Everyone has such different schedules and has a different relationship with food in regards to being healthy, eating out, and cooking at home. There is no one size fits all approach when talking about diets and how to implement nutrition into your daily routine, but we think it’s important to understand what you are getting yourself into, nutritionally, when you eat out.
After diligently tracking food for well over a year now, I’ve come to realize that almost every entree a restaurant provides has an excess of fat, even the “healthy” or “low calorie” options. Now, no matter if your goal is one of fat loss, or lean mass gain, fat levels are generally recommended to be low or moderate. Most people are just generally unaware of the amount of fat content in the entree’s they order when eating out, or have never really cared or thought to look up the foods they might order at the restaurant, but our hope here is that you at least become aware of what you’re ordering!
I grew up in a family where my dad loved to cook and would cook when he had the time, but there were many seasons growing up where both of my parents were busy at work and my siblings and I had sports and activities we had to get to, so we ate out frequently. Since one’s upbringing has an impact on the decisions they make as they get older, I integrated a similar ratio of cooking to eating out when I got to college.
More recently, now that I’ve started trying to live a healthier lifestyle, I’ve cut back on eating out as much as possible. Don’t get me wrong, there is almost always an option that won’t be too detrimental to your goals at every restaurant, but the options are few and generally not as tasty as all of those other items on the menu that are begging to be eaten. My self-control can be inconsistent at times, so now I just try to limit the amount of times I eat out, or at least try to have a plan before I arrive at a restaurant. I know the last sentence can sound silly, or that I’m being really picky, but nutrition has such a huge impact on your fitness and lifestyle goals that I tend to take it very seriously.
I recently went to a restaurant with my family that we would go to all the time when I was growing up. It’s a small regional chain that is a bar and grill type of setting where they have a wide variety of entree options. So a few weeks ago my family decided we were going to head there for dinner. Now that I check the nutrition facts before I eat at a restaurant, I hopped online to check them out, and to my surprise almost every entree had a minimum of 40-50 grams of fat. My mind was blown. I would venture to say the average fat content per entree was around 60 grams of fat. I would eat some meals at this place and consume god-awful amounts of calories and grams of fat, and I had no idea. Some of those entrees were even entrees you might think were “healthy.” I don’t bring this up to scare anyone, but I think this anecdote is relevant for those that have started tracking nutrition themselves.
Hopefully that knowledge is enough for you to at least think more about what you are eating when you go out, but I wanted to leave you with some recommendations for how to approach eating out.
Option 1: Never eat out. Obviously this option is very restrictive, impractical, and probably not very realistic for most people. However, if you commit to this, you will always be in control of what you are consuming, and you can easily figure out the composition of the macronutrients in your food.
Option 2: Eating out when necessary or to be social. This option is probably the most optimal option for most people out there. The idea here is that you cook and prep as many of your meals as you can, but then eat out when you run out of time due to an unexpected project at work, or when you have three kids trying to make it to three different practices in one evening. Life happens, and we have to be realistic! We are also social creatures, and so no one wants to be the lame one not spending time with friends and family just because they are going out to eat. The best advice for this option is to plan ahead of time and try to find something healthier to eat at the restaurant.
Option 3: Eat out whenever you want. This option would definitely not be recommended, but it is the least restrictive yet also the least optimal for nutrition goals. If you take this approach, there is little work in cooking and food prep that needs to be done, but I guarantee you will miss your nutrition targets again and again if you take this approach.
Again, everyone’s lifestyle is different, but in general we think option 2 is the best to fit most people’s needs. We also recommend that if you do eat out, try and limit the times you eat at fast food establishments versus an actual restaurant because often times the fast food quality is a step down from a restaurant.
Cheers,
Josh