Don't be fooled

If you’re looking to eat healthfully at your favorite restaurant, don’t automatically turn to the salad menu. Turns out, restaurant salads can often be as bad as—or worse than—any burger or steak on the menu. Sure, salads may contain a fresh produce base, but those leafy greens are too often weighed down with cheese, deep fried croutons, and high-calorie dressings. In fact, one salad from a popular chain restaurant contains over 1,500 calories! Surprised?

Quizno’s Honey Mustard Chicken Regular Chopped Salad
920 calories 65 g fat (20 g saturated, 0.5 g trans)
1,685 mg sodium

The secret to this salad’s salacious calorie count is in the sauce. A general rule of thumb when you eat at Quizno’s: Serving sizes are often not what they seem. This “Regular Chopped Salad” accounts for nearly half your day’s caloric allotment. Even most of the small chopped salads pack over 500 calories. Unless you order the Pan Asian small, consider a salad at Quizno’s a meal unto itself, not a side dish.

Chili’s Quesadilla Explosion Salad
1,400 calories
88 g fat (26 g saturated)
2,370 mg sodium

This salad is explosive all right. Here’s a tip: At most Mexican restaurants, the salads are actually the absolute worst items on the menu. For example, with burritos and tacos, the amount of high-fat, high-calorie fillers is limited to what will fit in the shells. But there’s no built-in portion control with salads. So it’s no surprise that this Quesadilla Explosion Salad contains a full day’s worth of salt and nearly three-quarters of your day’s calories (it’s the caloric equivalent of 172 Cheetos, in fact). Unfortunately, Chili’s offers only three salads with less than 500 calories. Stick with the Guiltless Grill options, or the salad mentioned below.

Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad with Oriental Vinaigrette
1,430 calories

This salad starts out with a bed of “Fresh Asian greens,” according to the menu. Unfortunately, these greens serve as a bed for deep-fried chicken tenders and carbohydrate-heavy crispy noodles. Without dressing, this dish rings in at 840 calories—already more than in an Applebee’s hamburger. But factor in the super-heavy dressing and you’re adding another 590 calories to the mix. To put that in perspective, a lunch sandwich shouldn’t pack more than 500 calories, tops. At Applebee’s, the only salad that won’t sink your entire meal is the Paradise Chicken Salad, which cuts back on calories by using grilled chicken instead of fried and actual produce instead of noodles. (Note: Applebee's refuses to disclose their nutrition information, so you just might be consuming days' worth of sodium as well!)

Cheesecake Factory Caesar Salad with Chicken
1,513 calories
16 g saturated fat
1,481 mg sodium
23 g carbohydrates

The top three words you never want to see sharing a space with “salad” on a menu: tuna, taco, and yes, the mighty Caesar. Consider that tangle of romaine a hapless vehicle for the troubling trinity of croutons, Parmesan cheese, and viscous Caesar dressing. This Cheesecake Factory version is the worst; the elephantine portion yields a salad with more calories than 10 Twinkies! If you’re looking for a salad meal at Cheesecake Factory, choose from the Weight Management varieties—every other salad tops 500 calories.

California Pizza Kitchen Waldorf Chicken Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing (full)
1,570 calories
30 g saturated fat
2,082 mg sodium

CPK is no stranger to the title of “Worst Salad in America”—in fact, last year’s Thai Crunch Salad from California Pizza Kitchen won this dubious distinction for having over 2,000 calories. CPK has since downgraded the Asian-inspired leafy disaster (to a more modest 1,399 calories). Unfortunately, the rest of their salad lineup is still sorely lacking in smart options. This Waldorf Chicken Salad takes the title this year—the blue cheese dressing certainly doesn’t help, and neither does the oversized plate this salad is served on. Believe it or not, your best bet at CPK is to order two slices of thin-crust pizza with any toppings you want. But if you’re set on a salad, choose a half-size of the Moroccan Chicken, below.

Fast Food Secrets You Should Know

Before you mindlessly chew your way through another value meal, take these mini-mysteries (conveniently solved below) into account. Sometimes the truth is tough to swallow.

What’s in a Chicken McNugget?

You’d think that a breaded lump of chicken would be pretty simple. Mostly, it would contain bread and chicken. But the McNugget and its peers at other fast-food restaurants are much more complicated creatures than that. The “meat” in the McNugget alone contains seven ingredients, some of which are made up of yet more ingredients. (Nope, it’s not just chicken. It’s also such nonchicken-related stuff as water, wheat starch, dextrose, safflower oil, and sodium phosphates.) The “meat” also contains something called “autolyzed yeast extract.” Then add another 20 ingredients that make up the breading, and you have the industrial chemical—I mean, fast-food meal—called the McNugget. Still, McDonald’s is practically all-natural compared to Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets, with 30 ingredients, and Burger King Chicken Fries, with a whopping 35 ingredients.

