Eating out at a restaurant can feel awkward when you are not eating carbohydrates and are following a Keto, LCHF diet or any other low carb food diet. There usually comes problems on what you should do when you have lunch or dinner out with friends or what to do when invited out to party and you do not know what food will be served.
If you can choose the food yourself you should obviously choose the food that is the cleanest. Have a nice piece of meat or fish, skip the potato, pasta and rice. Add on different accessories like salad, lettuce, tomato and cucumber. Try to find a fat sauce and add that to you food. If you can select also the foods with the highest fat content.
The easiest way is to then replace the potato, rice or pasta, served with your meal with vegetables or salad. If there are real butter or cheese you can take an extra large portion of this to bring up the fat percentage. Keep in mind that food that is served on the restaurant is often very low in fat due to fat usually is quite expensive. Try to add on more fat if you have the possibility.
All bread you should of course skip. An example is e.g. the bread on a burger. It is easy to remove and in most places you can also have it replaced with some extra lettuce instead. By just removing the bread the burger dish would transform from something quite un-healthy to a really good and health keto burger.
Also be careful of the low-fat butter that many restaurants today serve. You should avoid this (some people even bring their own butter to lunch restaurants). Light margarine or low-fat butter is not natural human food so stay away from it if the restaurant does not have real butter.
If you are invited out to a party to some friends you have to decide how strict you want to be. Many people can be totally understanding that you are on a special diet and can adjust the food served a little according to your needs. Most people have some butter or cheese at home that they could add on to your meal.
Another option might be to make a scheduled departure from the diet just for the occasion. You can prepare by eating extremely low on carbohydrates the days before and after and just have one meal where you do not follow your strict keto or LCHF diet. It is what you eat the other days of the year that counts – not the individual days. You should however be aware that eating a high amount of carbohydrates will of course impact your results and might slow down your weight loss.
If you are out at an resturant there usually are a lot of alternatives on the menu that are less bad for you. We have created a guide that can help you find which dishes that are the best for your LCHF diet or for your Keto diet. You can use our Eating out while on keto or LCHF diet as a guide to know which are the best dishes to select.
A general rule you should always try to follow is make sure you are living your life, do not stop going out with your friends just because you are on your low carb food diet. You just have to adjust the way you eat a little and you can still go to the same restaurants and eat with your friends.
Johan Bengtsson
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