Quote:
Originally Posted by lin43
In all fairness to yourself, it is really difficult to stay on plan when going out to eat. I read a statistic somewhere that indicated that people who eat out regularly consume 20-30% more calories than if they eat at home. It's easy to figure out why: We just don't know how much fat is going in our food when we eat out (unless you go to a chain restaurant, in which case, at least you can find the nutritional info. online). The other thing is, when I eat out, I find that to get something comparable to what I would want to eat at home, I have to "spend" at least 200 more calories. For example, the other day, I went out to breakfast and ordered an egg and cheese sandwich. Doesn't sound too bad, right? However, the bread they used was way bigger than my slices at home, they used more fat to fry the egg, and they definitely used more cheese than I do. So my guess is that my harmless egg & cheese sandwich ended up being 500 - 600 calories. I ate 3/4 of it to try to offset some of the damage, but believe me it was hard to stop eating it (I poured ketchup over 1/4 of it just so I wouldn't eat it).
Thanks for that, lin43!
I beat myself up about it because we *should* have prepared for the worst instead of thinking, "The power will come back on any time now." So our food went bad because we waited too long to move it. And because we kept hoping it would be cut back on every day, we didn't buy any more groceries, thinking it would be a pain to keep them at my parents' home (30 min. away, where we stayed and commuted for school/work) and cart it back and forth every day. (Seriously, we'd pack up to stay with them at 9 p.m. once we realized they weren't going to fix our power line. Then we'd pack up the next morning to drive back home and cross our fingers all day. Lather, rinse, repeat.) UGH! That's the only thing about dieting... It just takes one disaster to throw you off the wagon.
But you're so, so, SO right about restaurant food. That's why one of my healthy eating goals has been to avoid it at all costs. I even gave up our "Free Lunch Fridays" at the office in favor of a 300-calorie brought-from-home lunch. I wonder what the heck these restaurants are putting in their food to make it so bad. For instance, most salads at the places our office frequents (chains, so we have the nutrition info) are over 1,000 calories! In a SALAD! How is that even possible? There's got to be some shady stuff going on with their food preparation, and I ain't having none of that!
One of my guilty pleasures (::cough, cough:: Cracker Barrel ::cough:
doesn't even post any nutrition info - even though they are a chain! - so I've had to give it up. However, I do get one "treat meal" every month where I don't count the calories (but still try to be reasonable). Guess where I'll be August 27? (If you guessed Cracker Barrel, you get a gold star!)