Staying Healthy While Eating Out

How to Stay Healthy While Eating Out

Five Tips to Enjoy Eating Out While Staying Fit and Healthy

Eating out at a restaurant is one of life’s pleasures – though it can be hard to stay healthy or to avoid unhealthy ingredients.

Food prepared in seed oils, sauces with added sugar and those tempting sugar-packed deserts combined can have lasting ill-effects. When you add the tricks used by restaurants to get you to order a little more, it becomes a minefield for your health and fitness.

This guide has five practical tips for staying healthy while eating out.

It balances your fitness with enjoying a night out – after all, nobody wants to stay in chomping broccoli when they could be out enjoying an evening with friends.

Tip #1 – Staying Healthy While Eating Out by Avoiding the Free Bread

When your server appears with a basket of bread before you order, alarm bells should be ringing.

This is an industry trick to get you ordering more. Bread turns into glucose when it enters the blood stream. That mild sugar-high will have you indulging in subtle ways. Scientific studies clearly show that people order more (and less healthily) after their free bread.

Instead of thinking of it as a gift, think of those rolls as a ploy.

Broccoli Superfood?

Tip #2 – Fried Food and Oxidative Molecules

Restaurants are high volume businesses, and that cooking oil gets used over and over.

It is the less healthy seed oils that you will find in the friers at most restaurants. Sunflower oil, rapeseed oil or corn oils are fine in moderation. When everything you order is cooked in them, you should begin to get wary.

Worst of all, reusing the same oil over and over risks oxidative molecules forming. They are bad for you right down to the cellular level.

A simple way to get around this is to choose food which does not need to be fried.

 Tip #3 – Don’t Arrive too Hungry (or you’ll over-order)

The expression ‘eyes are bigger than their stomach’, works perfectly for eating out.

You get to a restaurant hungry, and by the time you get to order, those extra sides and carbohydrates look irresistible.

Staying healthy is about balancing your food groups. Lining your stomach with a small portion of something healthy before you go will keep you in control – and might make the difference between a healthy meal out and an unhealthy one.

Regular Water Drinking

Tip #4 – Staying Healthy Eating Out: The Order of Food on Your Plate

Blood sugar spikes cases by eating sugar (usually in the form of simple carbohydrates) can be bigger or smaller, depending on which order you eat things in.

If you start with your potatoes – your sugar spikes (and insulin response) will be at their biggest. This will trigger you to store more fat in the short term and can contribute to insulin resistance in the longer term.

Conversely, starting with your greens, and a little protein and consuming your carbs last has the opposite effect. If you see the graphs of how blood sugar spikes work in controlled settings, you’ll be surprised just how big an effect this is.

Tip #5 – Sauces are a Hidden Source of Sugar

Pasta style sauces served in restaurants will often have 8 or more teaspoons of sugar. When you add ketchup, mayonnaise, and salad dressings, that sugar will quickly add up. This is before you get to seed oils, preservatives, and artificial flavourings.

Avoiding dishes covered in sauce is a sensible approach. If you really must have dressing (for example), then ask for it to be on the side. Having the portion in a small pot means you are in control of how much you eat – if you have it all on your salad, the chances are you will eat it all.

Food Choices 5:2 Diet

Extra Tips for Staying Healthy While Eating Out

I have hit a balance on this page so far.

Enjoying your meal out at a restaurant without having to compromise on that pleasure while staying healthy is easy when you know what to look for.

For anyone that wants to go that extra mile for a really healthy experience, and does not mind compromising, here are some extra tips.

  • Drink Water, Not Wine: Staying hydrated is a great way to boost your health, it fills you up without adding calories, or boosting your chances of ordering any unhealthy food.
  • Skip Pudding: This is a tough one for me, though the times I choose a coffee instead, I always feel healthier.
  • Use a Doggy Bag: As a Brit, this can be a tough ask, though saving part of your meal for the next day does help prevent overeating.

 

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