A tale of two take-outs; how not to eat fast food.

It's possible to eat low-carb and still have fast-food meals, but you really have to watch what you eat. Here's one example.

Boston Market, a fast-food chain owned by McDonalds, features rotisserie-grilled chicken and a couple of other meat dishes plus a selection of sides. They have some very low-carb items available - as well as many that aren't. Their chicken is so close to zero carbs as makes no difference, while their meatloaf evidently has considerable added starch. So I did a breakdown of the carb content of two meals using their own website's numbers for the content. (I've subtracted the fiber from the raw carb amounts since fiber can be ignored when watching carbs.)

Meal one: Half a rotisserie chicken with green beans and steamed vegetables, no cornbread.
Chicken: 2 grams carb
Green beans: 4 grams carb
Steamed vegetables: 5 grams carb
Total: 11 grams carb, 760 calories, 38.5 grams fat, 88 grams of protein.

Meal two: Large portion of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with beef gravy, sweet corn, no cornbread.
Meatloaf: 29 grams carb
Mashed potatoes with gravy: 36 grams carb
Sweet corn: 35 grams carb
Total: 100 grams carb, 1195 calories, 61.5 grams fat, 54 grams of protein.

Adding the cornbread (which is included with the meal automatically unless you tell them to leave it off) would boost the carb level on either of these by another 29 unneeded grams. I've left it out of both to be fair.

The meatloaf dinner has nine times the carbs of the chicken dinner in this example - in part because of the choice of side dishes. (It also has more than half again the calories, largely thanks to those very same carbs - and at 760 calories, that chicken dinner has plenty of calories already!) Okay, so what happens if you use the beans and steamed vegetables with the meatloaf? You've still got more than triple the carb that's in the chicken dinner; that's because the meatloaf is loaded with starchy fillers. And if you go the other way, and have the mashed potatoes and corn with the chicken, you get 73 grams of carbs in the meal. Any way you look at it, everything in that meatloaf dinner is bad news, and these aren't even the worst possible selections; get the meatloaf with sweet potato casserole and cinnamon apples, and throw in the cornbread, and you'll have 176 grams of carbs - enough to keep your insulin level elevated for many hours; maybe all night. That's why choosing the right food is essential.

What you eat is more important than how much.

When eating out, if you avoid the stuff that has the starches and sugars, you really can still go low-carb in many places. However, if you choose the wrong components to go with your low-carb main dish, you can lose the advantage rapidly. Having a salad? Ditch the croutons and the thickened-with-starch dressing; use oil and vinegar instead. Stare those breadsticks back under the napkin. Ask for something else instead of grits or hash browns or toast with breakfast. Disdain the beguiling bran muffin or whole-grain bagel with its 50 grams of non-fiber carbs (many are that high or higher). It won't be long before you won't miss the sweet, and you certainly won't miss the pounds that you'll shed as a result.