If you have a Score of 20 or higher in the Eating Out section, then eating away from home is likely to be a factor in your difficulty in losing weight or maintaining your weight loss. Just 25 years ago, the majority of the food we ate was eaten at home. Now, in some age groups, particularly amongst 18 to 34 year olds, almost half the food we eat is eaten out. We are now twice as likely to eat at a restaurant or fast-food joint as we used to be (the average is two meals a week).
Working life forces some of this change on us, whether we like it or not. Few of us live close enough to work to actually go home for lunch, or sometimes even for supper. And often, in this climate of pressure for higher productivity, mealtime is one of the rare occasions we have to relax and enjoy time with our colleagues and friends at work. So we can find ourselves going out to lunch virtually every day or, at the other end of the spectrum, trying to skip lunch. It seems as though our work schedules are conspiring to make us fat.
In fact, there is some evidence that they are. In a recent study from Japan, where obesity is growing almost as fast as it is in America, researchers followed a large group of workers over a period of 3 years. There was a good correlation between the number of overtime hours worked and weight. The more they worked, the fatter these mostly male workers became. The researchers speculated that it was a combination of a change in eating habits (eating more meals at work rather than at home) and less time in which to exercise. The same study done in the US or the UK would, I suspect, reveal the same. Obviously, when eating at home, we have much more control over what we eat than we do when we eat out.
It's not just where we eat that has changed. What we eat when we do eat out has also changed dramatically in size. When you look at the food pyramid or any of the dietary recommendations put out by nutrition agencies, amounts of food are usually described by number of servings. According to the original food pyramid, we are supposed to eat five to seven servings of grains, breads or pasta per day. We're not told what that serving size should be. A serving is a serving is a serving right? No. These guidelines are based on what the average serving size was when these guidelines were developed in the 1980s. What a difference 20 years has made! A recent American study compared current serving sizes of commonly consumed foods that could be bought when eating out today with those used in the food pyramid and on food labels. The difference was mind boggling.
Say someone had a bagel for breakfast. The recommended serving size is 60g (20z), but the bagel available in some supermarkets is 125g (4 ½ ,oz) more than twice the bagel it used to be. If you go for a muffin, the recommended serving size is also 60g (20z). The average this is the average, not the biggest was more than three times that size, and some muffins were six times that size! That means that with one muffin, you have eaten all the grains and breads you are supposed to eat for the rest of the day! It would be okay if you knew that and adjusted for it, but who knew?
Let's move on to lunch. Say you had a hamburger; you're watching your weight, so you pass on the fries. The recommended weight of your burger and your bun together should be 115g (40z). Remember, though this seems small to you now, these sizes were based on the average size of the portion back in the 1980s, when the pyramid was designed. The current fast-food burger-bun combo is larger as well, at around 170g (60z). However, at some American chain restaurant, that burger-bun combo could be twice the size of the pyramid portion, at 250g (90z). That's very close to the maximum daily amount of meat recommended on the food pyramid.
Okay, how about supper? You had a burger for lunch, so you figure you'll eat light for dinner. How about some pasta? At a chain restaurant, the average serving of pasta can be as much as four times larger than the recommended allowance for a serving of pasta.
The US undoubtedly leads the way on this front so it's little surprise that average calorie intake there has increased by 600 calories a day in the past 30 years 600 calories a day! You do the moths: there are 3,500 calories in 455g (l Ib) of fat. Increasing your calorie count by 600 calories per day means that you put on an average of 455g (lib) every 6 days! No wonder that over the past 20 years the percentage of Americans who are overweight has doubled.
Americans, and increasingly Britons, have recognized this change in portion size and welcomed it although I suspect they didn't really understand what it meant to the real bottom line, the waistline. You can't accuse American restaurant chains of not responding to consumer demand. They heard, and they were more than happy to oblige with huge servings of bad food.
The same supersizing trend has moved into vending machines too. Look at chocolate bars and packets of crisps. They just keep getting bigger and bigger. Let me remind you: portion size is learned. How do we know this? The first evidence came from experiments on rats. In laboratories rats were given as much rat food as they wanted. Once this portion size was determined, the rats were fed that amount daily. After a week or so of this, the portion size was increased.
At first, the rats continued to eat the same amount of food, leaving the excess untouched. But after several days, the rats started eating the excess. When allowed to eat freely in an unrestricted fashion, as they had been originally, they ate this bigger portion but no more. They had learned a new portion size, which they then expected to eat at each meal.
