So you’re on a diet, but an occasion comes up in which sticking to it becomes difficult. It might be a night out, a party, a wedding or maybe you’re just travelling and don’t have the ability to cook. The opportunity to say ah fu*k it shows itself, do you give in? I’m going to help you screw the ah fu*k it and stay on track. The key to results is consistency, so if you let occasions like this take you off track too often, you’ll lose that consistency and therefore any potential results.
Here is your Step by Step Eating Out Survival Guide:
1) Follow a Flexible Diet
This hopefully isn’t new to you, but if it is, flexible dieting essentially means that you give yourself a break. You screw up one day, or maybe just one meal, as long as you’re consistent with the majority of your meals you’re A OK.
Basically, when an occasion like this crops up, you do your best and then the next day, you get back on your nutrition plan.
The great thing with this approach is that because you allow yourself some flexibility you never feel the need to stray from your diet. You know as long as you’re on the straight and narrow most of the time, you will see results. You have the bigger picture in mind. Thus, we avoid binges or cheat meals, so instead when you screw up one day you don’t say ah f*ck it and just drop your diet, you get back on it the next.
2) Plan Ahead
So you get flexible dieting, but you’re extra eager to stay on track, you want results as fast as they can come. Therefore, you want to plan ahead. Know you’re eating out with friends in the evening?
Why not check out the restaurants menu beforehand, select something that fits within your diet and then work your day around it.
That way you know you’ll be on track. However, restaurant food is not like home cooked food, the chef doesn’t care about your fitness goals, they only care about making food taste good. That means they’ll not worry about adding extra butter, oil or sugar to your food. So expect the food you eat out to be higher in total calories than meals you would make yourself.
Some insider tips:
– Many chains give you the nutritional breakdown of their meals, so make sure to do a google search beforehand.
– Pick easy to guestimate meals e.g. steak and chips, pasta with tomato sauce, Margherita pizza etc.
– Ask for any dressings on the side & vegetables without added butter.
– Search for the meal in question on myfitnesspal & use a suggestion that looks about right.
– Over-estimate fats & under-estimate protein.
– Enter the components of the meal into myfitnesspal & use cups to guestimate quantities e.g. a cup of rice, half a cup of chips etc.
As you eat out more often, you’ll get better. Like anything practice makes perfect. For example, I love pizza so I used to eat out at Pizza Express a lot because they provide their nutritional information. Great! But I wanted to try other joints, so overtime I became more confident in my ability to guestimate other pizzas. You too can do the same with any meals. If you’re someone who weighs their food and tracks the nutrition, you should have a good idea of how many calories are in different foods. Plus remember tip number 1, you should be following a flexible diet, and by estimating you’re doing really well, and if you’re off by a little bit it isn’t a worry as long as you get back to your home cooking soon enough.
3) Create Buffer
This one I find very handy, and makes complete sense, make yourself some buffer room so you can enjoy more grub.
Basically, you change your calorie output or intake in and around the event, thus creating a buffer.
While I do not advise doing a bunch of what I call ‘guilt cardio’ I don’t see anything wrong with trying to increase your NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis). Doing extra cardio for me rings alarm bells. In my past I remember binge drinking and then doing very long runs the next morning, this is what I call ‘guilt cardio’. To me this is an unhealthy relationship to have with food, and in future can lead to problems. However, making sure you don’t just sit on your butt all day and actually get up and go for a walk I do agree with. For example, you have a takeaway with friends or family, instead of falling asleep on the sofa, maybe you go for a 30 minute walk.
Or during the day before the event you decide to do some housework you have been putting off, or clean the car. That way you can nail two birds with one stone, getting something productive done while giving yourself some extra buffer for the event. For me the big difference between this and doing the extra cardio work is that you don’t measure this NEAT, you are just more aware of your activity in the day, whereas with the cardio you might be tempted to think ‘Oh I must have burnt 1000 calories doing that’ and then overeat at the event, and I feel that sets you up for failure.
