By Samantha Taylor
The more restaurants I tour to check for healthy dishes you can eat, the more convinced I am that you must be SO particular about what you eat in restaurants and how it is prepared since most restaurant meals are loaded with calories.
Just so you know: I used to eat out three times a day for many years. I had an eating disorder; I was a compulsive eater and I binged on fast food, junk food, sugar and restaurant food.
I started to have victory with my binge-eating challenge when I began to understand the total calorie content of my food.
One of my old favorites was the restaurant food that has been named home of the No. 1 worst food in America – Outback Steakhouse’s cheese fries, according to a series of popular books called “Eat This Not That.”
Yes, this health and fitness expert used to gorge on this grease-filled dish and like that wasn’t enough, I ordered extra, extra bacon on it!
Guess how many calories are in this dish. Just try and guess. OK, it’s 3,500, according to the book. I honestly didn’t know that until I looked it up one day.
That discovery led me to never get a full order again — only half!
Now, it has been years and I don’t eat it anymore. It actually tastes gross to me now even though I used to love it.
I think many people aren’t really aware that they are gorging on 3,000 calories in a single sitting, but when you do become aware of it, everything just seems different, especially when you know that 3,500 calories is equal to one pound of fat.
So the moral of the story is that you need to be aware of how many calories are in what you are ordering when you eat out. You wouldn’t leave your child with a babysitter that you have never checked out, right?
It’s the same with your body and health. These are important, so don’t leave the fate of what you’re eating in someone else’s hands unless you have made your investigation.
That’s the beauty of the Internet; in less than five minutes, you can just type in the website of your favorite fast-food place and look up the nutritional information of its meals, especially the food that you tend to order over and over.
For large corporate restaurants, you can search the restaurant name and name of meal or entrée like “Chili’s chicken crispers nutrition info.” Brace yourself, though, because you may find that your favorite dish has a lot more calories than you thought.
But at least you can make a wiser decision now like eat only half of the dish or definitely make sure you do cardio that day. My husband just lost 60 pounds and has kept it off for five months doing that very same thing. You can too!
