Have you ever sat in a restaurant and wondered how many calories or grams of fat were in the food in front of you? Do not? Okay, you’re not as weird as I am with that, but I wonder all the time, and after reading this, maybe you should be too.
Some have the information available upon request, but most do not make it available. Well my aunt emailed me that it had the worst restaurant meals and their calorie content and nutritional breakdown.
Here are some examples.
McDonald’s 5-Piece Chicken Selects with Ranch Sauce has more than 800 calories with 55 g of fat. 55 grams of fat! That’s crazy. Especially when you consider that they were advertised under the guise of healthy food because they were supposed to be chicken breast, but even chicken breast is unhealthy when battered and fried.
My favorite, however, was the Jamba Juice smoothie. When you listen to smoothies you probably think it’s healthy, right? After all, this is how they are marketed. But this Jamba Juice smoothie was 900 calories, with 160g of sugar! That is incredible!
By the way, those two I just gave you were “the best of the worst.” There were many with more than 1500 and 2000 calories. That’s the number of calories that many people should consume in an entire day if they want to lose fat and these entrees (or some snacks) have them in one sitting.
Hearing numbers like that, it should come as no surprise that we have an obesity epidemic in this country. We simply eat too much, or we don’t pay attention to what’s going on in our mouth, and we don’t even realize it until it ends up as sticky fat on our gut, butt, or thighs.
You need to be careful with any food when dining out. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out to eat. Quite the opposite. I think we need to get out of the house and go to restaurants. I’d go crazy and get cabin fever if I didn’t leave the house and eat at restaurants. What I’m saying is that you need to understand that many foods and drinks are not prepared with the idea that they will keep your waistline in check.
They are made to taste as good and as cheap as possible because restaurants need to make money, after all. Therefore, to make many foods taste better, they are either fried, sautéed, or prepared in another way to increase the fat, because fat makes food taste better, or they are topped with creams and sauces loaded with sugar and fat.
So here are a couple of tips to keep in mind when dining out.
First, avoid the appetizer. Appetizers are often loaded with fat, and this includes vegetarian dishes because they come with some kind of sauce for dipping.
Next, avoid anything that is fried, sautéed, or cooked in some kind of sauce. It may sound healthy because it’s salmon or chicken or vegetarian, but if it’s fried, sautéed, or cooked in sauce, it’s high in fat and loaded with calories.
Lastly, if you’ve decided that you’re going to eat poorly when dining at a restaurant, get at least half an order. The proportions in full orders are so out of place that they could feed an entire village in some starving country. So do yourself a favor and order half an order or split it up with whoever you’re having dinner with.
Another easy thing to do is have a drink of water between each bite. The water will fill you up a little faster, which means you won’t be able to eat as much, which means you won’t be storing as much fat.
I hope I have brightened you up a bit and start eating a little more mindfully when you’re away from home.
