Eat Out To Lose Weight With A Restaurant Calorie Counter

 

 

A restaurant calorie counter can be a dieter’s best friend. Losing weight isn’t easy, so you need to take steps to make it as easy as possible on yourself. One way to do this is to not limit yourself to just bland home meals and a life where you never eat out for fear of not being able to maintain your diet the way you want to. With a restaurant calorie counter, you won’t have to.

 

There’s no doubt that losing weight is difficult. The rate of obesity is soaring and it’s not because people are trying to gain weight, sumo wrestlers excepted. In general, more than 95 percent of people who do manage to lose weight won’t be able to keep it off. Many people manage to gain and lose hundreds of pounds over their lifetime. When something is this difficult, you need to take every step you can to make it as easy as possible. This includes eating out, or grabbing things on the fly, which is where a restaurant calorie counter comes in handy. We’d all like to be able to be able to do up our food at home, eat perfectly all day and come back to prepare a nutritionally flawless means for dinner, all with a smile on your face.

 

But in reality, this doesn’t happen. People sleep late, work late, and sometimes the boss wants you to have lunch with him. It’s a rare person who can get by without buying their food already prepared at some point. Unless your eating out is going to consist of glasses of water, you’re going to need a restaurant calorie counter.

 

A restaurant calorie counter is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a guide to the calories and nutrient contents of things you find in restaurants. Generally, these will be available for all chain type restaurants, fast food and otherwise, but a very good restaurant calorie counter will also have very famous restaurants, and it is possible to get copies that have local information, as well.

 

The local restaurants are actually a flaw in using a restaurant calorie counter; even those that have restaurants are forced to estimate. This isn’t necessarily a huge problem, but bear in mind that if you’re eating at Uncle Joe’s Wings and Things you’re going to have to estimate.

 

A good way to do this, if you’re eating in a place where you’re going to be eating a lot but the place isn’t listed in your restaurant calorie counter, is to get your favorites as take out. Once you have them, measure them and then find something in the counter that’s pretty close and work out how many calories are in each one.

 

Either way, a restaurant calorie counter can be key to your weight loss success, regardless of the type of diet you’re on. If you’re using a controlled calorie plan, then you can easily look up the calorie count and adjust. Or you can choose dishes with the right amount of fat or carbs for your plan. Every diet is easier with a restaurant calorie counter.

Eating healthy & working out but STILL not losing weight?

A person exercises every day and doesn’t eat that much. Yet, they can't lose any weight. What else should they do to try to lose weight?

I ran through the answers here and boy oh boy…I’m looking for someone around me that has a gun…

I’ve been a fitness trainer for weight loss for almost ten years now and every time when someone says “move more, eat less” doesn’t work, I silently pray for an earthquake or something.

I touched on this topic in my article but when someone says “oooh, just eat healthy and you will lose weight. Calories don’t matter”. I think…

Wait, what? After this claim my following question is this:

What do you do when you hit weight loss plateau when eating healthy? Eat even healthier? No. You reduce your calories because that‘s what drives weight loss.

The Real Problem

Why can’t you lose weight even when exercising and eating less (who knows how much less…)?

This is considering that one has no pathologies that inhibit weight loss.

That is a brilliant graphic by @Bdccarpenter which will explain everything.

• First problem: people say they eat less but what does that even mean?

People say they eat less but that means nothing. You can eat less and still gain weight because you still overconsume calories.

In this particular study, subjects underreported their caloric intake by 1053 kcal/day!!!

This is crazy, right?

So eating less alone won’t make you lose weight. If you can’t lose weight - eat even less next week, and the next week, and the next week!

Until you see weight dropping. That means you finally hit that caloric deficit.

• Second problem: people say they exercise everyday but…do they, really?

What do I mean by that? I’ve seen people “exercising”. They sit on a machine for 5 minutes and then do a set which takes 15 seconds to complete a set. Then - the same story again.

You have to realize this: weightlifting only burns about 300 kcal/hour. 400 kcal if you are a genetic freak. Don’t think that exercise burns heaps of calories. Those who claim differently probably want to sell you something…

Again, going back to that study. Subjects overreported their caloric expenditure by 251 calories! That’s almost an hour at the gym…

My tip

Over ten years, I have never ever had a client that didn’t lose weight if he had caloric deficit dialed in. None. Period.

That being said, there are many ways to do that:

• Having a food diary
• Using something like myfitnesspal
• Adjusting macronutrient intake by increasing protein intake and lowering fats and/or carbs
• Dramatically increasing physical activity levels
• Using fat burners that ACTUALLY WORK!

• Final Thoughts

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t say that you have to track your calories to the tiniest detail in order to lose weight.

You simply need to admit the fact that if you are not losing weight, you are not in a caloric deficit.

Then, ask yourself this: “what can I do to decrease calories even more? Can I eat less fats? Can I incorporate an hour of walk in my schedule? Can I use fat burner”?

Eventually, by doing this, you will find yourself in a caloric deficit and think: “Oh, okay. I was wrong. I ate less but not enough less”.