Dining Out While Dieting
One of my clients said that "eating out making it very difficult to track calories accurately."
Dining out with friends or family is a part of life.
We're social creatures, and for many of us, going out for dinner, a drink on the weekends, or to hang out with friends helps you unwind for the week and connect with people.
But what if you're dieting for a fat loss goal?
In that case, you're probably tracking your food intake. But you're not going to be that person who brings a food scale to a restaurant. You also want to enjoy yourself (which means eating and drinking freely).
So what do you do?
This is where I see people going to the extremes.
They either say, "I'm going to eat every meal at home and stop going out altogether."
Or they say, "Well, nothing I can do about it. Just enjoy myself and eat and drink as much as I want."
The real answer, as always, is somewhere in between.
If you want to keep making progress (toward losing weight, getting lean, building muscle, whatever your goal is), there's an intelligent, balanced way to approach these situations.
First, let's talk tracking.
There are strategies to develop this skill in a way where you can estimate pretty closely without a food scale or bar codes--like when eating out.
One of those is to track everything you normally eat (at home, with a food scale) in GRAMS and pay attention to the amounts of food you usually consume.
Let's say you have a plate of dinner every night with a meat, vegetable, and carb/starch. You weigh those in grams and learn over time that you typically eat around 150 g of meat, 125 g of potatoes, and 125 g of broccoli, or 400 g total.
You know what "400 grams of food" looks like, and what 100 or 125 or 150 grams of an ingredient looks like.
When you go to a restaurant, eyeball your food (or quickly snap a photo for later), and later you estimate in your food log based on your experience of what different things weigh.
Add 20% (because restaurants add more fat, salt, and sugar to make it taste irresistable).
Then you're all set.
As long as you're within 30%, that's better than not logging.
Second, let's talk about the "what the hell" mentality.
This is where advanced planning is helpful.
Here are some options for planning ahead:
If the restaurant has nutrition info online, choose what food/drinks you plan to have ahead of time and "pre-log" them to fit your plan
Manage your week or day to accomodate the extra calories eating out (for example, lower calories on the other days, or eating less earlier in the day)
Give yourself permission to (just slightly) down your progress for the week and freely enjoy eating/drinking at the restaurant (but still track)
Can we make all this even easier?
Yes!
How? By increasing your metabolic rate 📈 so you can diet on more calories, with even more flexibility!
My clients work on increasing their daily expenditure by training to build muscle, getting steps by walking, using reasonable calorie deficits, managing stress and sleep, and many other things that then let them enjoy eating out, vacations, social events, and the foods they like.
The end result is you simply burn more calories on a daily basis because of your improved body composition (muscle!) and movement (NOT cardio, just walking).
Where you used to lose weight on 1300 calories, now you can lose weight on 1900 calories. 😲
You can enjoy your lifestyle while reaching your goals.
If this is something you want, you can learn about the process I use to help people get sustainable results with individualized 1-on-1 coaching.
Here's the process: CLICK HERE.
