When you're trying to lose weight [2], you may feel like you have to give up all the fun things in your social life in order to meet your goals: happy hours, birthday parties, and dining out are all filled with temptations and opportunities to slip up. Fortunately, fat-loss coach Carter Good explains the four easy steps to eating out and still losing weight.
The steps include:
- Step 1: Find your meal ahead of time, whether that's looking up the restaurant menu online or finding it in your tracker app.
- Step 2: Plan to order what you want, but just be reasonable. After all, you don't want to deprive yourself and end up making poor choices later.
- Step 3: Make your other meals fit. Be sure to budget your calories for this meal and plan accordingly for your other meals for the day.
- Step 4: You won't be perfect and that's OK! Try to be as accurate as your can with your planning and tracking, but if you go over a little, don't stress about it.
"Your diet plan should never, EVER take away from living life & spending time with others [4]," Carter wrote in his caption. "See, many-a-folk get so obsessed with their weight loss goals that they end up isolating themselves or avoiding social events." Instead, he recommends people follow his four-step plan and enjoy themselves while they're out.
Some other tips for eating out include watching your portion sizes [5]. Restaurant portions tend to be huge, so plan on taking half your meal to go or split it with a friend. You can also order a salad to start or a side of veggies to load up on nutrient-rich, low-calorie vegetables, which will make you feel full faster.