Restaurants: Yes, You Can Eat Out on a Diet

Eating out can be a real treat, but if you're on a diet, it can be hard to know how to navigate the world of restaurants without sabotaging your diet. Start by choosing your restaurants wisely. It is easier to maintain a healthy diet if you choose a place to eat out that offers some healthy dietary choices. Even fast food restaurants have picked up on this cue and offer more than just fried foods and soft drinks, so there is no excuse to fall of the wagon just to eat out.

If you are on a special diet, like the South Beach diet for example, that is more of a restrictive life style diet than a traditional short term diet, it can be more challenging to eat out and stay on your meal plan, but not impossible. Almost every diner has a few healthy meal selections, you just may have to be creative in finding those selections.

Start by looking for non-fried foods and foods that aren't slathered in gravies or salad dressing even if it means asking your server to omit something from your meal. Salads are a really healthy choice right up to the point you start putting heavy salad dressings on them. If you love your greens but don't like to eat them plain you can ask your server to put lemon on them instead of Thousand Island dressing and spare yourself the extra empty calories.

You should also avoid drinking soda with your meal. It can be especially easy to start adding calories to your meal when you have a bottomless glass of soda being refilled at every turn. Instead of soda, try just ice water or if you really feel like you need some flavor in your water you can ask for a lemon wedge to add to your water or drink a low sugar drink like iced tea. Or you can always order a glass of milk, which is a healthy part of any diet and provides you with much needed calcium and vitamin D.

If you manage to make it through a whole meal without falling back into bad habits, the real test of strength is in the dessert cart. You can always choose a fruit bowl instead of fruit pie and get the same natural sweet taste of fruit, without all of the added syrupy sugar that comes with most fruit pies. If you're hankering for ice cream, you may be able to ask for low fat frozen yogurt instead. Most of the time you probably won't even notice any taste difference between ice cream and frozen yogurt and yogurt comes in just as many flavors as ice cream does these days.

Once you understand what you can and what you can't eat, you should be able to successfully navigate the world of restaurants without sabotaging your diet or feeling like you are sacrificing to eat out.