10 Tips For Eating Less Calories At Restaurants

Restaurants food is delicious, but eating there on a regular basis can lead to weight gain as many of the food options tend to be pretty high in calories; read this post for more information. So how can you still enjoy eating out at restaurants, while ensuring that you don’t gain weight? I go over 10 tips below that can help.

For the record if you’re looking to lose weight I’d recommend skipping eating at restaurants all-together – at least for a bit. But sometimes that’s not possible, and here we are. Let’s dive in.

1. Be informed. Probably the most important tip here. Much of the information you need is now at your fingertips– including this sweet post! So, before you go out take a look and see where your favorite dishes rank and make a conscious decision about what you are going to eat. Myfitnesspal, a food and calories tracker for those not familiar, even has a feature now where you can look up local restaurants based on your gps location and it’ll show you items on their menu and their respective calories. Here are some nutrition facts for some common restaurants in Canada:

• Cactus Club – via MyFitnessPal
• Joeys – via MyFitnessPal
• Moxies – via MyFitnessPal
• Boston Pizza

2. Be cautious of pasta dishes. Pasta dishes tend to be prepared with lots of butter and therefore are high in calories.  If you want to eat these dishes, that’s fine but remember rule #1  – be informed.

“Wtf I didn’t lose weight this week?”

“Yes Karen, your Chicken and Mushroom Fettuccini was 1250 calories.”

3. The salad is not always the lower cal. option.  This answer is two-fold: 1. Some salads are still high in calories. 2. Salads won’t keep you full for long so you’re more likely to eat again sooner, therefore you’ll consume more calories in a given day. If you’re going to have a salad, skip the fancy candied and feta cheese ones and opt for one that’s fairly simple with protein.

4. Opt for dishes with Lean Protein and Vegetables. Chicken/fish/duck/turkey > Steak. Steamed Fibrous vegetables > Potatoes. Think fibrous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beans, etc.  Yes a Potato is a vegetable, but when you top it with butter, sour cream, bacon bits, and cheese, it’s “vegetable-ness” diminishes.

5. Avoid obvious high-fat foods. By this I mean foods that are literally prepared in fat and oil. This means things that are deep fried, like chicken wings or beer battered fish, or heavily oil based appetizers like mushroom Neptune.

6. Avoid Dessert. I can hear my Aunt whining as I say that – she loves Dessert. If possible, try to avoid Desserts as they can add quite a bit of extra calories.

7. Take your time eating. It takes (at least “Science” tells us this) about 20 minutes for your brain to get the proper fullness signal after consuming food. Given this, take your time and enjoy your food. Drink your water, put your fork down often, and be social – that’s kind of why you are at the restaurant anyways aren’t you?

8. Drink a calorie-less fluid before eating. Increase volume in your stomach helps activate stretch receptors in your stomach, effectively telling your brain you’re full. Drink at least one cup of a calorie-less fluid (water, tea, black coffee, etc.) before eating and this will add volume to your stomach, which will help “turn off” the hunger cue from your brain and you’ll stop eating earlier and effectively eat less.

9. Share your food!  This touches on point 7 and is one of my favourite things to do when eating out. Instead of getting a main, order two appetizers and share those. You’ll likely take more time to eat the food this way, the overall experience will be more focused on the taste and flavours presents, and you’ll get more variety this way – which is cool too.  Another possibility, if the serving sizes are large, is to share a main dish. Which bring me to my last point…

10. You don’t have to finish the food on your plate. First off, you can take whatever you didn’t finish home. Or, you can simply just put your napkin on the plate and call it a day. My grandpa would not support the latter, he used to say “thall shall not waste,” and I couldn’t leave the table until i was done everything on my plate. I get it, he grew up in an era where at times food was scarce. But times-a-be-a-changing and you need to rid yourself of that mentality, especially forcing this thinking on kids – by doing so you’re forcing them to ignore their hunger and fullness cues which will have lasting implications with their ability to manage their weight later on in life. I prefer to just order an appropriate amount of food, but sometimes my brain in hangry and I order too much – so I package it up for later.

My goal was not to bash restaurants here, because eating at them can be included as part of normal eating and social behaviours. That and the food is tasty, but we still have to be mindful for how many calories are in some of the food options served there.

Till next time,

-Mike