We Underestimate Fast Food Calories By 20%

You’re on a tightly calorie controlled diet – what’s known as a macronutrient-based eating plan, flexible dieting, or IIFYM – If It Fits Your Macros. These diets are great for allowing you flexibility in your food choices, as they don’t have set rules.

When you’re cooking for yourself and have access to kitchen scales and can control exactly what goes into your meals, counting calories is incredibly easy: Weigh everything out, plug it into your calorie tracking app or website and away you go.

You’d think that eating out wouldn’t be much more difficult.

Take a quick look at the menu, order something that sounds like it’ll fit in nicely with the rest of your day’s food and take a scan of the plate when you get it to your table. Provided you chose relatively basic ingredients and can eyeball amounts, it should be fairly easy to guesstimate the calorie content and input this into your diary when you get home.

Teens and school age children are the worst offenders – underestimating by as much as 34%, but adults don’t fare much better.

You might think this isn’t a huge issue, but as with anything, the consequences can add up.

Say you need to eat 1600 calories per day to lose one pound per week and eat what you believe to be 500 calories of fast food, three days per week. Each week, you’re actually eating three lots of 600 calories, adding 300 calories to your weekly intake.

It takes a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a pound, so going off these figures, that equates to a pound less weight loss every 12 weeks – over four pounds in a year. And that’s only eating a 500 calorie fast food meal (most typical meals are in the 1,200-1,600 bracket) and indulging just three times per week.

The calorie estimation research was carried out in New England throughout 2010 and 2011 and published in an edition of the “British Medical Journal.” One surprising aspect the researchers noted was that participants tended to underestimate calories even more at supposedly healthy fast food restaurants.

People were much further out with their calorie guesses at Subway than they were at McDonalds. It would stand to reason that the average member of the public believes that salad items are almost calorie-free, while whole-grain breads are healthy, meaning they think Subway is a much lower calorie option.

Compare a typical Subway meal of a turkey, salami and cheese footlong on wheat bread with salad and a dressing and you’re looking at at least 750 calories, and that’s without drinks, chips or cookies. A McDonalds Big Mac is only 550 calories, yet you’d believe McDonalds to be a far worse option than a “healthy” sub.

How to Avoid Underestimating Calories

Simple – overestimate

It might seem like an incredibly simplistic approach, but it’ll certainly work.

You can almost guarantee that when your food is being prepared, they’ll be more dressing, oils, butter, condiments and sugar added than you’d use yourself. A good rule of thumb is to roughly guess what you think the calorie count would be of an equivalent meal you’d make at home and add 20% to it.

Use Restaurant Guides

They might be well hidden, or kept behind the counter, but nearly all fast food joints do keep nutrition guides on the premises. They may make for grim reading, when you see just how many calories you’re eating right there in black and white, and it’s possible the data will vary to what you’re actually eating, but it will give you a much better indication than just guessing yourself.

If there aren't any nutrition guides available, check the restaurant’s website, or look for similar items from other chains. A bacon cheeseburger with fries from Burger King will be more or less the same in terms of calories, protein, carbs and fat as the same meal in McDonalds, or wherever else you go.

Order Low Calorie Options

Fast food salads are notorious for not being as healthy as you might think, but it’s still a better option to go with one of these, or a lower-fat chicken or fish burger. If you know your calorie estimate will be under by about 20 percent, then 20 percent of a 500 calorie salad is a lot better than 20 percent of a 1,500 calorie burger meal.

Make Requests

If you don’t want your meal drowning in mayo or ketchup, just ask.

Fast food restaurants may not be fine dining, but you can still ask for your order to be cooked slightly differently. When there’s mayo on a burger bun, it’s very difficult to know if there’s half a tablespoon, a whole tablespoon, or a full ladle’s-worth on there. If you ask them to hold the dressings and sauces or serve them on the side, you eliminate unnecessary calories.

Embrace Flexibility

The idea of counting calories as opposed to banning or eliminating certain foods from your diet is that it allows you to have a huge amount of flexibility in terms of eating out. Nothing is banned, provided you count it and it fits your calorie requirements for the day.

If eating fast food is only something you do once in a blue moon, then slightly underestimating your calories isn't the end of the world. While you want everything to be as accurate as possible, unless you’re preparing for a bodybuilding show or are only a few weeks away from a photo shoot, going slightly over your intake once every couple of weeks won’t harm your progress.

This isn't an excuse to recklessly disregard your calorie targets, thinking it won’t matter, but the stress you’ll cause by fretting over potentially eating an extra 100 calories will likely do your weight loss more harm than the extra food.