Why It Seems Normal: Eating Out

When I was in high school, I worked at Wendy’s.  When I was in college, I waitressed at a steakhouse.  I saw a constant stream of people eating hamburgers, fried chicken, French fries, steaks, ribs, “Texas-sized” plates of yummy food.  Eating out seems very normal to me.  Doesn’t everyone eat out every day? What? No?  Huh. Weird.

And then there’s the Gilmore Girls.  Gilmore Girls is a fun TV show featuring a mother-daughter relationship.  These two beautiful, skinny women are portrayed as eating out every day and lacking basic cooking skills.  They eat pop tarts for breakfast and frequent the local diner.  Eventually the writers acknowledge this impossibility by having other characters commenting “how can anyone eat like that”, “they should be 500 pounds”, and “they must have incredible metabolism”.  There is also an odd dynamic with the diner owner, who chooses a very healthy diet for himself, but serves his costumers typical diner food.  He often tries to discourage the Gilmores from ordering hamburgers, French fries and other unhealthy food on his menu.

Not that the writers of Gilmore Girls are alone.  The media bombards us with food.  Movies and TV shows of skinny-mini people on the go, whose “important” lives do not leave them time to eat healthy.  Commercials for restaurants serving every yummy food imaginable.  But then they tell us we are only beautiful if we are a size 2 dress.  No wonder so many of us have issues with food and body image.  All I can say is Praise God for the Biggest Loser.  It’s about time someone addressed these issues so boldly. But that’s a topic for another night.

Because eating out was so normal to me, imagine my surprise when I found out that a regular size combo at all of my favorite fast food places contains an entire day’s worth of calories and fat.  And my favorite DQ Medium Blizzard is almost an entire day’s worth of calories and fat all by itself.  Crazy. That is Crazy.  Needless to say, I have had to realize that eating out should not be a regular part of my diet.

*Note: I have not given up fast food and Blizzards entirely.  We seems to go through phases where we eat out a lot and then phases where we don't eat out much.  It's one of my harder issue, both from a healthy diet view and also from a financial aspect.