There is something inherently obesogenic about restaurant eating and it has nothing to do with the "portions" as you really don't get much food for the price. Eating out is not a bargain in any way. It is costly and you won't pay the price with your wallet alone, but with your health. Here are some of the issues with "eating out":
- High Fat/High Carb - Restaurant food is the epitome of the Standard American Diet (SAD). It is made of foods which are very high in fat and carbohydrate. The fats used are vegetable oils and the main carbohydrate is wheat. Both of these make up everything on the menu. Restaurant food always ends up in one way - High Fat + High Carb + Low Protein = Obesity.
- Low Protien - Protien is expensive. If you have been following low carb for a while and you order your favorite restaurant meals "without the bread" or "without the tortilla" or "without the pasta", you will see how your plate magically becomes a child's serving. If you want to double the protein, in order to get a normal portion, the price also doubles. Restaurants have long known that they can charge you a lot for a whole lot of cheap carbs.
- Processed Ingredients - Aside from these meals being high in fat and carbs, they add processed ingredients to them on top of that. When people think of "processed ingredients" they immediately think of some artificial "chemical" but chemicals are not the culprit of obesity. "Processed" simply means modified. These ingredients are completely natural, they are just modified in a way that makes them obesogenic. These processed ingredients are usually versions of refined/concentrated fats (mono and diglycerides) and carbs (starch) to improve texture, shelf life and enhancing flavor. Processed is just a way of adding even more fat and carbs to food, which further disrupts blood glucose.
- Novelty Eating - The SAD diet does not consist of real meals. It consists of a variety of novelties and this is what you get when you eat out. Eating out is a conglomeration of unnecessary filler items such as "fun appetizers", "artisan breads" and "shareable desserts" which take precedence over your main meal. Addition is always bad but when the items added are generally party foods, the addition becomes worse.
- Liquid Calories - Restaurants love filling you up with the cheapest items they have - drinks. From shakes, to coffees, to cocktails, to plain soda and all their "fizzy" derivatives, you end up paying more for drinks than for actual solid food. The price hike on drinks is so high that you get free refills of their cheapest items. There is nothing more obesogenic than drinking calories. All fat people have a drinking problem. Ask any fat person about their obesity you will see a linear correlation between it and their drinking habits. The ones who have been obese all of their life, all started drinking early on. Do not think that ordering "diet" drinks will save you. Restaurants absolutely have diet versions of popular drinks but they are not caffeine free. In fact, more restaurants will not carry any caffeine free sodas. This leaves many obese people wondering how they can be getting fatter on diet sodas.
- Sauce On Everything - Nothing entices you to eat more than slathering sauce on top of your food. Restaurants are notorious for this and have quickly found out what a money grab it is. Many restaurant chains have even bottled and started selling their own "special sauces" at grocery stores. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find a single item on the menu that doesn't contain a sauce of some sort. Fat people love sauce. I wrote an entire article about this once. This is part of obesogenic behaviors. Sauce does exactly what fat people love to do to all of their food - add more fat and carbs to it. Most fat people can't eat unless some sauce is poured over everything. It used to be gravy (fat and carbs) but now it's become more sophisticated with a vast variety of different flavors. But, of course, one of those flavors stands out above the rest - sweet. It doesn't matter how "spicy" the sauce is portrayed to be, sweet is always in the mix. Fat people now pass on the gravy just to have the barbecue. Both make and keep you fat.
- Healthy Is Not Healthy After All - What if you can avoid all of this and go to a truly "healthy" restaurant to eat? Then you will most likely end up at a salad place. A place that is void of fat and certain carbs (glucose/starch) and also of protein and nutrients. This means hunger later on in the day and you end up, once again, eating out of meal times and reinforcing a starvation response (hunger/hypoglycemia), all while getting broker. After all, a lot of these salad places are extremely expensive while serving you cheap leaves. To make matters worse, some of these places are really only void of one thing - protein. This means you end up eating a vegan, sustainably sourced, non GMO, organic, whole wheat, blueberry muffin for lunch. Word salad does not make a meal. Muffins, raw juices, porridge, a sliver of avocado or a bowl of kale chips are not meals. Eat like a normal human being. If meat is not on the plate, it's not a meal.
A lot of people don't realize how much labor it takes to run a restaurant kitchen. There are chefs, line cooks, prep cooks, a clean up crew, etc. It takes a lot of work to bring you ten different foods items. There is nothing more obesogenic than for food to come flying towards you that you didn't have to prepare, cook and clean up afterwards for. This means you now have access to a vast variety of different foods that you wouldn't have had otherwise. No one cooks like it's a party everyday. That's basically what a restaurant offers you - an endless party.
This has nothing to do with the total portion of food. After all you can sit at home with a steak and an endless heap of green beans. It has to do with blood glucose/insulin disrupting macronutrients in the wrong combinations and ratios. That is usually what occurs when someone is willing to cook up a lot of cheap stuff (fat and carbs) for you and you don't have to move. These cooks are preparing these foods, at the wee hours of the morning, long before the restaurant opens. You don't have time for that.
Breading, homemade pasta, frying, baking are all ways of mixing macronutrients together in obesogenic combinations. What's great on the tongue is hell on the liver. It doesn't matter if you just eat one French fry that was dusted in flour and then deep fat fried. Eating one is enough to get the obese ball rolling. This is why you can sit at home with an all you can eat platter of green beans and obesity never catches up to you. As you can see it's not the portions, it's the macronutrient combinations because that is ultimately what disrupts your blood glucose homeostasis. And these combinations are difficult to do at home so people love sitting at restaurants and have it come flying to them. People like ordering at restaurants what they usually don't have time to make at home.
Ordering "low carb" or "keto" while chronically eating out will not save you as the only thing it will do is replace the carbs with air. Air disrupts blood glucose regulation just like fat and cards do.
Stay away from restaurants. Eat out only when you have no other choice. Do not eat out chronically. Do not double up on the fat to make up for the carbs. Adding more cheese to a bun-less sandwich is not the way to go. Cook your meals at home. In fact, you can cook like it's Thanksgiving, once a month, and then freeze 29 - 30 meals and you'll be better off.
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