As I sit in my tiny college dorm room, my stomach is begging me to feed it a nutritious meal. However, this healthy eating struggle is not only relevant when I am limited to eating at dining halls or heating up Ramen noodles before class. This nutrition scarcity problem occurs all school year. But the worst had to be when family members and friends wanted to take me out to dinner over Spring Break. While this may sound like a good thing, each friend, parent, and grandparent filled up my schedule with the healthy eater’s worst nightmare: “Where do you want to go out for dinner?”
Obviously, I’m not completely against going out for dinner. In fact, I love it!
I have dreamt about feeling the heat of a freshly served sizzling fajita
platter on my face. But allowing family to take me out for both lunch and dinner
for four days straight taught me a terrible truth. Eating out is not as
satisfying as you might imagine. Although my meals were varied with everything
from fast-food, to chain restaurants, to mom-and-pop places, eventually it all
just seemed to feel like I was eating the same thing. My food started to lose
its significance as I emptied kitchens across the Long Island, New York area. I
had everything from burgers, to tacos, to Chinese, to Japanese, to German, to
both “Italian” at Olive Garden to Italian at my town pizzeria, Gino’s. Eventually
I found myself blindly staring at each menu with no idea as to what I felt like
having. I lost my appetite. My stomach needed a break.
But, why was eating out at so many restaurants making me feel so unenthusiastic
about food? Only two out of the eight restaurants I ate at I didn’t thoroughly
enjoy. But at the end of each day my stomach continued to feel as if it was
going to explode. So, I decided to look into why I felt this way a little more.
That’s where I found out the horrible truths. “As few as 3 percent” of selected
Top 400 U.S chain restaurants were, “within limits for sodium, fat and
saturated fat,” according to a 2013 study from Helen W. Wu and Roland Sturm.
“Food portions in America's restaurants have doubled or tripled over the last
20 years,” according to The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute as well.
In fact, “order an appetizer instead of an entrée, share an entrée or eat half
of a meal and bring the rest home,” is what the National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute suggests to people who are eating out.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Of course I was losing my appetite! Their higher portion sizes were making me take in more food than I am supposed to eat in one sitting. Plus, in addition to my initial meals, eating out made me eat more dessert than I usually do. Out of the eight restaurants, I got dessert at five of them — even when the rest of my meal was sitting half eaten in a doggy bag next to me. Dessert: a course I could have very easily avoided if I had eaten at home.
Eating at restaurants was not only making me lose my appetite, but it also
ended up emptying my bank account. Since I was “on vacation” I didn’t really
pay too much attention to the prices. Therefore, I often found myself
regretfully handing over my credit card to pay my share at the end of each
meal. According to Zagat’s 2015 Dining Trends Survey, the average price per
person for dinner out is $39.40. And that price raises to $48.15 when talking
about a meal in New York City! It’s no wonder the restaurant industry plans on
gaining $709.2 billion in sales in 2015.
Now that Spring Break is over, the last thing I want to do is eat out at
another restaurant. I am on a search for fresh fruits and vegetables that I can
prepare in my own kitchen. However, my stomach is growling as I write.
Michelle Lulic is a senior at Rutgers University, studying
Journalism and Media Studies with a minor in Theater Arts. She loves to tell
stories through both writing and acting.
