I do Weight Watchers.
Sometimes more attentively than others. Something I struggle to eat well when I am not in control
over the situation. Think dinners
out with friends, traveling and living off of restaurants, or Wednesday at 2PM when
I realize I forgot to eat lunch and have no plan.
Trip Advisor and Yelp are excellent for finding great eats
for good deals, but I can’t read reviews and tell if I am going to be able to
find something healthy. I am not
just looking to eek by despite eating in restaurants. I want to enjoy eating in restaurants.
There are several ways for a restaurant to fit easily into
my dietary routine. They can
provide nutritional facts. I heard
that giving access to calorie counts at restaurants doesn’t make a statistical
difference in what people order. I
don’t even know if that is true, and I don’t care. It does make a difference in my choices either in the
restaurant or later in the day.
Another way a restaurant can be health friendly is having a
lot of healthy options with fresh vegetables. I strongly dislike having to chose the only thing on the
menu that isn’t going to be a point bomb.
(Us Weight Watchers people count points. We get a certain number of points per day. Fruits and veggies are pointless, and
that is a good thing!)
Finally, a restaurant can be flexible with
substitutions. It is common for
restaurants to substitute brown rice for white rice or a fruit or vegetable
bowl for fries. Some
restaurants charge for this, some won’t allow it all, and others go out of
their way to make the healthy choice easy by including it as an option directly
on the menu.
When restaurants make good decisions easy, I enjoy my food
more. That moment when you have to
decide either to take one of the two healthy options or the signature chicken
quesadilla that you really want causes me some anxiety and I often regret going
out to dinner at all. I don’t like
feeling marginalized at restaurants because of my desire for healthy
options. Restaurants have the
power to alter my experience for the better with a good variety of creative
vegetable dishes and flexible substitution options.
Information about substitutions and the variety and quality
of healthy options would be helpful for me in a review, but most people don’t
think to include them. So I joined
Yelp, reconnected with my neglected Trip Advisor account, and started a
blog. I hope you enjoy
reading. And I hope my experience
will help you (and me) enjoy dining out to its fullest extent.