What’s in a Wendy’s Frosty?

Wendy’s Frosty requires 14 ingredients to create what traditional shakes achieve with only milk and ice cream. So what accounts for the double-digit ingredient list? Mostly a barrage of thickening agents that includes guar gum, cellulose gum, and carrageenan. And while that’s enough to disqualify it as a milk shake in our book, it’s nothing compared to the chemist’s list of ingredients in the restaurant’s new line of bulked-up Frankenfrosties.

Check out the Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty, for instance. It seems harmless enough; the only additions, after all, are “coffee syrup” and “coffee toffee pieces.” The problem is that those two additions collectively ­contain 25 extra ingredients, seven of which are sugars and three of which are oils. And get this: Rather than a classic syrup, the “coffee syrup” would more accurately be described as a blend of water, high-fructose corn syrup, and propylene glycol, a laxative chemical that’s used as an emulsifier in food and a filler in electronic cigarettes. Of all 10 ingredients it takes to make the syrup, coffee doesn’t show up until near the end, eight items down the list.

What’s in a Filet-O-Fish?

The world’s most famous fish sandwich begins as one of the ocean’s ugliest creatures. Filet-O-Fish, like many of the fish patties used by fast-food chains, is made predominantly from hoki, a gnarly, crazy-eyed fish found in the cold waters off the coast of New Zealand. In the past, McDonald’s has purchased up to 15 million pounds of hoki a year, each flaky fillet destined for a coat of batter, a bath of oil, a squirt of tartar, and a final resting place in a warm, squishy bun. But it seems the world’s appetite for this and other fried-fish sandwiches has proven too voracious, as New Zealand has been forced to cut the allowable catch over the years in order to keep the hoki population from collapsing. Don’t expect McDonald’s to scale down Filet-O-Fish output anytime soon, though; other whitefish like Alaskan pollock will likely fill in the gaps left by the hoki downturn. After all, once it’s battered and fried, do you really think you’ll know the difference?

Ready, Set, Lose Weight

Losing weight — and keeping it off for good — requires both physical and mental preparation. You need to determine a weight-loss plan that you are able to stick with for the long haul. It's not easy, but there are steps you can take to stay motivated.

10 Ways to Get Psyched for Weight Loss

1. Commit. The first step is making a commitment to yourself. Make a commitment and then share that commitment with somebody else. This will make you more accountable to your diet, exercise plan, and weight-loss goals.
   
2. Make a plan. Think about you as a person, as a whole being, and come up with a plan that's going to be best for you. It should be a program that will help you lose weight, but also be easy to stick to. This goes for both diet and exercise.
   
3. Don't wait for the "right time." At one time or another, everyone has determined what they think is the perfect time to start a diet — after the holidays, after vacation, after tomorrow. Now is as good as any.
   
4. Get in the right mindset. Don't fall into an "all-or-nothing" way of thinking. You don't have to give up all decadent foods or exercise strenuously every day of the week. It's about small changes in your lifestyle that you can stick with and that will brings results overtime.
   
5. Be realistic. Think about how your life is right now, and what you can realistically achieve in terms of an exercise and eating plan. That means considering all aspects of your life, including work and family responsibilities. "If you will be traveling for business over the next two months, you probably need to think of a plan to eat in healthy restaurants instead of a stringent plan you would always need to modify.
   
6. Make time for exercise. Fitness is a key component of losing and keeping off weight. It's important to create an exercise plan that's realistic according to your schedule. Think about how much time you're going to have for exercise. Anything that gets you moving in the right direction is a good start. Decide to make physical activity part of every day. All those extra steps add up to pounds lost, and it's even easier when they're steps that you don't really consider exercise — like a walk during lunch hour or hiking in a park on the weekend.
   
7. Figure out what motivates you. Ask yourself questions to figure out what will help you meet your weight-loss goals. For example, "Do you need a workout buddy? A reward at certain goals? How can you incorporate healthy foods that you enjoy? What types of activity don't feel like work to you?" These answers will help you formulate a plan that you can stick with.
   
8. Don't think diet, think life change. Preparing to lose weight isn't about starting a diet, it's about "starting to make healthy adjustments that you're going to fit into your life. Being "on a diet" implies that it will end. To maintain a healthy weight, the diet and exercise changes you make in your life should be permanent.
   
9. Create a network for weight loss. "There's a social network that begins to develop as you start to attend fitness classes. Taking a yoga, aerobics, spinning, or kickboxing class gives you support. Make friends at the gym, or visit online community groups to find individuals with similar weight-loss goals. Not only will losing weight be more fun, but it will also be more effective.
   
10. Use outside resources. There is a wealth of information on the net, do some surfing.
    

It's not about preparing for a diet, but changing your life so that you don't need to diet. Eventually making healthy food choices and getting regular exercise will become a part of your day you don't even have to think about!