We behave the same way as lab rats. Barbara Rolls, PhD, decided to check this portion theory out. She recruited a group of adults and had them eat several meals. Before each meal, each person was asked to rate his hunger. Then they were served a meal. What the participants didn't know was that with each meal they were being served larger and larger portions. Despite having the same amount of hunger, these volunteers ate the larger portions. They learned a new portion size.
This is not just a laboratory phenomenon either. The same thing has happened here in the real world as well. Greg Critser, in his artilce, Fat Land, suggests that Americans (and increasingly Britons) have been inside a giant portion laboratory since fast-food franchises started selling more (food) for less (money) 15-years ago. It all started with Taco Bell. Some of their market research suggested that the reason people came back to the their restaurants over and over and over again was not because of taste or quality but because of value and savings. So, the Taco Bell head honcho took a risk: what if he made the food an even bigger bargain? Would customers come back even more frequently?
They cut their prices and held their collective breath. The word went out and … business boomed. But what was really amazing even to the executive at Taco Bell the people who came didn't end up spending less money. Instead, they bought more food. Like the rats, when presented with more food (for the same amount of money), we might have balked initially, but in no time we ate it, enjoyed it, and finally insisted on it.
In the few short years since Taco Bell made this remarkable discovery, everybody's got in on the act. Value meals under one name or the other – are ubiquitous. And it's not just in fast-food joints either. Everywhere you go, food has been supersized. Even the finest restaurants now heap food onto our plates. Name a food and the chances are that over the past decade the serving size has grown. Soft drinks are bigger; doughnuts are bigger; chocolate bars are bigger; a slice of pizza is bigger; even salads are bigger.
No matter what type of diet you end up on, managing your weight requires that you scale down your portion sizes. If big portions can be learned, so can small portions. The problem is that you will be doing this on your own. Don't expect restaurants and vending machines to reduce the size of their portions. It's been way too profitable for them to reverse the trend.
Larger portion sizes in foods we eat away from home have undoubtedly contributed to our expanding waistlines, but the world we live in often makes it difficult not to eat out. So what's your average working person to do?
There are some tricks to eating out that may make it easier for you. There's no magic here, just common sense.
1. Take your lunch and snacks to work with you. When you are trying to lose weight, it's easier to control both what you eat and how much of it you eat when you make it yourself.
2. If you eat your lunch at your desk, use the extra time that you would have spent had you gone out to lunch by taking a brisk walk or exercising with your friends.
3. If you have to eat a meal out, take snacks to work so that when you do go out for lunch or supper, you're not so hungry that you inhale the bread as soon as you sit down.
4. Order one or two appetizers rather than a main course. The appetizers come more quickly, so you don't have to wait as long to eat. You'll be surprised at how much they fill you up. Appetizers have also grown, and often, what is now considered an appetizer used to be a whole serving.
5. Order a half size or appetizer size of a pasta or other main dish. If the restaurant doesn't do that, ask the server to bring you only half and pack the rest up for you to take home, or split the dish with a friend.
6. Send away the bread before it even lands on the table.
7. Don't hesitate to tell the server how you would like your food prepared. If you want it grilled rather than fried or with the sauce on the side, ask for it that way. A restaurant would rather let you 'have it your way' and come back again than not.
8. Find the restaurants in your area that serve foods that you can eat on your diet. A fat-counting diet is the hardest to pursue when eating out, because restaurants add fats to just about everything to improve flavor and appearance.
9. Get all sauces served on the side.
10. Eat the foods that you'll feel good about eating first. Save the higher-calorie foods for last. When you get a steak and salad, eat the salad first.
11. Avoid drinking an alcoholic beverage before your meal, and limit your alcohol consumption during a meal.
12. When you know you are going to be dining out, allow for the extra calories you will undoubtedly consume by being selective in what you eat before and after your restaurant meal.
13. When you overeat, forgive yourself and get back on the diet before you add insult to injury by eating dessert too.
One last point: many of my patients have told me that when they go out to eat with their friends and order just an appetizer or a salad, they worry that their friends perceive this as an assault on their eating habits, since they are ordering the usual big lunch. I suspect that this is true some of the time. But the world we live in is pushing us down the path to obesity. If you want to get off that path, it's going to make you different. Here's your choice: you can continue with them on their path and end up with the same weight problems as your friends, or you can find your own way to the weight you want.
Sometimes others may feel that the choices you make for yourself imply a criticism about them. It's not that. You know that as well as I do. Their feelings are a projection of their own concerns about their weight. They have to make their own choices. You must be free to make yours.
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