Stay on Track While Dining Out

I recently got a DM asking about how to accurately track your food if you’re logging it and while you’re dining out. These are EXCELLENT questions! Let’s dive in.

As far as tracking accurately goes, especially if you use MyFitnessPal, you might look at your options and see a variety of results. My tip is to go for foods with the green check next to them. These options are verified and over time, you’ll be able to pick up on which entries are accurate and which are not.

As far as dining out goes, it’s a lot easier than you think! Remember, our goal is to learn how to be flexible while we keep our eyes on the prize. Some restaurants have their menus available online with nutrition information. When we’re looking at the menu, look for foods that are prepared “baked”, “blackened”, or “grilled”. When I was in Ashville, I knew I wanted fries and a beer with lunch. So I ordered a grilled chicken breast with fries and a nice local beer. All I did was think about what I wanted and figured out how to make it happen! I got my protein from the chicken, carbs, and some fats from the fries, and I’m pretty sure I counted the beer as carbs and fats. We can discuss how to do that later but I plugged it into MyFitnessPal.

If you can’t find the information online, we’re going to have to do some guesswork. This is where our hand portions come in handy…. I didn’t do that on purpose but it’s staying. If you’re going this route, remember to add in a few more fats since restaurants tend to cook with more oils for flavor. We’d rather overestimate when dining out than underestimate. Restaurants also tend to serve enormous portion sizes so consider following the above portion guides and taking the rest home. Leftover steak with eggs the next morning? Oh, yes!

I have room to take on a few more clients so if you’ve been thinking about dialing in your nutrition using a mindful approach, I’m your girl! Fill out this form and we’ll set up a time to chat.