Eating out at restaurants on the Medifast diet

I recently received an email from a potential dieter who told me that although she was intrigued with the medifast diet and knew some people who had good results on it, she didn’t want to try it because as an account executive she was required to having corporate lunches at restaurants and obviously couldn’t take his medifast meals on these outings. So, she was afraid that this diet would not work for her because she had to go to restaurants a lot for her job. Well, you can eat out with Medifast. People do it all the time. You just need to change the timing of your lean and green meals and make decent choices. I will discuss more about this matter in the next article.

Lean and green foods and when you can have them: When you’re on medifast, they want you to eat six small meals. Five of these will be diet meals that the company sends you. These require hardly any work or preparation. However, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to eat exclusively prepackaged meals all the time, so they ask you to prepare a “lean, green meal” made up of fresh protein and vegetables once a day.

Many people assume that they have this lean, green meal at dinner time, and this practice is the most common. But, nothing says that you can’t have this main meal at lunchtime and in a restaurant. As long as you make smart decisions, this will work fine and shouldn’t affect your results.

Choosing your lean, green food when eating at a restaurant: The requirements for this meal are quite simple. If you’re eating beef, pork, or lamb, you can have five ounces. If you have eaten chicken, turkey, or fish, you can eat up to seven ounces. The general rule of thumb here is the well-known serving size which is about the size of a deck of cards.

In addition to protein, you are allowed three servings of vegetables. Most people will add a salad and a low-glycemic vegetable like green beans, but there are pretty clear instructions that come with the food. Basically, you’re not going to want to eat junk food when you eat out, but if you choose the healthy options that most restaurants offer, you should be fine.

Just try to avoid heavy sauces and have your salad dressing on the side. You can even do fast food if you’re smart about it. Grilled chicken with green beans and a salad is available at most fast food places. A salad with chicken and low-calorie dressing is also a good choice here, as is a lean stir fry.

Now, sometimes there will be times when you have to cheat a bit. This is good. Because, overall, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories and carbs than is normal for you when you average everything out. Everybody cheats sometimes. The key is to get back to normal as soon as you can and move on. A few lunches out isn’t going to ruin everything, especially if you stick to the rules for the rest of the day.