Restaurants

Restaurants are hard, especially in the early days of a diet, when food choices are most restricted but habits are not well formed.  I always want to opt to being social, but my somewhat unconventional understanding of what is "healthy" makes it hard sometimes.  For our family, it is incredibly hard to pick a  place, since one of us is vegan, and so the only foods we overlap on are salads!

Almost all Thai food is cooked with sugar. A lot of Chinese food is as well.  What doesn't have sugar has corn starch, often. Coatings on meet and vegetables are starch based. So at a Chinese place, I'll opt for simple - beef with broccoli, or else moo shi without a pancake or sweet hoisin sauce.  I simply try to avoid Thai places.

Waffle Houses and IHop - did you know they put pancake batter in their omelettes?

Sauces most places are extremely suspicious.

The family went to Red Lobster Sunday night, which all things considered was the least-bad choice in terms of what I wanted to eat.  I got grilled shrimp, steamed broccoli, and a side salad.  The problem was it just wasn't terribly tasty.  So the reason I was there was not primarily the food, but the company.  It's just important to shape your mind around that.

Because I'm tracking every bite right now, another problem with restaurants is simply understanding what the food is and how to count it. My crowd-sourced app has a lot of the chain restaurant menus already included, but you have to study the entry to decide if it's correct.

Much easier to eat at home.