Creating a healthy mindset surrounding food is vital for long term weight loss results, and while cutting out entire food groups and making major changes to your eating habits may provide your body with rapid results, it’s unlikely this will be sustainable for the future. Therefore, you should find a way to be able to still enjoy the foods you love, and even eating out occasionally while working towards a body you feel good in.
However, while you can certainly dine at your favorite restaurants and see positive changes in your body, there are some ingrained habits you may have been following for years that can stand in the way of your most significant results. We spoke with registered dietitian Trista Best who explained the biggest mistake you may be making when ordering at restaurants that could stall your weight loss results, so now you can dine out without fear of standing in your own way.
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Hidden Calories From Seemingly Healthy Foods
When you cook at home it’s easy to know exactly what ingredients go into your meals and how this can impact your body for weight loss. But when you eat dinner at a restaurant, many food items on the menu may be posing as healthy options while actually housing hidden calories that can quickly add up and negate your deficit.
“These [hidden calories] come from fried vegetables, high calorie dressings, excess condiments, and choosing fried animal proteins over grilled,” explains Best. While meals such as salads, grilled vegetables and unfried meats may be healthy additions to your weight loss eating plan on their own, when prepared in certain ways as they often are in restaurants, they frequently contain more calories than you would think.
Due to preparation methods, there are many meals that can seem like great options on the menu that you will be more inclined to eat in excess because they feel like ‘safe’ foods. Especially if you’re in a dieting mindset and are depriving your body of nutrients and food you love, ordering something that you believe to be healthy can inadvertently give yourself permission to consume it in great amounts which will naturally lead to an overindulgence in calories.
“When ordering a meal that you think is healthy but is high in calories, it can give you a false sense of assurance that you are within certain calorie limits you may have set for yourself,” explains Best. “This can lead you to unintentionally eat a high calorie meal which ultimately leads to excess calories being stored as fat.”
The best way to continue eating dinner at restaurants while seeing weight loss results is to be more intentional with your menu choices, and specify cooking methods so as to avoid heavily fried or breaded foods such as meat or veggies.
“When ordering an animal protein or vegetable it is best to order grilled over fried. Fried animal proteins and vegetables add unnecessary saturated fat to your meal that do not cause you to get full any quicker but do add to your calorie intake quickly,” notes Best. “Eating fried vegetables can reduce the health benefits of an otherwise healthy food.”
That being said, if you’ve created an adequately balanced lifestyle, there’s nothing wrong with choosing the menu option you would enjoy the most and eating it until you’re full instead of stuffing yourself. In allowing yourself the grace to eat the foods you want without restriction, you will be less likely to binge in the future and will ultimately create an eating plan you can stick to in the long term, rather than a diet.
There truly is a place for nearly any food within your eating habits for weight loss, so if getting a burger and fries while you’re out to dinner will make you happy, get that and resume your more nutritious eating plan at the next meal without punishing yourself for living your life.
