Eating Outside | How To Track Your Macros

When you track all your macros in order to reach specific fitness milestones, eating food outside may be quite challenging.

Most restaurants offer food that is generally abundant in ingredients, making it difficult to stay exactly on track with your macronutrients. At those exact moments, the pleasant restaurant invitation from a loved one may turn out to be one of your biggest nightmares.

In this short guide, we’ll give you a multitude of options and actionable tips, which you can apply and make the best out of your nights when you’re dining out without sacrificing any progress.

Now let’s get to it!

Check Your Options

As we already mentioned, restaurant meals usually contain a lot of ingredients, meaning that you need to pick the most easily trackable food.

That would generally be a meal that has 2-4 main ingredients, such as:

-??????? Crispy chicken with potato mash & sauce

-??????? Beef steak with sweet potatoes & broccoli

-??????? Fish risotto

And so on...

If you choose to go this route, you’d generally have to use a calorie-tracking tool such as MyFitnessPal, to get a rough estimation of your calories.

Now, even if the meal has more than 4 ingredients, your best bet would be to track the ones with the biggest volume. In most restaurants, meals have 1 animal-based product such as meat, along with garnish (potatoes, rice, fresh or cooked vegetables, etc.)

5 Tips & Acknowledgements For Dining Out

Fitting an outside meal to your daily nutrition plan is just a fraction of what you should focus on while dining. If you break outside of the macro-tracking robot box, you’ll come to realise a couple of things.

#1 Night Time = Recovery Time

The human biological clock makes us naturally be more active throughout the day and less active after the sun sets. What this means is that the BEST recovery occurs during the night! As a matter of fact, your cortisol (stress) levels are at their lowest at night, meaning that the body is basically primed for recovery and absorption of nutrients.

What this means for you, is that you can have a pretty big meal when dining out, as that will support your recovery big time, especially if you are an active trainee.

To put it simply - Low Cortisol + Plenty Of Food = Optimal recovery, And YES! This means eating big meals after 6 pm is actually not a bad thing.

#2 Food Preparation

Alright, besides the type and amount of food you have on your plate, a very important thing to factor in, is how the food was prepared. Surely, when you want to get the best out of your dinner, you would be looking for the highest quality nutrients.

The way your food is prepared plays a MAJOR role in the quality of the nutrients provided.

Your best bet here would be to avoid deep-fried & heavily treated foods, as aggressive thermal treatment may disrupt the structure of the nutrients. Instead, focus on slow-cooked foods that have not undergone extreme treatment.

#3 Focus On MEAT!

One of the biggest concerns regarding macronutrient tracking when eating outside, is to not set yourself off of your goals too much. In other words that would mean going overboard with your caloric intake. Well, binging is usually a bodily response associated with food that is not satiating due to poor nutrient content.

This is EXACTLY why food like chips and ice cream is likely to make you go over. Not because those are inherently fattening foods, but because they are poor in nutrients and thus, won’t leave you satiated, therefore making you eat more.

The best way to avoid this, is to focus on nutrient-dense foods that have a high satiety index and are highly bioavailable. Those are namely animal products, such as:

-??????? Meat

-??????? Organs

-??????? Eggs

-??????? Cheese & other dairy products

-??????? Fish and other seafood

Now, even though those foods contain plenty of protein and fat that will keep you full for hours, there is one other (non-animal) food product that has a huge satiety index…

Drum roll please....

Potatoes!

No, this isn’t a joke - Though potatoes are a root crop, they have one of the highest satiety indexes, that is to say that your best bet would be to make meat & potatoes the core of your meal and then, add other low-calorie garnishes, such as vegetables.

#4 Don’t Track It!

You see, dining out with someone is supposed to be a time where your attention, energy and mood goes and is shared with the one you are dining with. If you’re obsessed with your macronutrients and calories, you might as well rob yourself of the opportunity to spend good time with a loved one.

For this reason, you can think ahead of schedule and leave yourself a “calorie window”.

The best way to do this, is to track all your nutrition prior to your dinner and cutting some of the calories, in order to leave more room for a bigger dinner.

For instance, leaving 800 calories worth of food for dinner will make it highly unlikely for you to go overboard, even if you don’t track the dinner.

So you see, this is just another way to look at things and make everything more flexible.

#5 Consume high-volume foods

With the goal of a meal being enjoyment, nourishment and satiation, one of the best calorie-sparing things you can do on a night out, is to consume high-volume foods. Those are namely greens and other vegetables, that have a low calorie content, but are high in fiber and therefore make you more satiated.

This is especially valid in case you are on a weight loss diet, because it will allow you to spare calories and remain in a deficit, while not burning yourself out with hunger. Combining high-volume, low-calorie foods, with protein & fat rich animal products, is probably the best way to go about your calorie-sparing meal.

Take Home Message

When your goal is to make the best out of a night out without ruining your progress, there are a couple of things to do:

1.Focus on nutrient-dense foods

Satiety is your best friend when it comes to avoiding calorie overconsumption. Pick a meal with plenty of animal products, along with a volume-dense salad.

2.Don’t stress it

One big meal won’t ruin your progress, especially if it is full of good nutrients. Stressing about your night out can actually be worse than the overconsumption itself.

Enjoy your meal, have a good time and stay on track in the long term!