How to Eat Well in a Fast Food Restaurant

Find yourself stuck in a fast food restaurant sometimes, due to necessity, long road trips, nights out with friends, or for whatever reason?

Wondering how to eat well, even in these places? No problem — check out these ways to eat super-healthy at just about any chain.

You Can’t.

Sorry! It’s pretty much impossible to eat well at practically any fast food restaurant you go to. Want to try a light option? Most likely it’s full of salt — which won’t up the calorie or fat content so much — and therefore isn’t fantastic for you anyway. Sure, you can order some fruit or some kind of strange, dressing-free salad, but these are things you’re much better off buying at a grocery store, in advance, and just taking with you. It’s cheaper and you have way more choice.

It’s really not in the interest of a fast food restaurant to have you eating well — it’s not really cost-effective to prepare healthy, good food quickly and at a super-low cost, so if you’re looking to eat well — and you should — try writing off fast food restaurants all together.

You Don’t Want To Anyway.

Part of the reason we like fast food so much is because a perfect specimen (take a Chicken McNugget or a McDonald’s French Fry) hits a bunch of crazy receptors in our brain that give us a lot of pleasure. There’s a perfect combination of salt, fat, and sweetness — created through some insane-genius chemical flavoring at a lab somewhere — that makes us satisfied (albeit temporarily) right from the first bite.

So if you’re trying to eat healthy while also eating fast food, you’re denying the whole point of why some of us enjoy fast food in the first place — the things that make it bad for us also make it taste (in a pretty strange, almost chemical way) delicious.

Ignore All the Marketing.

If you go into a lot of fast food restaurants you might see some vain attempts at dressing up an otherwise unhealthy ingredient with some clever marketing words in order to make it seem more real, authentic, or good for you. Some examples:

• American Cheese: any cheese made in America can be called American cheese. It means nothing, pretty much!
• Made With Ingredient ‘X’: This could be anything from “ice cream” to “real milk”. It doesn’t mean much, because you can make poison “with” a real, good, ingredient, too. Until that word “with” changes to “entirely from,” it’s just a trick to get you to ignore the unhealthiness of what you’re eating.
• No Trans Fats: Any time one ingredient is highlighted as not existing in whatever fast food item you’re about to buy, you can bet another ingredient has been injected in in order to maintain the taste and consistency. No trans fats? There’s probably something else in there that’s bad for you, then. Think about the big picture.

Plan Ahead and Save Yourself the Stress.

If you’re going on a road trip and know there might be a chance you’ll have to stop for fast food along the way, make a 30-minute diversionary stop at somewhere in your city before you go.

Try an Italian deli — have them make up 5 sandwiches with good bread and good things inside them. Sure, a bun with some prosciutto and olive oil isn’t the best thing in the world for you, but compared to a big mac? You’re laughing.

And stock up on other things full of fat and calories — and lots of other good stuff — like nuts, and dried fruit. I don’t want to suggest you should eat 500 cashews the next time you drive a few hours, but having a bag of trail mix around is a lot better than 6 chicken mcnuggets, and will hit some of those same brain receptors, anyway.