How to Track Your Macros When You’re Eating Out

Tracking macros is a perfect way to manage your diet; until you can’t. Tracking relies on accuracy, but what do you do when you’re at a café and all of a sudden you can’t figure out the macro breakdown of your food?

Well, you can either ask the waiter to weigh your cheeseburger and hope he knows the macros, or you can read through this article and let me show you exactly how to track your macros as accurately as possible — while eating out at any restaurant you want.

Should You Even Be Tracking Macros…?

Newbie or seasoned gym-goer, guy or girl, young or old — it doesn’t matter, everyone will benefit from tracking their macros.

If you’re currently tracking, this is Step 0. But I’m going to assume you are, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now.
However, if you’re not tracking yet, go and check out this article here to learn why it’s something you’ll want to start doing; and download our free Nutrition for Weight Loss Guide here if you’d like more info on setting up your unique macro split.

I’m Smashing My Diet, Until….

Everyone who’s ever started a deficit has been in this position before…it’s all going perfect, until the weekend hits and something comes up.
Maybe it’s the work social event, birthday party, or date night with your partner. The point is, things will come up that force your diet strategy to pivot, and this tests your ability to stay on point with your macros.

This is exactly why flexible dieting exists.
It’s a way for us to understand how to stack the Lego Bricks of our nutrition and make things fit into our diet that might not normally be there.
Even if they’re “unhealthy” foods, you can make them fit because every single thing we eat has a caloric value and macro profile — we just need to manage them better.

In fact, between food labels, calorie counting apps, and kilojoule numbers on menus, managing our nutrition has never been more accessible.
The hard part comes when you don’t have access to those labels and the meal we’ve ordered isn’t sitting in your MyFitnessPal, pre-loaded & ready to be tracked.

Nothing used to give me more diet anxiety than being invited to someone’s house for dinner. I used to sit there surrounded by people having a great time, but all I’d think about was how the f*** I was going to track the food.
Sure, you can see what the base of your meal is, and what most of the ingredients are, but when it comes to oils, sugars, and other additives — there’s a lot more going on under the surface.
But that doesn’t mean you have to avoid eating out.

Like I said earlier, events like that are going to happen and you just need to accept that tracking perfectly is going to be impossible. It is what it is, and one day off won’t cancel out weeks of consistency, so you don’t need to add stress to your life worrying about it.

But this brings me to the main point of this article…

Perfect Tracking Doesn’t Exist — Close Enough is Good Enough:

Even if you enter every gram of food into your tracking app, it’s still just a really good estimate of what you’re consuming — meaning even if you’re 100% perfect & hit your targets every day, you’re still probably not eating exactly that amount.

Macro tracking is not an exact science; at best, it’s making educated guesses based on data to get as close to accurate as we can.

How do we know this? Well, for starters, food labels on most supermarket products have a roughly 25% margin of error in Australia. This means that under the “Explanatory Notes for the Use of the Nutrition Panel Calculator (NPC)” by the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, food producers are legally allowed to be off by 25% and still be considered compliant with food standards.

Insane, right? That means that if you’re eating some that says 250 calories on the nutrition panel, it could be anywhere between 200 & 300 calories.

If you eat a lot of packaged foods and rely on the nutrition label to track your total caloric intake, then you might be stacking the margin of error over the day and could end up over by a few hundred calories without even realizing it.

This is where most Coaches would say “just base your diet off whole foods that aren’t packaged”, which makes complete sense.
However, that doesn’t mean that these unpackaged foods are accurate either.

Take a chicken breast for example. An “average” serving size of around 115g gives us roughly 120 calories, with about 25g of protein.
But if you look it up in your app, you’ll see a bunch of entries ranging from 100–180 calories with 20–30g of protein.

So what’s the right entry? Your best bet is to find the average amongst them all, because not every chicken is the same size or lived the same life. Like humans, every chicken had its unique amount of fat & muscle, ate slightly different feed diets, and hydrated differently, meaning that finding the perfect measure is next to impossible.

At the end of the day, the point is simple; calories and macros are never perfect. They will always be measured in the most accurate amount we can access and because of this, it’s the easiest way to get as close to ideal as possible.
This is why flexible dieting is a great system; it’s NOT just a way to squeeze treats into your diet, but rather it’s a method that focuses on average ranges, not absolute perfection.

