How To Eat Out Healthy (W/O Having To Order Salad)

See, one of the reasons why you’re packing on the pounds is because you eat out so much.

How much? Like every…single…day.

How many meals? Like every…single…one…of…them.

Considering that restaurant food is high in calories, dietary fat, sugar, and sodium, that’s bad for your waistline. You know this, but figuring out how to eat out healthy is the bane of your existence. Man, if only you could cook your own food and take it with you to work then you wouldn’t have to eat out so much, if at all. Or if only you could do something active with your friends instead of them putting a gun to your head and forcing you to go to gatherings with them that revolve around food and drink.¹

But yeah, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to do either!

Because of the impossibilities of simply NOT eating out, all you’re left with is a workaround solution to eating restaurant food without your body having to suffer as much for it.

Well, here’s how to do that…

Plan Ahead

Most restaurants post their menus and nutritional info online. Some even have calculators that allow you to plug in a dish and see the nutrient breakdown. So decide on the establishment that you’re going to in advance so you can do your homework. Once you find something that fits your dietary requirements, select it as the dish you’re going to order when it’s time to dine out. This way, not only will you see if the restaurant offers anything healthy but choosing what you’ll eat before you arrive can stop you from caving in to temptation when you hear what others are ordering, as well as keep you from falling prey to your company’s encouragement to treat yo’self.²

Don’t Skip Meals

Eat as you regularly would throughout the day.

Skipping meals in an attempt to make space for your outing will only increase the chances of you experiencing hunger by the time of the get-together, leading you to order food you probably wouldn’t have. So if you’re meeting friends for lunch, eat breakfast if you normally do. Dinner? Eat all the meals and snacks that you usually do up to the time of the dinner. Simple!

Oh yeah, and then several minutes before the get-together, eat a small low-calorie, high protein meal. The low calories won’t fill you up enough that you can’t partake with your friends but the high protein content will give you a sense of satiety so the feeling of hunger doesn’t come into play and influence your menu choice.

Make A Reservation

There’s nothing worse than going to a restaurant and seeing a line out the door. Reserving tables not only eliminates wait time but also stops your growling stomach — NOT your brain — from deciding what you’re going to eat once you finally sit down.³

Eat At The Right Location

Have your hostess seat you at a high top table towards the front or by a window or in a well-lit part of the restaurant.

Research shows that people who sit at high top tables are more likely to order salads and fewer desserts than those who sit at tables and in booths deeper in the restaurant. Also, people sitting in poorly lit sections were found to eat heavier food and more of it than those who sat by windows and in places with adequate lighting.⁴

Eat With The Right Company

Dine with men.

Men and women both order food with fewer calories than they normally would when eating among men as opposed to women. Sexual selection theory is the suspected reason why, with men eating more in the company of women as a possible means of showing off and women eating less in the presence of men to conform with society’s standards of what’s attractive for a woman to do.⁵

Skip The Pre-Meal Food

The brown bread at the Cheesecake Factory is delicious. So are the cheddar bay biscuits at Red Lobster, Olive Garden breadsticks, and chips and salsa at your favorite Mexican restaurant. However, as delicious as those complimentary offerings are, it’s better that you skip them rather than add those additional calories to your meal.⁶

Read The Menu

Pay attention to what the menu is telling you, as the description provides clues on what items are higher in calories and fat and what items are lower.

Avoid items with these words:

• Béarnaise

• Crispy

• Breaded

• Parmesan

• Bisque

• Au Gratin

• Battered

• Scalloped

• Sautéed

• Fried

• Crunchy

Choose items with these words:

• Lean

• Baked

• Broiled

• Poached

• Steamed

• Au Jus

• Grilled

• Braised

Ask The Waiter…

If certain information isn’t present on the menu, how else are you going to obtain it to make an informed decision if you don’t ask questions? So don’t be scared to open your mouth hole, move your lips, and let some words fly out!

But what can you ask for?⁷

Ask the server the preparation technique for a menu item. For example, it’d be a good thing to know if the sweet potato fries are doused in an OPEC tanker worth of oil.

Ask what options are available. For example, have the waiter lean in and then say to them, “Sure, the menu says this…but Thomas Jefferson here says that you know of some ingredients in the kitchen that can be added to make a healthier dish.”⁸

Ask to swap starchy shit with veggies.⁹ The fiber will cut calories while making you more regular and less full of shit!

