Things Byron ate five weeks ago - Part Two: What's in your fridge?

...In Byron's case, I'm guessing nothing. Although it admittedly made the project easier as the nutrition info was easy to find, the fact that Byron ate/eats virtually all his meals out is reflected in the excessive number of calories - on average, he ate 400 calories more than his estimated needs! Given that a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories, theoretically Byron should be gaining a pound every nine days! Meals prepared away from home also tend to be higher in sodium (On Day 1, Byron ate half a week's worth of the maximum sodium recommended in a day - the requirement is actually 1500 mg), fat and sugar, and lower in fibre.

In my regular practice, I see a lot of clients who go out for lunch everyday, but they argue that "it's ok" because they never have fast food. So what? Just because you're at a sit-down restaurant doesn't make the food any healthier. Restaurants don't attract business by looking out for our health - it's mostly about taste. While it is possible to make healthy dishes that also taste good, sadly it is generally easier and cheaper to make things taste better by loading it up with fat, sugar and/or salt. The second part of the equation is value - people like the idea of seeing that they can get lots of food with their money and as a result, portion sizes have increased steadily over the years to the point where the average restaurant entree contains around 1000 calories! Another way many restaurants deliver "value" to their customers is to buy processed foods, which helps them save money and the extra time that is sometimes necessary to prepare fresh ingredients.

Some of my clients have argued that even if they did cook at home, they would make the same dishes that they would order at the restaurant anyway. In a way, this does make sense; restaurants have affected the way we eat at home as well. When we see what/how much we are served when we eat away from home, it becomes "normal" to serve ourselves 3-4 cups of pasta (i.e. a day's worth of grains) in one sitting, or a large steak the size of a person's face with a fistful of vegetables as an afterthought. Brian Wansink did a study surveying 16 recipes in The Joy of Cooking over the past 70 years, and found that the calories per serving increased by an average of 63% while the serving sizes themselves increased by about 35%.

However, when you cook for yourself, even if it's something as simple as making a sandwich or throwing together a salad, you are in control of how much you serve yourself (you can "trick" yourself into serving less by using smaller plates and bowls) and what's in your food. Making simple tweaks like changing the proportion of vegetables to meat at your meals, switching to whole grain breads and pastas, buying real parmesan cheese instead of the stuff in the plastic bottle, or not buttering the bread when making a sandwich will already make your meals healthier than those at restaurants. Also, restaurants often have access to ingredients and use techniques that home cooks would never dream of. When I was in high school, I used to work for a fast food restaurant where the "grilled chicken breast" that went on the salads came in giant plastic bags of cubed chicken that were probably loaded with salt! Another example I heard of at a conference once was a professor was speaking about looking at nutrition info for an order of chicken fajitas at a restaurant, which most people perceive as a healthy choice - grilled chicken, lots of vegetables, flour tortillas (ok, not so good, but that's not the point) - but it ended up being almost 1000 calories per order. How could this be? One student raised their hand and said that they worked at the restaurant and the reason why the calories were so high was while the chicken was on the grill, it was constantly being basted/brushed with butter - something a home cook would probably never do.

I'm not asking you to turn into a gourmet chef - for many this is not realistic from a time and/or skill standpoint, but even if you choose one meal a day (heck, even one meal a week for some) to prepare at home, using the money you save by not going out to buy high-quality, fresh ingredients and preparing a simple recipe (yes, even sandwiches and salads count) can make a difference to your health. And as this becomes a habit and you prepare more of your meals at home, soon restaurant meals won't even taste as good because the food is too salty or greasy or whatever it is, and you know that you can make it better anyway.