Eating Out

Summary:

Eating out can hinder your progress whilst dieting, but there are several ways to allow for meals out / social events.

Unless it is a very specific health food restaurant who go out their way to list the nutritional information (and even then there is going to be some disparity) most chefs aren’t over-careful with oils, butters dressings and portion sizes (even if you request no butter / oil etc).

Here are a few ways you can approach eating out. Whatever you choose, the accuracy won’t be 100% and the method you choose will largely depend on your goal, your margin for error and the context of the occasion. A bikini or physique competitor will need to be more careful then somebody who has a lot more weight to lose and / or isn’t looking to get competition lean.

 

Choose Trackable Restaurants

There are several chain restaurants that list the calories and macronutrients on their website and MyFitnessPal. Whilst they aren’t going to be as accurate as tracking the food you make, they offer a rough ballpark figure. Even so, we would recommend coming in the lower end of your targets for the day when you are eating out to allow for a margin of error on the restaurants part. Here are just a few examples:

• Nando’s
• Wagamamas
• Harvester
• Pizza Express
• Ask Italian
• Zizzi
• Prezzo
• Pho

We’d recommend taking a look at the menu, tracking the food you are planning on eating in advance and working the rest of the day around that. If you do it the other way round you may potentially overshoot your calories. Remember you can borrow calories from the days subsequent / prior to allow for a higher-calorie day if need be.

When we’re eating out and looking to be accurate, we usually suggest adding 10-20% on what you think it might be, to allow for extra oil, miscalculation or varying portion sizes.

 

Guesstimate

As mentioned above, probably not suitable for those who have extreme goals but every now and then, you may be in a situation whereby the nutritional information isn’t available to you. In this circumstance, with prior experience, you can “guesstimate” the calories/macros for the food you ate. There are a couple of ways of doing this:

More Accurate –  Track the food and guess the weight in MyFitnessPal.

For example, you would search for a steak in MyFitnessPal and find the option you think corresponds with what you think the calories and macros were. You can do this for all the food/drinks you eat.

Less Accurate – Guess the macros for the meal.

For example, you may look at a plate and guess the whole plate as being roughly 50g Protein, 100g Carbs and 30g Fat. You can enter these into MyFitnessPal by searching for the corresponding macronutrients.

Either way, this isn’t the most accurate way of doing things and should ideally be reserved for times when fat loss isn’t the goal or situations where there are no other options. It is however, better than not tracking at all as it at least gives us some data to work with. Even if you are out by a few hundred calories, it’s better to know a rough ballpark figure than wondering whether you ate 100 calories over or 1000!

 

Bank Calories

Another option would be to bank a number of calories for the meal, allowing for all possibilities. This is akin to saving for a holiday. You don’t know exactly how much you’re going to spend but you save ENOUGH to know that you’ve covered all bases.

For example, if you’re going out on Saturday night, you could save 200 calories a day Mon-Fri which will give you an extra 1000 calories to “spend” on Saturday night.

If the meal is going to be particularly indulgent, we’d also recommend eating slightly less during the day, preceding the meal, too. Focus on keeping fats and carbohydrates low and protein high.

 

Not Track At All

There are going to be times when you simply don’t want to track. Be it because you have been in a fat loss phase for a long time, you are at a special event that is food orientated or you are simply fed up.

This is definitely an option providing you understand the consequences. You may stall or even reverse fat loss if fat loss is your goal and you may put on unwanted extra body fat if muscle gain is your goal.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with not tracking and we will not make you feel guilty. There are times in life where tracking is simply not necessary or not appropriate!