I eat out a few times a week, often at taco trucks or local restaurants, and for a long time those meals were the part of tracking I dreaded the most. Now I'm quite carefree with my tracking. It's because I stopped expecting restaurant food to be logged perfectly. It never will be. So this is how I get the best possible estimation so I can stay on track.
Do restaurants have to list calories?
Some of them do. In the US, chains with 20+ locations have to put calories on their menus and keep detailed nutrition information available, so if you're at a chain the numbers have to exist somewhere. Local restaurants usually don't have anything (no menu calories, no nutrition page), and that's most of where I eat. These situations have to be handled slightly differently.
Eating at a chain
When eating at a chain restaurant, go to the official site. Not a random database entry that somebody typed in six or seven years ago, but the actual official page, because it's the closest you'll get to the real number.
Once I find it I either type the info in as context or I screenshot their nutrition page and upload the picture. The app reads the calories, macros and ingredients from the screenshot and compiles it into my log. If I want the calories and macros to match the restaurant's numbers exactly, I use "Estimate" mode. If I'd rather have it split up into individual ingredients, I use the default "Ingredients" mode.
I remember I typed "10 bk chicken nuggets" into the app, just to see, and it came back around 500 calories. When I saw that, I thought that couldn't be right.
But when I checked Burger King's site, it was.
Though, even chain numbers aren't one fixed value. Depending on which version of the menu or which database you're looking at, that same 10 piece can vary, since recipes change. That's the whole reason I'd take the official site over a database entry. They are most likely to have the latest information.
Eating at a local restaurant
This is where most people give up, and where streaks fail and consistency stumbles.
Instead of aiming for perfection, I trust the app to estimate it for me. I take a photo and only add context if something's hidden or if I know something it can't see (sauce on the side, cheese under everything, I only ate half, etc). Otherwise I just let it do its thing and review the ingredients after to make sure the main calorically dense ones are there. It shows what it detected and how much, so I can see what it got right and swap out whatever it didn't. Most of the time I don't have to touch anything. If it's a meal I really care about getting right though, I'll fix it.
The hardest thing for me to log is food truck tacos. There are a lot of toppings piled on and the fillings kind of hide each other, so even with years of estimating I have a good guess there and not much more than that. I usually get 4 chicken or al pastor tacos, which come on double corn tortillas (very greasy) with a ton of toppings. The main calorically dense parts are the tortillas, the oil the cook used, and the meat, disregarding the sides. The AI usually catches all of those for me. But since it's a regular enough order, I have a custom entry I told the AI to revise based on minor details it missed, like the double wrapping it couldn't see.
How do you estimate restaurant portions?
Portion size is very difficult to estimate without a scale in general, and oftentimes it's really a size problem and not a food problem. A medium fry at one place can be a totally different weight of fried potato than a medium fry somewhere else. Same with milkshakes and dozens of other typical foods. The size name tells you (almost) nothing.
When I've gone back and checked my logs I'm usually within a hundred calories or so, and when I'm off it's almost always because I got the size of something wrong, not the food itself. In fact, a big reason I'm reaching my goals faster than the app predicts is because I don't track my exercise calories burned. I explain why I don't log my exercise in another post.
Some things that help:
- Count what you can. Tacos, nuggets, slices, wings. A count beats guessing volume every time.
- Don't trust size names across restaurants. "Medium" isn't a unit of measurement. If you have no other choice or you'll accept a wider margin for error, it's fine, just know the error you're risking.
- Mention the hidden ingredients, ie sauces, cheese, anything cooked in butter or oil you can't see in the photo.
- Check the ingredient breakdown and not just the total. If the ingredients look right, the total usually is too.
You're probably estimating low
This one surprised me. Even when I'm consciously trying to _over_estimate a restaurant meal to make up for my own bias, I still end up under, despite weighing and tracking food for years. I eyeball pretty well. I still lowball restaurant food when I estimate it myself, which is part of why I trust the app's estimate as much as I would mine for meals I didn't cook. It's not perfect, it just doesn't have my bias.
Don't plan around it, and don't skip it
I don't plan restaurant meals ahead of time and I don't skip logging them. I sit down, pick whatever I want most on the menu that still roughly fits my macros for the day, and that's pretty much it.
I'm fairly carefree with logging nowadays and I still hit my goals. What actually ruins tracking isn't a restaurant meal being a little off, it's deciding the whole day doesn't count because you couldn't log something perfectly. I wrote more about that perfectionism trap too.
An estimated log is still a log. Skipping it gives you nothing except potentially breaking the habit.
Micros first, then macros
I'll admit this is probably where I'm a little different. I care more about hitting my micronutrients than about my exact macro split. I still pay attention to macros, but if I'm low on vitamin A, C or E by the end of the day that bugs me way more than being slightly off on carbs.
Eating out makes it easy to lose track of that, so I check at night. It's usually an easy fix since I keep milk, oranges and fruit juice in the house (plus a vitamin E supplement). I eat mostly unprocessed food but I don't stress about it when I don't. I feel like stress is deadlier than the occasional processed food anyway.
This is just what works for me. The point is a restaurant meal doesn't wreck your day if you know what the rest of the day needs.
TLDR
For chain restaurants, use the official nutrition page, and screenshot it into your log if your app can also read it. For local places, take a photo, add context only for what's hidden, and check the breakdown. Count items when you can and don't trust size names. Assume you're estimating low, because you probably are. And log it anyway, every time.
Eating out a few times a week hasn't stopped me from reaching my goals. It won't stop you either.