Can You Eat Healthy at a Fast Food Restaurant?

You have changed your eating habits to align with your decision to live a healthy lifestyle but you find yourself with only fast food restaurants for lunch. Due to hypertension your doctor has put you on a low sodium diet but your kids keep nagging you to take them to McDonalds. After a thorough diet evaluation you have chosen a low fat diet plan to lose those extra pounds but your friends love to eat at Subway. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? The bottom line is can you eat at fast food restaurants and still adhere to whatever diet plan you have chosen to follow?

You can definitely minimize the unhealthy impact of most fast food restaurants on your diet plan by choosing menu items that are better for you than most. But before we get into the details let’s review the basic tenants of healthy eating. Avoid foods with saturated fats and trans fatty acids, load up on fruits and vegetables, choose whole grain foods, choose foods low in cholesterol, don’t drink your calories and watch your portions.

The two healthy eating basics that you can follow to a “T” are don’t drink your calories and watch your portions. Choose either a diet soda or, better yet, ask for water. Do not supersize and select the smallest size available. There that wasn’t hard and you can apply these two basics to any fast food, or for that matter any fine dining, restaurant.

The other basic tenants require a little prior planning to satisfy effectively. Almost every fast food restaurant has nutrition information available on their website. For example if you type in Subway in the Google search window the third item on the drop down menu of suggestions is Subway nutrition. Click on the first item and it takes you to the nutritional information for Subway. There is a ton of information including fat, fiber and sodium tips and printer friendly nutritional information. The fat, fiber and sodium tips provide specific information on what sandwich to order and also what toppings to choose and which toppings to avoid – excellent information.

What do you do if forget to do your research? The first choice is to inform the staff your specific diet requirements (emphasize that your doctor has put you on a special diet this should get you special treatment) and ask what menu items satisfy your requirements. Your second choice is review the menu while you’re waiting in line and with the basic healthy eating tenants in mind make your best guess.

Let’s say you made you best guess and when you get back to the office or home and check the nutritional and caloric values on the fast food restaurants website you discover that what you just had for lunch was loaded with calories, saturated fat and cholesterol. Ouch! All is not lost, just adjust what you eat for the remainder of the day so you don’t go over your daily caloric limit and burn the experience into your memory so you don’t make the same mistake the next time.

Another strategy, especially if you are eating with family or friends, is to bring your own healthy lunch. Most fast food restaurants will not make a fuss if your lunch companions are ordering from their menu. This will generally be more difficult to pull off if you are eating alone but can be done if you select a couple of healthy menu items to compliment what you brought from home.

My final recommendation is to select a couple of healthy sides and don’t select a burger or sandwich. For example, if you find yourself at Wendy’s you can get a side salad and a baked potato. Just be sure not to load up the potato with cheese, bacon or chilli and choose a fat free or low fat salad dressing for your side salad.

You can now walk into a fast food restaurant and have a plan in place that won’t bust your healthy eating or diet plan. With all this in mind you don’t want to eat at fast food restaurants on a regular basis unless based on your research into the nutritional and caloric value you can stick with your diet.