Restaurant Meals

When entering food into the food diary what do people record for a restaurant meal?

Example: We went to a chinese restaurant and I ordered the combination beef soup. I have no idea what to enter into the food diary because I didn't cook it.

I usually try to find the restaurant in the food database to see if the desired food is there. If it's not, I just search for something similar, like "Beef Soup" - it will give you options such as 'beef barley soup,' 'beef vegetable soup,' 'beef noodle soup,' etc... Then just choose the one that's closest to what you ate. It's not going to be an exact match, but it will at least keep you close!

Also, after you've done this calorie-counting thing for awhile, you get better at estimating how many calories something should be and you can edit the serving size to reflect how many calories you think it probably was. For example, was it cream-based or broth-based? Lots of veggies in it or something starchy as a filler (noodles/rice/dumplings)? That will help you figure out what to log.

Cool, great ideas Erika, thanks

What erika said.

Also, learn how to visually estimate portion sizes. If you learn what a three-ounce serving of chicken looks like, for example, then you can eyeball a restaurant portion and adjust accordingly.

I got pretty good at this by playing a game with myself: whenever I was going to weigh or measure something, I would first try to get exactly that portion size by myself. After I made my best guess, I'd weigh or measure it to see how close I'd gotten. If you do this for a few weeks you'll find that you can get pretty close without trying very hard.

wow thanks Hoser, excellent ideas