Eat Restaurant Food Without Gaining Weight
Yes, you can enjoy restaurant food and still lose weight
If you are yearning to eat out for a change, but your weight loss diet demands you to stay at home, then this article could be the good news you are looking for.
How can that be? Because even though your doctor may have ordered you to stay home and diet, I am here to tell you that you can eat out and not gain weight. However, you will need to follow my guidelines closely if you are going to get away with it.
We’re not trying to cheat the doctor, because in the end that is cheating yourself. We’re just going to let you have your cake and eat it too… figuratively but not literally.
By now I’d expect you are bored to tears with following your weight loss meal plan at home. You yearn to go out to a nice restaurant again and enjoy an evening out with friends or family. Unfortunately this goes against your doctor’s advice, which was for you to stay home and follow your diet plan. Any deviance from your diet plan will most likely cause you to put on weight.
So there’s the dilemma. Do you do what the doctor ordered, or can you eat out once in a while and maintain your weight loss? Well keep reading, and I will show you exactly how you can enjoy the occasional excursion to a proper restaurant for a taste of fine foods and pleasant company again and, what is more, I’ll show you how to do all this without putting on any more weight!
If you want to avoid putting on more weight, rule number one is to steer clear of all fried foods – especially deep-fried foods. Sure they taste good, but it’s that preference for high-calorie foods that has helped give us a weight problem in the first place. Leave out those high-fat foods, and that means you are leaving out some of the high-calorie foods as well. These are the ones that clog the arteries and pile on those unwanted pounds.
Fresh salads, on the other hand, and fresh fruits, are absolutely the best foods you can have to feed a healthy, leaner body. Uncooked fruit and vegetables are full of the best vitamins and minerals, and they are pretty much straight from nature. Don’t be tempted to process them through a juicer, however, as you will put on weight again by drinking the juices. The unprocessed fruits and vegies contain another very important ingredient that your body craves for good health… They are full of plant fiber – roughage – which helps to scrub away accumulated toxins from inside your intestines. Think of roughage as a kind of bottle-brush cleaner which scrubs your insides and clears away the gunk. And while it is doing that, it helps to keep your bowels regular, as nature intended, No medicines required.
So vegetarian and vegan restaurants are ideal places to eat out safely. There you will find a new and different way of eating, and your waistline will benefit from the experience, as well as your taste buds. This way, you will be eliminating those damaging high-fat foods.
You probably know that white meat is better for weight loss diets than red meat is, but not many people are aware that chicken meat varies greatly in quality – depending on where you buy it. When I purchase chicken fillets or stir-fry pieces at the supermarket, the quality is really poor and it is full of fat. But if I buy from a specialist chicken shop or my local butcher, I get the low-fat version with all the garbage removed for me already. It costs a bit more, but by purchasing the good chicken meat I know I am supporting a local business and I am getting healthier meat to eat as well.
Unfortunately, many restaurants and especially the fast food outlets, use chicken meat with plenty of fat. It adds to their profits while it adds to your waistline, and it shows when you step on the weight scales in your bathroom.
Honestly, the best way to play it safe when eating out is to go to a specialist vegetarian restaurant instead. You won’t have to worry about the quality of the meat in a vegetarian or a vegan restaurant, because they don’t serve meat at all. But they do serve some very testy and healthy meals that won’t hurt your weight or your waist-line.
Incidentally, if you like Asian food, there are quite a few Asian restaurants that serve vegetarian food. Usually they are set up to cater to Buddhists, because they won’t kill animals and therefore they do not eat meat. However, with true Asian ingenuity, these vegetarian restaurants often have pretend meat that is looks very real, but is made out of gluten. They can serve you mock pork, chicken, beef or even duck slices that are made from gluten. They are a bit bland to the taste, admittedly, but they look real and they are okay to chew on. Try some sometime and see if it works for you. It won’t hurt your waistline either.
Portion control is another important tool to help you lose weight and keep it off. The best way to watch your portions is to weigh and measure all your food. Some folks on strict weight-loss diets actually carry a small set of scales with them everywhere, and a measuring cup. (1 cup = 250 mls.) Most meals should be limited to two cups of vegetables or fresh salad, plus your allotted portion of protein. Often this will be either one cup full, or 4-6 oz of meat. (That’s 6 oz for men but 4 oz for women or old folks with a slower metabolism.) You should get a nutritionist or your family doctor to advise you.
Salads are your friend, as long as you learn to do away with the calorie-rich salad dressings. A little bit of lime or lemon juice will add flavor and make things more palatable. Balsamic vinegar is good as well, and just a spoonful of olive oil. Make or mix it yourself, then you know what is in the mix. Think of sugar as the enemy of any successful weight-loss diet, and you will do well.
Buffets are always a great temptation for us gourmands. The restaurants and hotels that lay them on for guests know that they appeal to big eaters, so they usually lay out dish after dish of pasta or pizza and other high-calorie but low-nutrition foods that don’t break the bank for them. But they will break your diet if you succumb. My advice is to steer clear of any kind of buffet if you can. That way you avoid temptation. However, if you insist on eating at a buffet, use the tools I mentioned earlier and weigh and measure your portions so you don’t overdo things. And stick to low-calorie nigh nutrition foods like the salads, but without any rich salad dressings!
So if you stick to these guidelines, you can eat out at restaurants and stick to your diet at the same time. You can even print a copy of this article and show it to your doctor. I am sure he will approve.
Vegetarian or Vegan Food
Vegetarian or Vegan food is a diet followed by people who refuse to eat meat or fish, usually for religious reasons or moral principles.
Some Vegetarians are happy to include milk and cheese in their food plans, for while these are animal products, no animal has been killed for them. And some vegetarians will even eat eggs as well, reasoning that eating an unfertilized egg is still not actually killing an animal. So vegetarian food is not quite as restrictive a diet as many people imagine.
The Vegan philosophy, on the other hand, disallows making use of any animal products whatsoever. So a Vegan food plan is really strict, and it’s a bit harder to get adequate protein in your diet to maintain a healthy body.
Both Vegetarian or Vegan food plans concentrate on getting healthy nutrition from whole grains, such as rice and bread, fruits and vegetables.
Protein is necessary to build healthy body tissue, and without eating meat or fish, your best way of eating protein is to include beans or other pulses (such as Lentils) in your diet.
And while many vegetarians are happy to eat eggs, milk and cheese, the Vegans refuse to touch these dairy products because they still come from animals. It’s not so restrictive once you realize that you can eat Soy Milk (made from cooked soy beans and water that have been liquidized in a blender.)
Many commercial varieties of soy add heaps of sugar to make it taste more palatable, so be sure to read the food labels carefully. Remember, added sugar means unwanted calories and just feeds more craving for sweet treats.
Can your body afford any more sweet treats? Not if you’re going to lose weight, it can’t.
In much of South America, I’ve been told that meat is so expensive that the staple diet for poor people comes from what they term locally “The Three Sisters”: That is the three vegetable food staples which are grown together and later eaten together. They make a simple but perfectly-balanced and nutritious vegetarian diet.
The peasants grow corn or maize, together with beans and squash vegetables. (Squash includes pumpkin, cucumber, zucchini, gourds and so on.) The gardeners plant the corn first, so the beans can climb up the corn stalks. The squash vegetables become a ground cover, a living mulch, which discourages weeds and conserves water.
Vegetarian food may seem a bit boring, but your taste buds will adapt quite quickly and you will feel healthier for it. And just consider this: There aren’t many obese people who got fat on a non-meat diet. It would be very hard to do so.
Another way of eating that works well for some is the Mediterranean diet.