Yes, You Can Eat Out and Still Lose Weight — Here's How

When you're trying to lose weight, you may feel like you have to give up all the fun things in your social life in order to meet your goals: happy hours, birthday parties, and dining out are all filled with temptations and opportunities to slip up. Fortunately, fat-loss coach Carter Good explains the four easy steps to eating out and still losing weight.

The steps include:

  • Step 1: Find your meal ahead of time, whether that's looking up the restaurant menu online or finding it in your tracker app.
  • Step 2: Plan to order what you want, but just be reasonable. After all, you don't want to deprive yourself and end up making poor choices later.
  • Step 3: Make your other meals fit. Be sure to budget your calories for this meal and plan accordingly for your other meals for the day.
  • Step 4: You won't be perfect and that's OK! Try to be as accurate as you can with your planning and tracking, but if you go over a little, don't stress about it.

"Your diet plan should never, EVER take away from living life & spending time with others," Carter wrote in his caption. "See, many-a-folk get so obsessed with their weight loss goals that they end up isolating themselves or avoiding social events." Instead, he recommends people follow his four-step plan and enjoy themselves while they're out.

Some other tips for eating out include watching your portion sizes. Restaurant portions tend to be huge, so plan on taking half your meal to go or split it with a friend. You can also order a salad to start or a side of veggies to load up on nutrient-rich, low-calorie vegetables, which will make you feel full faster.