Another way you can create buffer is to use one of the ‘Flexible Pillars’ from Get Big, Stay Lean. I use this Pillar with all my clients, and it is moving up to 20% of your calories from one day to another. Why 20%? Well I think this is enough to give a decent amount of room, but not so much that it messes with another day. Say you’re usually on 2000 calories a day, you can take up to 400 calories and move them from one day to another, so you would consume say 1600 calories before the event and then on the day of the event 2400 calories. You could even take this a step further and spread those calories, so still having 2400 calories on the day, but taking 100 calories from 4 other days, having 1900 calories. Obviously the more calories you have to play with the more buffer this method will provide, thus someone bulking has a lot of leeway. For me that is a very easy, and sustainable approach, and gives a lot of potential buffer while keeping you right on track.
There are many other potential ways you could give yourself buffer, like doing extra exercise. For example, you could really restrict your calories around the event, sticking to say just protein and vegetables in and around, making for very low calorie days. However, just like the exercise example, I don’t really like this because I think it doesn’t provide a healthy relationship with food. For me this sets you up for failure, you think ‘oh I’ve basically starved myself for 2 days’ and therefore binge like crazy on the day of event.
Doing ‘guilt cardio’ or ‘starvation intakes’ around these events for me is not a healthy mindset to have, I do not ever advise my clients to do it, or anyone else. I believe it sets you up for binges, because in your eyes you’re making them OK, but believe me, binging is never OK. It is an eating disorder. So if anyone tells me they’ve binged and want to do a tonne of ‘guilt cardio’ to burn it off, I tell them NO, just get back to your usual diet and activity the next day.
4) Take a Diet Deload
Next up is for those of you who may be or have been on quite a strict diet for a long period of time. You may be on really low calories, and therefore even with all of the above you’re still struggling with how to tackle eating off plan. Well, for you guys I think it may be a perfect time for a ‘diet deload’, similar to a training deload;
you’re reducing the stress to allow you to continue making progress.
So in a training deload you tend to drop volume and maybe intensity too, these are the main stressors, this then allows you to recover for further progression. So the diet deload uses the same principles, except your stress is the restraint on calories, so in this case you simply reduce this stress by eating a bit more. By taking a day off plan you give your body and mind some time to recover, refresh and therefore continue onwards with your diet. This is not an excuse for a binge, this is to prevent exactly that, to give yourself a break from dieting.
This could be used for just one meal, for example Lyle McDonald recommends free meals to be incorporated into your plan. Essentially it is one meal during the day, that would not be at home, in which you can eat what you like, and then be done with it. Get back to your diet the next day. What if it is longer than a day, well this would be more along the lines of a ‘diet break’ in which you take 1 or more weeks of eating at maintenance. This would really help your body ramp up all the things that come down during a diet, it would also give you a really nice mental break. Which of these you choose will depend on the occasion and on where you are in your diet. Just like with training deloads, they may only be one lighter session, but they could be up to a month of lighter work, it all depends on the stress accumulated before. If you’ve been training really hard for a long time, or dieting in this case, then you would probably warrant a longer deload. Personally for my clients, I tend to introduce 1-2 week long diet breaks every 3 months, and then free meals are used sparingly, because they have all the tools described above and they’re usually enough for one off events.
5) Day of Tool Kit
Right so it’s the day of the event where you’re not eating on plan. How do you go about tracking your grub? I use a lot of the tools I am going to talk about on a weekly basis, for example this weekend I am away with family in the Lake District, so eating is far from routine. Last weekend my girlfriend and I went to a food festival, there were samples from homemade cheeses to flavoured ciders, and I enjoyed it all. This weekend I’m not taking my scales weighing every portion of food, and I’m eating with family, whether it be out at a restaurant or homemade grub.
