3 Tips For Eating Healthier When Going To A Restaurant
Eating healthy can be quite difficult if you like to go out to restaurants, mostly because it is easy to eat larger portions and binge on unhealthy items. However, there are ways to continue eating healthy when going out to eat, such as controlling your portion sizes, limiting your beverages, and eating a salad.
Controlling Portion Sizes
One of the easiest ways to eat healthy at a restaurant is to avoid eating portions of food that are too large. It is easy to binge eat at a restaurant because you can feel compelled to eat the entire serving size that the restaurant offers you, which can be a problem if the restaurant is offering rich foods. In addition, many restaurants do not offer smaller portion sizes, so you pretty much have to take the portion size they offer.
An easy to way to limit your portion sizes is to skip the entree menu entirely and order your meal from the appetizer section, which often offers quite filling dishes in smaller sizes. Another way to limit your service size is to consider ordering one entree to share with whoever is joining you for dinner.
Finally, you can request that your meal be divided in half when you order. For example, you can ask that half your meal be plated for you to eat at the restaurant, while the other half is placed in a to-go box before the food is even brought to the table.
Limiting Your Beverages
Another easy to eat healthy at a restaurant is to try and avoid drinking carbonated or sugary beverages. In many cases, multiple glasses of alcoholic beverages or soft drinks can end up contributing several hundred calories to your meal. When possible, try to stick to water or low-fat milk with your meals so that you can avoid a massive intake of sugar or a lot of empty calories.
Salads
Finally, salads are a great way to eat healthy at a restaurant. Now, this does not mean that you have to stick to just eating a salad at dinner; ordering a small salad to eat with your main course is a fantastic way to limit your food intake. The salad will help to fill you up so that you do not end up eating a much larger portion of your entree than is good for you.
Also, consider asking the restaurant to limit the salad dressing or to place the dressing on the side. This is important, because many restaurants will drench their salads in dressing, which can add a lot of sugar and fat to an otherwise healthy food option. Having the salad dressing on the side will allow you to directly control how much dressing you use.
Going to a restaurant is a great way to experience new types of foods in a convenient manner. Eating healthy at a restaurant is not very difficult if you control your beverage intake, portion sizes, and salad dressing use.
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