The menu describes a meat or veggie item as fried, crispy, crunchy, or sautéed? Ask to have it flame grilled or broiled instead of cooked with cream, butter, or oil.

And as you’ve probably heard before, ask that sauces and dressing come served on the side instead of your food already swimming in it.

Oh yeah, also ask for a doggy bag to come with your meal. When the entrée gets served, box half of it and eat the rest. Considering that restaurant dishes are often double to quadruple the recommended serving size, this is one of the best methods to avoid overeating without being more anal about it than a Mike Adriano production.¹⁰

Control Portions

With their huge portions, remember that restaurants are basically serving nothing but fancy super-sized meals. So in addition to keeping your portion size down with a take-away box, you can:

(1) Choose one or two seafood- or vegetable-based appetizers as your main course rather than ordering from the entrée side.

(2) Look to the kid’s menu for your main meal.¹¹

(3) Get that jumbo meal and split it with your friend.¹²

Don’t Drink Your Calories

The empty calories in sugar-sweetened drinks and alcoholic beverages can add up quickly. By drinking water before and during your meal in place of soda, juice, beer, wine, and other fluids, you’ll not only reduce the intake of calories from sugar but from your meal overall because of water’s filling effect on hunger.

BYOF

Depending on the establishment and local laws, you may be able to bring your own food (BYOF) from home.¹³

Sure, you may get some jokes cracked at your expense but remove the Tupperware lid and dig in…as you keep in mind your dining partners may eat as they like now while you’re unable to but they’ll come to eat their words when you’re not as fat as them.

Bonus

Some of the tips you may have come across before. Some may be new to you, but you’ll most certainly see them elsewhere. This last tip is a bonus one that you’ll only get from me, NOWHERE ELSE!!!

Be polite, but firm, when asking how shit is cooked, if you can replace X with Y, if you can have Z served a certain way, etcetera.

Do everything in your power not to be cunty with your restaurant demands!

But if you’re with a group of people and don’t really want to eat anything but are feeling peer pressured to, you might need to be wildly disrespectful towards your waiter.

Why?

So when your order gets served, no one blames you for not touching it out of fear of your food being spat in or tampered with somehow!

As mentioned in the first footnote, I won’t touch on the anthropological reasons for why humans gather around food. It’s really not all that important for our purposes here. All I’ll lend commentary to is that eating as a social activity more than likely began with families or members of the clan circling around the fire and shooting the shit as they waited for their mastodon to finish roasting. That then evolved into what we see now, where socialization and food seem to go hand-in-hand to the point that social functions are expected to involve eating.

Hanging with the fellas? Girl’s night out? On break and exchanging gossip with coworkers about who earned their promotion by lying on their back? A date to act on your best behavior to fool someone into eventually sleeping with you? All bets are that the interaction will take place over food and drinks at a restaurant, bar, coffee shop, some kind of eatery.

In the old days, people didn’t have the gobs of leisure time that we now enjoy to chill with each other because — DUH!!! — putting food on the table, clothes on their back, and a roof over their head all required labor-intensive work. On top of that, the foods they ate when they did get together weren’t as fattening as the items we dine on at restaurants, our social gathering spots. As a result, their weight and health weren’t as affected by socializing, which was a rare event. The same can’t be said for modern man with his sedentary lifestyle and almost daily mixing of food and social interaction.

This socializing that always revolves around eating is often the unrecognized cause for many people’s weight gain and associated health problems. As an illustration, the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that one meal at a fast-food outlet or full-service restaurant raises the average American’s caloric intake by about 134 calories a day. This translates to two extra pounds if someone was to eat one meal away from home every week for a year.

True, an added two pounds in the course of a year is nothing to cause much of a stir about. But those pounds add up over time — never mind the fact that most Americans eat out 3 or more times per week, leading to the rivers of sodium, mountains of added sugar, and oceans of saturated fat resulting in much greater annual girth.

Many people fail to identify this impact of outside food, which is why they often have difficulty losing weight despite their careful grocery shopping and regular exercise. They just don’t take into account all the eating out they’re doing.

It’s for these people that the above tips for eating out are provided. And with them, any social butterfly trying to become healthy and fit should be able to do so without having to pull a Howard Hughes and turn into a recluse.

[this is the part where you say, “Thank you, Monster”]

You’re welcome, ingrates!

Glossary: calories, diet, dietary fat, exercise

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.