When you're trying to lose weight, eating out can be a trying experience. All those choices! All those confusing menu terms! All those big portions!
In restaurants, people on a low-carbohydrate, high-protein weight loss plan have an easy time deciding what to eat. All they have to do is say yes to meat, fish, and poultry, and no to bread and starchy veggies.
People counting calories on a standard carb-based, lowfat weight loss diet face more complicated choices because they must keep on eye on portion sizes while hunting for hidden hazards such as cream in the sauce or butter in the veggies. These guidelines can help you make your way through the menu maze:
Start smart
A carb-based, lowfat diner can enjoy the full Monty — no, not nude dining, but a full three- or four-course dinner — by starting with the right appetizer, such as a tasty but low-calorie clear soup, a salad with lemon juice dressing, or shellfish such as shrimp cocktail (10 to 30 calories per shrimp) with catsup or horseradish sauce. Making this choice enables you to continue ordering down the menu.
Pick an appetizer as your main course
Choosing an appetizer as a main course is another way to reduce fat and calories. With the increased popularity of lowfat, low-cal seafood, many restaurants serve an appetizer of a really big bowl of steamed mussels in their shells in a tomato-based sauce with one crusty piece of French bread underneath to sop it up with. Salads are also good choices. (Just hold the dressing or ask for a lowfat version.) Add a glass of cold, dry white wine, and one more piece of bread, and this "appetizer" can be a meal in itself. — with a lot fewer calories and less fat than many entries on the menu, including fish. It's cheaper, too.
Don't butter the bread
Don't oil it, either. Now that everybody knows vegetable oils are lower in sat fats than butter, many restaurants from pizza parlors to the fanciest white tablecloth establishment cater to their patrons' sense of sophistication by substituting a small bowl of olive oil for the standard plate of butter pats. Before you reach for the oil, though, consider this: Vegetable oils, including the ubiquitous olive oil, are not an unmitigated blessing. Yes, the oils have less saturated fat than butter. True, they are cholesterol-free. True, they are rich in heart-healthy monounsaturated fatty acids. But the bad news is that all dietary fats — butter, margarine, oils — have about the same number of calories per serving, 100 to 125 calories per tablespoon. Sorry about that.
 | To test the fat content of your bread, pick up a piece and put it on your napkin. Hand sticky? Oil spots on the napkin? You know what that means. |
Serve the veggies naked
Victorians boiled vegetables into a yucky muck — no color, no texture, no taste. Then came butter, cheese, and cream sauces, often broiled to a tasty brown crust. Sorry, but these are not for you if you're lowfat, carb-based. Instead, you want a dish for which the cook relies on herbs and spices or reduced (boiled down and thickened) fat-free bouillons or imaginative treatments such as purees and kabobs or lowfat stir-fry to make vegetables tasty but trim, a culinary technique leading to dining heaven and nutrition joy. The vegetable flavors come through loud and clear, while the calories stay very, very, very low.
Minimize the main dish
Lowfat, carb-based diners know fried or sauced foods are verboten. Best bet? Something broiled, baked, or roasted — without added fat and with the drippings siphoned off. You can further reduce the fat content of any meat or poultry main dish by wielding a mean knife and fork to cut away any visible fat. Yes, that means the crisp skin, too.
| Another possibility is to order the main course without the main part. In other words, have your protein food (meat, fish, poultry) in your small-serving appetizer (remember those meaty mussels) and then assemble a main course of veggies or, again, a salad. It may cost a bit more to have a special dish assembled, and you may have to beg a bit, but most reputable restaurants will work with you. Especially if you point out that your strategy is allowing you to order three dishes — appetizer, main dish, and dessert — instead of one. |
Control the portions
When it comes to serving sizes, restaurants can be hazardous to your diet. For example, according to the U.S. Departments of Agriculture/Health and Human Services Food Guide Pyramid, one serving of pasta is 1/2 cup. At your favorite Italian restaurant, the standard serving of pasta — with or without sauce and parmesan — is typically four to six cups, a whopping 8 to 12 USDA/HHS servings!
Sideline the sauce
 | Exercise some restraint when it comes to sauce. Ask your waiter to bring the sauce on the side. Take a teaspoonful. Hand back the rest. Out of sight, out of mind. Down 100 calories or more. |
Share dessert — or substitute espresso
After a heavy meal, your body naturally craves something sweet. One way to have your cake and eat it, too, without the fat and calories is to split a dessert. Another is to choose a sweet but fat-free treat such as berries. Alternatively, you can ask for fat-free sweetened espresso, Greek, or Turkish coffee. Hate coffee? Have a special tea or a soda.
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