What makes a restaurant healthy for me

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.