My first tool is a pre-event protein shake, or if it is a holiday or prolonged period away from home, take some protein powder. This is just handy, because protein is expensive and whereas picking up some bread is easy, finding lean protein sources isn’t. For example, when I was going to the food festival I wanted to make sure I wasn’t ravenous, so I had a protein shake before leaving. Want to make this extra filling? Add some xanthum gum, this adds fibre, will thicken up the shake and slow digestion. Another option is to have casien protein, this is very slow to digest when compared to whey protein, therefore keeping you satiated for longer. The idea of this is that you are not starving hungry when going to the occasion so you’ll be less likely to overeat, but still haven’t consumed a tonne of calories and made a massive dent in your intake for the day.
Along the same lines is portable protein. You might think I have some sort of fetish with protein, and well you’d be right, it is awesome. Not only is it only 4kcals per gram, it is also the most satiating macronutrient. Portable protein comes in handy because sometimes you just want a snack, but most things you can easily pick up are not overly diet friendly, although you can get some very suitable bars. Such as a quest bar, they’re reasonably low in fat (sub 10g), high in fibre (around 20g) and have a decent hit of protein (20g) which makes them quite ideal when you might be lacking fibre and protein during your vacation. You might think chucking some in your suitcase is a waste of time, but for me whenever I’m away they’re a life saver.
OK so now we’re onto actually tracking on the day. So when I was at the food festival I was trying all sorts of things, and every time I had something I made a mental note. Then when I got a spare moment I would jot it down in my notepad on my phone. This enabled me once home to tot everything up. But, how did I know how much I was eating of the food and how did I workout the nutrition of the food items? Well this is where guestimation has to come into play. As said before, if you have been tracking your intake somewhat for a period of time you get a good awareness of how many calories are in things, or at least what an amount of food looks like. So I ate some random homemade cheese, I had some samples of cider and picked at some brownies. When I got home I searched for generic versions of all these that looked roughly right, we follow flexible diets and so don’t sweat the small stuff, so this is good enough. I then entered amounts that matched up with my thoughts of the foods. You could take this a step version and take a picture of everything you ate to help assist once home. Once you have come to a guestimated amount you can then fit the rest of your diet around this.
This next tool is even more flexible and is for those of you who don’t want to have to track in your notes, and try and add things up afterwards. For you guys I recommend just setting aside a good number of calories for the event. Like if you know you’re eating out, you make sure to leave yourself a good 1000 calories or so, and then choose foods that hit that allowance. This can be tricky if it is an evening event, as you might not leave sufficient room, but then you can use the ‘Flexible Pillar’ that is your 20% swaps if you wanted, thus lowing your intake the next day.
The Bigger Picture
Just remember, your diet should be flexible enough to allow you to enjoy whatever occasions come up. Sure there will be some people that doesn’t apply to, such as those in competition prep, but then you are not intending to sustain the diet you’re currently on. Most of us however are trying to somewhat sustain how we are eating now, and if we can’t we should question our diet.
My advice above is meant to allow you to enjoy your life while sticking to your diet, pick the approach above that causes you the least stress.
You may find that some tools suit different occasions, like for me if I was eating a meal out I would simply plan ahead of time, but if I was on a 2 week holiday I’d utilise tools 3, 4 and 5. However, always remember Tool Number 1; that is a Flexible Diet, which means we can slip up now and then, so long as we get back on track and we remain on track the majority of the time. So I actively encourage you to take some time off now and then, because like when you take time off training, taking a break from your diet will help you in the long run.
So there you have it, the Ultimate Eating Out Survival Guide, now you can enjoy all the food and stay on track with your nutrition. No all out binges, no food restrictions, no carrying around weighing scales required.
If you found this helpful, or think others would too, I actively encourage you to share it. If you have any questions on the above, or anything relating to health and fitness, please email me, I will respond to every single person.
Further Reading:
– [NEW] Podcast – Discussing Get Big, Stay Lean with Jay Scott.
– [NEW] Website – http://www.revivestronger.com
– [NEW] Blog post – Meal Frequency Part 2
– [NEW] Fat Loss Success story – Chris Janssen
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