If You’re Not Sure, Aim Higher:

If you’re eating at a restaurant, it’s a safe bet that the chef is going to be a bit enthusiastic with the oil & butter for the sake of flavour.
So it’s a safe bet to assume that your food has a little more fat than usual.

Even if you overestimate and track a little more fat, it’s probably going to balance out over the day. It’s better to be safe and assume some extra calories are sneaking in rather than aiming for total accuracy.

To make life a little easier, I’ve added some ways I’d recommend rounding up with some restaurant staples:

For Roasted, Pan-Fried, or Pan Cooked Food: Add 1 tsp of Olive Oil per item (roughly 5g of added fat). For example, if you have 2 pieces of chicken on your plate, add 2 tsp of oil.

Rice, Pasta & Grains: Round up by 1/4 cup (so 1 cup should be 1.25 cups in your app).

Bread: Find the type (it’ll be on the menu) and add by number of slices, or close enough.

Steak, Fish, Burger Patties & Proteins: Guess by grams, then add 25–50g depending on the size. In the case of steaks, most restaurants will have these measurements on the menu (owners love to humble-brag on the size of their cuts).

Starchy Carbs: MyFitnessPal lists a generic Roast Potato as Small, Medium, or Large. Go one size up just to be safe.

Vegetables: Besides starches, most vegetables are relatively low calorie and won’t have a major effect on your caloric total for the day. For quick reference, 1 cup is roughly the size of your palm, so you can use this as a guide for measuring your veggies.

If They Have Their Menu Online, Look It Up & Track it Early:

Most fast-food places nowadays have their nutrition info available on their website. Restaurants like Grill’d, Guzman y Gomez, Soul Origin, Subway, etc. have this info available online. Even McDonald’s & KFC have most of their menu items loaded into MyFitnessPal already.

This doesn’t mean you’re not still making an educated guess, but it is going to make you even closer and most of the time allows you to track without worrying about rounding up.
If the menu online doesn’t show you specifics, refer back to our round-ups.

For these reasons, I always recommend my clients look up the restaurant menu online if they can before going out to eat. It might take you a few minutes now, but it’ll save you a lot of stress when choosing what to order & make it a lot easier to keep your macros closer to target.

If You Know That You’re Going Out, Plan Your Diet-Day Early:

Once you’ve searched the menu and figured out what you’re ordering, you can plan out the rest of your day around that meal. This will allow you to order what you want without compromising your consistency or blowing out your calorie total for the day.

The biggest challenge macro-trackers face when eating out is waiting until they’re sitting in the restaurant to figure out what to order.
This usually ends one of three ways:

A) Not eating much at all (or eating nothing) and leaving hungrier than before,
B) Being that annoying customer asking to chop & change the menu item so it’s more “calorie friendly”, or…
C) Saying “f*** it” and blowing out their calories because they haven’t planned for a bigger meal.

If you’ve found yourself in one of these situations before, chances are the idea of eating out either makes you feel awkward and anxious, or you’re saying f*** it way too often and it’s affecting your results.
This is where you can choose to start planning ahead so you enjoy your social events and still achieve successful weight loss.

Starting your daily tracking by entering this meal first and working backward leaves room for tweaks during the day to allow for more calories & macros (especially fats), so you’re able to enjoy your food without regressing your results.

How to Make Ordering Macro-Friendly Meals at Restaurants Easier:

I’ve added a few more tips that you can apply right now to your diet; so you can head out this weekend without stressing about how to manage your macros:

• When ordering anything with sauce, butter, or dressing, ask for it on the side. This allows you to control how much you add to your meals.
• For proteins, ask what cuts the restaurant uses. For example, when it comes to chicken, the caloric difference between chicken breast & chicken thigh is bigger than you think, and this can ramp up your total calories without you realising it.
• Order menu items that are easier to track. The fewer ingredients a meal has, the easier it’ll be to break it down and track it all.
• Use the round-up method. Guesstimating at portion sizes, especially specific measurements, takes practice and is never exactly right. Refer back to the list we added earlier and round up just slightly where needed.
• Limit how often you eat out. Flexible dieting gives you the space to eat out and still make great progress with your goals, but if you’re eating every day it’ll make staying adherent to your diet a lot harder.
  Keep it to once or twice a week and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and stress dieting.