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My family loves to go out to eat, but we don’t love the extra calories that come with mega portions and a menu full of temptation. This weekend friends invited us to go to an all-you-can-eat buffet that was peppered with high calorie, butter-laden fare. I managed to make a healthy meal for me and the kids with a few simple solutions:
- Load up with salad first
Take advantage of the salad bar and load up with fresh veggies. The best part about the salad bar is that this is the one place the veggies haven’t been drowned in butter or oil. Try to avoid the plethora of high calorie add-ons, like croutons, bacon bits and ladles full of dressing.
- Fill your plate with veggies
Many of the vegetables on the bar looked like they were swimming in a pool of butter, but they did have plain baked potatoes and steamed carrots. Leave the butter and sour cream behind and slice the baked potato into wedges and eat like baked fries.
- Skin it
The buffet had lots of meat choices, but most of them were fried, battered, sautéed in oil or covered in sugar-filled sauce. In other words, a dieter’s nightmare. I picked the baked chicken breast and removed the skin, which made it a healthy lean protein source.
- One trip limit
My son thought he was in heaven when he heard the words “all you can eat” but I let him know that he shouldn’t take that literally. I let him have one trip for salad and one trip for his main course. The variety of choices makes it easy to overindulge, but set the limit that if it doesn’t fit on the plate, it’s not needed.
Granted it wasn’t the best restaurant choice, but at least small modifications gave us a fairly healthy meal in the unhealthiest of places.
What are some of your tricks for limiting calories when dining out? Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant full of unhealthy choices? What did you do? I’d love to hear from you!
Healthfully,
Stacy Cacciatore
