky to have friends living healthy lifestyles or who support my choices. I really appreciate the suggestions here.