It turns out that there are at least a couple of options that might not be exactly low-calorie, but they're not going to bust the diet. I promised aaages ago that I would post in more detail about how we got on at TGIs. Flu intervened and I haven't blogged for more than a week, but John has been blogging away while I've been coughing away...
Anyway, on Monday 25th October we went to TGIs in Glasgow for a friend's birthday. None of the menus online or in the restaurant had any calorie information at all, and the restaurant manager didn't have any details either. So we just tried to play safe - and found it is just possible to eat without busting the diet at TGIs, although the choice was rather limited.
I chose a steak with no sauce, a house salad with dressing on the side, and fries. John chose the grilled chicken in Jack Daniels glaze with cheesey mash and seasoned veg.
The seasoned veg seemed to have butter on them, so I think those and the cheesey mash were probably quite high-fat options. The chicken seemed quite reasonable, as it only had a little glaze on it, and the rest was served on the side.
The steak was 21 days matured, tender and flavoursome and was great without a sauce. The salad was amazing. Just fresh greens, peppers and tomatoes with a little pot of vinaigrette on the side. I ate it without dressing as it really didn't need it - it was the freshest tastiest restaurant salad I can remember having ever.
Now I did try and look up calorie values for all these things on myfitnesspal and Sparkpeople, but this is where these kind of crowdsourced apps fall down. There was such a jumble of conflicting information that it really wasn't helpful. According to myfitnesspal, the salad was 265 calories and the fries 150, which doesn't seem right as that salad couldn't have had more than 30 cals without dressing. And although the fries were a reasonably small portion, they must have had more than 150 cals. I allowed 250 in my tracker.
We must have chosen wisely because we both lost that week - I lost two pounds and John, four.
On the Tuesday, I emailed TGIs head office to see if they could shed any light on the calories. Unsurprisingly they couldn't, which is sad, especially since most other large chains manage it fine. Now, I don't know if I'm being a bit paranoid here, but there was one line in the reply I got that seemed to be an ignorant assumption about my choices:
"we would encourage all our customers to make choices that best suit them, for example swapping fries for Salad or Vegetables, not having a sauce or cheese and so on"
Well, I did choose a salad - and sometimes, a restaurant portion of fries can be a better choice than glazed vegetables or cheesey mash which could have been hiding any amount of butter and fat. For example, a small portion of McDonald's fries is 230 cals. But, if TGIs had been able to tell me the calorie counts for their menus, I would have known for sure, wouldn't I?
Next post: the 'fat tax' - the Government is proposing to add a 'fat tax' to high-fat and high-sugar foods. Me and John seem to be in disagreement about whether this is a good idea. Let us know what you think in the comments!
There are plenty of extremely cheap foods that people without very much money ignore in favour of unhealthy processed options instead. A fax tax will do nothing but mean the active who eat high calorie foods pay for the inactive who eat high calorie foods when they get ill. That doesn't seem a positive towards becoming active, and being active, rather than careful with diet, is the most important factor in losing weight in the long term
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