If you pride yourself on maintaining a healthy diet, it’s not uncommon to find that your healthy eating habits still fall to pieces on a night out at a top-class steakhouse, making you feel like you have to start over.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way. Use these tips for eating out healthy to maintain the discipline you do at home while still enjoying your meals and time spent out with friends or family.
1. Know the Restaurant First
Visit restaurant websites before you choose where to eat out. You’ll likely be able to view their menu and note any healthy options. Consider lighter meals, vegetarian alternatives, and whether they have poultry and fish options. See if the venue offers vegetables and salads instead of carbohydrate-heavy sides. If you’re dining as a family, ensure the restaurant is family-friendly, and peruse the kid’s menu to ensure there are healthy options for your entire group.
Eating establishments sometimes display online logos or infographics — many grills and cafeterias promote a Fitwel Food and Beverage Standard, for example — to show their awareness and support of healthy eating habits. These kinds of identifiers can assist you in choosing healthier places to eat out. With or without these identifiers, if you can’t find a decent option with available space, consider postponing your outing to make a healthy pizza at home, which is bound to quell your family’s disappointment.
2. Exclude or Limit Alcohol
If you find a suitable restaurant and fancy an alcoholic drink, be wise about what you order if you’re watching your health and calorie intake. Light beer, whiskey on the rocks, or red or white wine are better options than most mixed drinks. Ultimately, a glass of water remains an excellent choice, and you can add cucumber, lime or lemon to spruce up the taste if necessary.
If you’re driving, foregoing an alcoholic beverage is easier, but your awareness of healthy eating should also prompt you to think twice. Excessive alcohol intake can contribute to several health problems, including bladder cancer, with Europe and North America having the highest rates of the disease. From the American Cancer Society’s perspective, one drink for women and two for men is an acceptable daily intake — besides, if you’re out with your children, there’s no need for more.
3. Choose a Healthy Appetizer
When indulging in a multi-course meal, the appetizer you choose can set the tone for the evening. If you begin your night out with a fried starter and a cream-based dip, your body will likely crave more fatty and salty food. Try to order appetizers with grilled, sauteed or roasted items instead of deep- or pan-fried, stuffed, or battered foods. If you choose a soup, make it broth- rather than cream-based.
Ingredients like grilled fish, mushrooms, spinach, goat cheese, asparagus, pumpkin seeds, hummus, and garlic — along with most vegetables, leafy greens and fruits — are healthy appetizer ingredients and nutritious alternatives to fatty meats or soy, teriyaki and other salty sauces. Remember to consider your appetizer in relation to the rest of your meal. If you know you’re ordering a more indulgent main course, sticking to a healthy or plant-based appetizer is a good way to keep things lighter overall.
4. Stress the Small Things
Many dining venues use alternative products like vegetable oils for cooking in these health-conscious times and offer whole-wheat bread or whole-grain pasta and rice as alternatives, so scour the menu for healthier options. It might be complicated to request that the chef prepare your restaurant meal without oil, salt, butter or sugar, but it’s worth asking. You may be pleasantly surprised as many eating establishments try to meet diners’ specific needs.
Requesting a restaurant to swap out less healthy items for healthier options might be easier. You can ask a waiter to swap out chips for vegetables or a baked potato for a salad. Request that any sauces, gravies, dressings or other toppings come on the side so you can regulate your intake or even avoid it altogether. Even a salad can sabotage your healthy eating efforts if it includes heavy dressing, cheese, bacon bits or other ingredients.
5. Watch Your Portion Sizes
Americans may expect restaurants to serve larger portions. Accordingly, your plate of food will always tempt you to eat more than usual. Because there’s more delicious food in front of you, you require more discipline to eat a healthy amount and request a doggy bag for the leftovers. You could keep the food in the fridge to eat the next day. Alternatively, you could always split an entrée with your kids or partner. Kids are more likely to enjoy healthy eating if you set the example, so making healthy choices when eating out can positively impact your family.
If you need more motivation to reduce your restaurant eating, compare your portions to typical serving sizes. If you regularly watch your family’s eating at home, you’ll know what’s healthy and when you’re going overboard while eating out.
6. Pick a Healthy Dessert
Dessert is an option you can bypass, but sometimes, finishing your meal with something sweet is irresistible. In that case, try to swap sugar for a healthier alternative and suggest your family do the same. You’ll likely not want to deny your children their sweet ending to the evening, so look at the dessert menu and propose a joint-family dessert.
Restaurant menus generally include bright and colorful fruit-based desserts, which are often healthier alternatives to ice cream, cookies and other traditional desserts. If the restaurant doesn’t have a healthy dessert option that appeals to you and your family, you could suggest going somewhere afterward that does or having fresh fruit at home.
Eating Out Can Be Healthy and Enjoyable
Gone are the days when restaurants only offered unhealthy options. However, many menu choices still don’t encourage healthy eating, and portion sizes are almost always too large at family restaurants. Nevertheless, approaching a family evening out with a positive attitude that matches your wise food habits and beverage choices will help you enjoy an incredibly fun eating out experience while still feeling good the next day.
