Calorie counts .....Help please

I have a family member who must have calorie counts for all meals....am looking for ideas within Chicago...already know about Chili's, Panera etc...looking for a notch better than those places....all help is appreciated

uh, this might be considered a little excessive on a foodie forum, but I confess to being the calorie counting type (I justify by saying that I maximize my enjoyment by saving myself tastebuds for the most delicious calories instead of wasting it on sugar and crap). I usually use mydailyplate.com to check on all the chain restaurant calories. Otherwise, for most meals, I will eyeball the ounces on the protein first, and then look up a generic recipe for the sides. It's not fool-proof but gives you a better gestimate than random number generators!

http://www.mydailyplate.com

Not so sure about calorie counting. But, my own approach, when eating out is to eat about a third to a half of everything I'm served in a restaurant

An adequate protein for your body to digest is the size of the palm of your hand or about 25 to 30 grams. The normal human body cannot absorb more than that in one sitting. So, anything more than that is wasted from a nutritional perspective (though not from a tatste perspective). If you're some kind of freak bodybuilder, you may be able to absorb more.

For instance, I love La Brasa Roja. 1/4 leg and thigh is what I eat there. The leftovers go home with me and get chopped up for a very tasty addition to Cobb salads or chicken salad later that week.

You can find counts for a surprising number of restaurants on the internet, but you will have to do the legwork. No one site has everything. When I joined Weight Watchers, I was pointed to Dottie's Weight Loss Zone (http://www.dwlz.com/). It gives the info in calories as well as WW points. Similar sites are too numerous to list but I found them all by typing the name of the restaurant and dish I was interested in. A lot of corporate-type restaurants will also supply you with nutritional information. At the Yard House I asked for information on the spicy tuna roll and they printed the ingredients and nutritional breakdown right out of the cash register.

A HUGE caveat of which you are probably already aware-- counts supplied by restaurants, which is what you get on all these sites-- of often WAY inaccurate. This has been in the news in the wake of proposed legislation about restaurants having to supply counts. Having done Weight Watchers for a while now, I am pretty sensitive to how much fat is in prepared food and I can often tell there's much more fat in the food than they say. If you really need to know about calories you will have to compensate for these inaccuracies somehow.

You had asked for suggestions for places a cut above Chili's and Panera and sadly, I can't think of any that give you their calorie counts. Probaby the only places that post calorie counts are the corporate chains. There are some places, I think, that identify low-fat or low-carb options on their menu. One I can think of off-hand is the Great Street Restaurant at the Renaissance Hotel at Wacker and State. I've only had lunches there but have enjoyed them and it's a pretty, light filled room.

Oh, and Scooter's does let you know that a small serving of frozen custard is only 5 points on Weight Watchers!

Great Street
1 W Wacker Dr
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 795-3333

Scooter's
1658 W. Belmont Ave
773-244-6415

Wow Bao posts nutrition information for all of their foods online and at their stores. Their buns are not gargantuan size, so a person watching calories can actually enjoy one. They

Good modernized Chinese food. They have some good varieties of food including noodle dishes and soups, as well.

Water Tower
835 N Michigan

1 West Wacker
Lake St and State St corner

175 West Jackson

www.wowbao.com

While it's pretty easy to estimate the size of the protein, the biggest trick is to estimate the amount of oil used in any dish.

There is this new place called Freshii where you build your own salads, wraps, "bowls," and soups. When you go online to choose your ingredients, it gives you a handy Nutrition Facts table. Sadly, it kind of shows you how easy it is to make a 900 calorie salad.

Potbelly has the same feature on their website. You can build a salad or sandwich and watch the calorie total go up. Not surprisingly, a sandwich could possibly be the better choice. That Potbelly vinaigrette, while delicious, will get you every time.

I joined WeightWatchers on Friday afternoon!

I proceeded to celebrate this with a pot roast sandwich, chocolate egg cream and doughnuts at American Depot...

Then OTOM on Saturday night...

Not to mention Chinese food for lunch at Mapo in Naperville yesterday

And Cheese Ravioli on the plane last night...

Hmmm... Not really off to a good start...

I'll start again tomorrow! Oh wait... There's a McNugget eatoff tomorrow... Wednesday then!

CrazyC wrote:I joined WeightWatchers on Friday afternoon!

I counted points for a couple of years off and on and will probably start again. Once you get used to the point system, it's a reasonable way to track what you eat and lose some weight. I had to go over my points a bit but still managed to lose about a half-pound to a pound per week. For low points basically think lower fat, higher fiber, lean protein, etc. Fruits and vegetables are your friends. As far as eating out during that time, Asian restaurants for me had the most lower point options (broth-based soups, protein and vegetables with rice, spring rolls and potstickers that aren't fried, etc.) Good luck!

Calorie counts for non-chain restaurants probably won't become a reality unless mandated by the government simply because of the cost involved. For many of the products that I develop, I use a product development and nutrient analysis software called Genesis R&D by ESHA Research which costs about $5,000. You have to enter the entire recipe/formula, and every ingredient has to be in their database for the resulting nutrition facts to be accurate. If an ingredient is not in their database, but you have the nutrition information for that ingredient, you can enter it into the database.

The other way to do it is to send the food out to a lab for analytical nutrition analysis which can cost $500-$1000 per analysis. I've had to do this type of analysis while in school (kjeldahl method for protein, soxhlet for fat, weende for fiber, etc), and not many restaurants can afford to spend that much money. I remember that we tested cheeseburgers and other fast food items and the results were consistently 20-40% higher than what the restaurants claimed.

I know this is probably not what the OP wants to hear but you just have to get a feel for this on your own. Once you begin to focus on nutritional values with foods you can identify completely, you'll get a better sense of how to apply that knowledge to foods that are more 'mysterious.'

A couple of things to remember: in many cases, restaurant portions are much larger than a typically-recommended portion. Also, processed foods generally contain a lot of sodium; far more than you might expect. Generally speaking, if something tastes better than the sum of its parts likely should, there's probably a good reason for that. It is difficult to eat nutritionally well and inexpensively in most restaurants. Ironically, the biggest chains are the ones that are most likely to provide nutritional data for their menu but those are generally the hardest places to eat in a nutritionally balanced way. At smaller, individually-owned places, you may not always be able to eat properly but in most instances, those are the places at which you're likely to get questions about what's in the food answered.

=R=