Eating out at restaurants whilst attempting to lose fat will require you to rob Peter in order to pay Paul.
You’ll have to sacrifice calories you would normally eat elsewhere to ‘make room’ for the extra calories consumed when eating at restaurants.
That’s the trade off.
You cannot expect to eat your regular diet, and eat out at restaurants on top of that, and still lose fat. It won’t happen.
It would be like trying to empty a bath full of water. You remove the plug and water starts to drain slowly. This is your weekly calorie deficit doing it’s job. At first the change is imperceptible. But after several weeks you can start to see a real difference.
Now imagine you pour in a huge bucket of water back into the bath. Any water being lost from the bottom is essentially being replaced at the top. These huge buckets of water are the calories consume at restaurant meals. Huge amounts of calories over a short space of time that serve to stop you losing any fat.
The bath remains full.
The average main meal in a restaurant is a smidge under 1,000 calories according to research by Robinson et al (2018), something I have written about before here.
So, if you only have around 2,000 calories to play with each day, there will be a lot of sacrificing to be made in order to make it work.
This is where a lot of guys come unstuck. They grossly underestimate the amount of calories in food they eat out at restaurants. They then wonder why they aren’t making progress despite seemingly only consuming the number of calories allotted to them.
Their metabolism must be the problem.
No, they need to drop their calories even lower.
No, they need to do 30 minutes on the treadmill every morning before breakfast.
Chances are you think that you are only consuming 2,000 calories per day across the week, but those couple of days you ate out? Your calories were actually closer to 4,000 for the day.
So all of that hard work you put in was essentially cancelled out by those restaurant meals. The very definition of spinning your wheels.
Can you go out to restaurants and still lose fat? Yes absolutely. But you have to be extremely careful about what you select from the menu. You need to ensure you allocate calories from other meals because your calorie intake WILL be higher as a result of these meals out. You need to be realistic about how many times you can afford to do this whilst trying to lose body fat.
Here are 5 tips on how to dine out and not destroy your diet: -
Look at the menu in advance and decide what to order ahead of time.
Sacrifice calories ahead of time by eating fewer calories at breakfast and lunch.
Leave the bread they offer you at the beginning of the meal.
Instead of an entree, which in many cases can be the most calorie-dense foods on the menu, opt to start the meal with a large garden salad.
Don't be afraid to leave food on your plate.