Medical Weight Loss on the Menu

Eating out is tough during a medical weight loss program New Jersey. is home to a wide array of fine restaurants, but once you dedicate yourself to losing weight those enjoyable nights out at a local eatery may seem worlds away. Even after you complete your medical weight loss program you will need to maintain healthy eating habits—and this is admittedly difficult to do when ordering from a menu.

Eating out may be difficult, but not impossible.

You might not be able to head out for some of the same fattening dishes you might have once enjoyed, such as burgers or pizza, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a night out and a freshly made meal all the same. By learning how to order healthy items from the menu you can meet with friends to socialize over a nice dinner or feel fine grabbing food on the go.

The average menu holds a lot more information than you may at first notice. Sure, most menus aren’t equipped with calorie counts and other nutritional information, but if you know what you are looking for then you will be able to glean all the information you need from the short description beneath each listed entrée.

As you peruse your menu, make an effort to avoid ordering items with the following terms:

• Au gratin: This means the dish will be loaded with cheese
• Breaded or Crispy: The meat is going to be covered in flour, bread crumbs or another form of carbohydrate and then dropped in oil and fried.
• Broasted: Not to be confused with roasted. This is just a fancy way to say it is fried.
• Basted: Refers to an item cooked in animal fat. Sometimes this means butter, other times it means lard.
• Smothered: Almost always refers to cheese.
• In gravy: Gravy is made with animal fats drained out of the meat during the cooking process. You can often make a meal much healthier by asking for no gravy.

Instead of these terms, do your best to order meat that is baked, broiled, grilled, poached or roasted. When there is a sauce of some sort involved, try going for a tomato base, as this will generally be much healthier than cream-based sauces. When you are ordering salad dressings, opt for the vinaigrettes.

These are a few basic rules that hold true in most dining circumstances, and can help you to eat healthier when you find yourself faced with a menu.

What restaurants in the Hackensack area do you know of that offer healthy meals that comply with your medical weight loss plan? Share your thoughts and experiences in a comment below!