watching what you eat and fast food

Have you noticed how completely horrid most fast food companies are at helping you make a “good-for-you-in-the-sense-that-you-don’t-blow-over- half-your-daily-allowance-of-calories-in-a-single-sitting” meal?

Now I don’t mean “duh, fast food is bad for you.” Fast food may not be health food, but there are obviously ways to make healthier fast food choices. I went on the McDonald’s site and was actually impressed with the range of healthier foods they had which I hadn’t previously discovered. I found that for what I wanted, their snack wraps, when made with grilled chicken, were really a very reasonable choice. I had one of those and one of their side salads for dinner the last time we stopped for fast food — it was tasty (really!) and filling. (I got a ranch snack wrap with grilled chicken at ~270 calories, 4g fat. That’s fewer calories than in one of their cheeseburgers.) And I didn’t need to feel like an odd man out, I could eat relatively healthy at the fast food place without having to get the completely unsatisfying “grilled chicken with no bun” to do so.

Burger King’s site actually annoyed me a bit for that reason, when I looked up their nutrition section. They had a whole pdf for lower calorie offerings, and their number one suggestion (repeated for the majority of all the low cal choices) was to order their regular sandwiches without condiments or bun. Again, I know fast food is never meant to be health food, but come on. Your lower calorie option is to essentially say “Oh, you want lower calorie? Just eat half the sandwich then.” Fuckers (*laugh*). Yes, I know saying hold the mayo and hold the cheese and hold the bun will make it lower calorie, but it’s nice to have some other options that aren’t just a patty. At least they did categorize their foods into calorie brackets, including their “low carb” (no bun or mayo) choices, so I could browse through, but I still haven’t figured out a good meal combination there. Currently, fair or not, it’s in my head as “wait until you can blow 800+ cals on a meal…”

Taco Bell was interesting — they really push their “fresco” style foods (replacing cheese and sauce with salsa). The idea is to make the food lower fat, and lower calorie. They had a menu of these choices immediately available in the nutrition section. I could have a crunchy taco fresco style for 150 cal. They didn’t make it as easy as I would have liked to browse the calories options on their regular foods (I liked the BK brackets for that). It looks like a regular Spicy Chicken soft taco is my best choice (~170 cals, 6g fat). I was amazed at the number of calories and fat in the taco salads. (The fiesta taco salad had 840 cals.) I don’t know why I was surprised though, they always had well-loaded taco salads. There’s potential here, if I can figure out a combo of two filling tacos or burritos I enjoy. I’ll have to experiment. (Or like with BK wait for a time when I can blow 800 cal on a meal, since my favorite combo of a double decker taco and a beef baja chalupa sticks me around 730 cal.)

I expected to have to do my own legwork based on nutrition lists, but it would be nice to have food lists sortable by the category I want to watch (such as calories, or fat, or saturated fat, or carbs). It would make looking through the lists a bit easier.

I tend to eat fast food 1-3 times in a two week period, so I’ve been trying to find myself some better choices (or I’ll need to plan my other meals of the day accordingly). I haven’t yet explored the Wendy’s / Arby’s / other sites for similar concepts, but I will in the near future. Do you have any happy fast food choices you’ve discovered?