Beware of Restaurants: Part 1

One of fastest and surefire ways to start losing weight and getting healthy is to reduce the number of times you eat out each week.  I know I know.  Restaurant food tastes so good.  I completely agree, but a lot of it is bad for you and there are a few reasons for that.  Dining out has become a staple of American culture.  It's what we do when we want to be social, have business meetings, catch up with friends, etc.  We should do those things, but once again, people of industrialized nations, especially in America, overdo it.....by a lot!!  America actually has the highest rates of obesity for adults and children than any other industrialized nation.  And I think a major factor is in our dining culture.

The major reason dining out causes a problem is the way in which restaurants prepare their food.  It doesn't matter whether it is fast food or a sit down restaurant, when you eat at these places, you are consuming a lot of fat.  Fat is a major ingredient in restaurant food for a couple of reasons.  The first being that fat is how they flavor their food.  Fat tastes good.  That's a fact.  I knew that since I was a young boy.  I was eating bacon one time and the yellow fatty part had so much more flavor than the actual meat. Restaurants have to make their food taste good because that's how they get people to come back.  And adding fat is the magic trick.

To prove this point, I was watching the History Channel the other day and there was a show on called Modern Marvels.  The topic for that episode was fried food.  I caught the episode when they were talking about the fried stuff they serve at carnivals and fairs.  You know, the elephant ears, funnel cakes, etc.  The man talking to the camera was one of the people that fries up all of this garbage and not surprisingly he looked like he weighed over 300 lbs.  He deep fries EVERYTHING.  He even poured spoonfuls of Coke (yes, as in Coca-Cola) into his deep frier.  It clumps together and he took it out and ate it.  And was proud of it.  He said he could fry anything.  I could've vomited right there.  

So, the segment on the deep fried food caught my attention.  Then they moved on to restaurants.  They were interviewing a chef from a diner somwhere in middle America.  I have to admit, what I am about to tell you, I was actually surprised the chef was saying on national television.  Anyways, they showed him cooking over his stove, and he was cooking with lard.  Typical.  As he was giving the details of how he cooked he dropped this gem, "Anything with fat tastes good.  Fat is key".  He actually said this, but the thing is, it really is true.  Fat makes food taste better.  There is just one problem.....it's kiling us.

I am not one of those people that is going to pretend that vegetables taste good, or that I am so disciplined that I never eat this stuff.  Trust me, I have my weaknesses as well.  But our work is to find the discipline to say to ourselves, "enough is enough".  One helping is enough.  To be fair, restaurants are getting better at reducing their food's fat content and providing food labels with their meals so you can at least see the calorie, fat and sugar content, but they have a long way to go.  By cooking for yourself or preparing your own food, you could never add as much fat or sodium as restaurants do.  My whole philosophy is that you can eat what you want, not have to eliminate anything completely from your diet, and still lose weight.  You just have to be smart about it and some sacrifices will have to undoubtedly be made.

I decided to break this post up into 2 posts because when I write, the info just flows out and my posts end up being too long.  I want them to be short and to the point, so part 2 will come in a few days.  In the follow up I'll talk about the kind of fat they use and also how sodium gets worked in there too.