Managing Your Social Life and Fitness Goals

This is by far and away the single biggest area I deal with when it comes to weight loss goals or generally improving the quality of my client’s diet. While most of us are aware that eating out in restaurants and frequently drinking alcohol are not particularly conducive with a healthy diet, the calorie content of these areas tends to still be under-appreciated. Here's the context:

Restaurants

When eating in a restaurant, main dishes are likely to be between 800-1200kcal, with salads and lighter options closer to 800kcal and pizza, pasta and bread based dishes 1000kcal+.

In addition, most starters will typically be between 400-500kcal, side dishes are similar and desserts will likely add 600kcal+. This is all before taking into account any additional wine at 120kcal per glass or pints of beer at 200kcal per pint.

With all this in mind even just having a main dish, side and a couple of drinks will easily exceed 1500kcal per meal. For most people a meal in the region of between 500-700kcal is a sensible amount for dinner. This restaurant visit has at least doubled if not tripled this intake.

Drinks

Even when not eating out, alcoholic drinks can really add up. If you’re out on a Thursday with work drinks and seeing friends at the weekend, just three glasses of wine on both occasions is adding around 750kcal to your week. Obviously weekends that may become more excessive can really start to rack this figure up.

The Problem

Adding everything together, a week containing two meals out and a third night just having a few drinks is easily enough to add around 3500kcal to your week. This volume of calorie intake is likely to result in one of three things:

1. Weight gain

Adding this volume of calories on top of your regular intake is very likely to result in weight gain. We’re quite used to experiencing this around times of the year when socialising increases (AKA Christmas). However many of us may also have experienced this throughout the lockdown with the frequency and quantity of takeaways and alcohol also increasing.

2. Prevention of weight loss

Even if you’re making the necessary changes to your day to day diet to create the conditions for weight loss, this volume of calorie intake is sufficient to offset those reductions elsewhere in the week. While you’re not gaining weight, your 2-3 days of socialising is sabotaging your other 4-5 days of solid nutrition.

3. Poor diet quality

Tied to the point above, if you are somehow able to avoid weight gain by decreasing calories elsewhere in your diet or increasing activity level to offset these excessive intakes, you’re likely to be left with a poor quality diet. While the calorie intake may be okay for maintaining weight, the majority of your diet will be coming from restaurant food and alcohol. This tends to be far lower nutrient quality compared to meals prepared at home, leaving you open to lower intakes of essential fats, vitamins, minerals and protein. None of this is great news for fuelling workouts, recovery or general health!

Solutions

When it comes to managing your social life alongside a sensible nutrition plan we can look at three interventions: frequency, quantity and type!

Frequency: this is the most straightforward. If you’re currently eating out two or more times a week, a great start is dropping this to once. While this isn’t always easy, it can be a good exercise to assess your social commitments at the start of the week and decide which one is most important to you. Just saying ‘yes’ to everything is often a good way of keeping everyone else happy, but your own goals are left unmet at the end of the week. 

Example: dropping from two meals out a week to one can save you around 1500kcal!

Quantity: when out in a restaurant consider what you’re ordering. While starters, mains and sides will easily take a meal to 1500-2000kcal, sticking to a sensible main dish and one glass of alcohol keeps your meal to around 1000kcal. While this may not be ideal it does still mean you can attend the event, socialise with your friends and have an enjoyable meal. This is a much more sustainable solution than trying to stop eating out completely.

Example: swapping a starter, side and main with two wines to just a main dish and one wine at two meals out a week saves around 2000kcal across the week. 

Type: this one applies particularly to alcohol. A typical glass of wine is around 120kcal, a pint of beer around 200kcal, while a gin and slimline tonic is only 57kcal. This is also true for any clear spirit and calorie free mixer such as vodka diet coke. This is very useful for an evening that may contain 4-5 drinks or more in which swapping from pints to gin and slim will save around 750kcal!

Example: swapping 7 glasses of wine a week to 7 gin and slims saves 440kcal.

Putting it all together:

Of course, not all of these interventions are going to be suitable for everyone. Many jobs involve entertaining clients or attending social events. In this instance frequency may not be a viable option. In this case, leaning more into quantity and type may make more sense.

Equally, if you’d rather keep a big night with the girls once a month you can probably go to town on the quantity and type knowing that the frequency is low enough to offset any long term setback.

For most people, a combination of all three is sometimes the best option!

Example:

Before: two meals out having a starter, side, main and two wines, plus one night office drinks having three wines. Total ~ 5000kcal

After: one meal out having a main dish and one wine, plus one night out having two gin and slims. Total ~ 1200kcal

This is a hugely significant saving of over 3500kcal a week. For most people this would be the single variable required in order to kick-start weight loss, prevent weight gain or significantly improve the nutrient quality of their diet.