Is Fat Our Fault?

All dishes aren’t created equal, especially when you compare the chicken dish you make at home with the one served at your favorite restaurant.

Even the healthiest restaurant meals are booby-trapped with calorie-laden oils, butter, sodium and sugars, says Dr. Caroline Cederquist, a Naples, Fla.-based weight-management specialist.

“That’s why we get into trouble,” Cederquist says. “We when order no sauce or even a baked chicken breast, it comes with olive oil or has been marinated in something a lot richer than you would make at home.”

So while you can slough off some of the blame for our national overweight epidemic, we can do something about it, Cederquist says.

Watch portion sizes when eating out: “Even if someone gets a plate of food and only eats half, that serving is probably four times the regular serving,” says Cederquist, who urges diners to eat even less, stop when full and take home a doggie bag if necessary.

Watch portion sizes when ordering in: “People will judge how much to eat not on how full they are but on the size of the container.”

For example, we may think only eating half a large order of Chinese shrimp fried rice is exercising control. But because that order was an “astronomical” portion in the first place, only eating some of it still may be way over the suggested portion size of rice, which, by the way, is a half cup.

Watch portion sizes when eating in: “We get very used to seeing two chicken breasts and a huge mountain of pasta as being a dish,” she says. “When we eat out often, we end up creating the same portion sizes as well.”

Alleviate portion distortion by relearning what real servings should be, Cederquist says. Because we’re no longer an agrarian society, we’re not doing as much to work off big meals, so we’ve got to cool it.

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