So you are starting to get the hang of tracking your food. You’re finding the foods in supermarket's with the weight, and barcode's printed on them easy to track, and you’re even getting the hang of tracking foods that you need to weigh out.
But your gaining confidence has come to a standstill as Saturday has approached, and your friends have invited you out for a meal.
I know this can be a daunting; after all you have lost all that weight, but what’s the point in losing the weight if you can’t also enjoy yourself?
Fear not, in this article I am going to show you the best approach to tracking your food at a restaurant.
Is The Nutrition Published Online?
Now, you might be lucky and the restaurant of choice has published their nutritional information online. A quick Google search of “[Restaurant Name] Nutritional Information” should bring that up. Unfortunately, this is usually the big chain restaurants that publish this information like Ask Italian, The Harvester, and Nando's; the smaller ones are still playing catch up.
What If The Nutrition Isn’t Published Online?
The majority of the time, you are going to be in a situation where the nutrition information is not available. Don’t worry, this won’t ruin your diet and it should only take 5 minutes to work out how many calories are in what you are eating.
What you are not going to do is search on My Fitness Pal what you have eaten, because the database allows anybody to add foods to it, you will have full meals ranging from 0 calories to 5000 calories. What you need to do instead is perform a food autopsy to see what exactly is in your meal, then estimate our calories from there.
How do we do this?
Let’s pretend you have chosen this chicken Caesar salad for your lunch. What we first need to do is note all the ingredients in the dish. Once you have done that, you can then search for each ingredient separately on My Fitness Pal, guessing the weight of each.
This may not be the most accurate method for tracking your food, and it may be a few calories out. However, this doesn’t matter too much; we don’t need to be perfect all of the time when dieting, just consistent.
Our Caesar salad calorie predictions:
1 large Chicken breast - 345
100 grams of lettuce – 14
10 Croutons - 130
2tbsp Caesar dressing – 170
10g Parmesan cheese – 39
Estimated Total Calories – 698
The actual Caesar salad nutrition
So, we were 88 calories out. Not bad!
What if I can’t deconstruct my meal?
If you have ordered something you can’t deconstruct, like a pizza, which is difficult due to its base. The best option would be to find a competitor's pizza that does have their nutritional information available and choose that, it will be close enough.
