How to count calories when eating out or ordering delivery
Restaurants and delivery: you can’t weigh the food, but you can still log it.
Short answer: restaurant and delivery food can’t be counted exactly. Log the closest entry in your tracker, add 10–20% on top, and save the dishes you order often once, so you pick the same entry every time. AI logging helps here: take a photo of the dish or describe it by voice, and you get an estimate in seconds. For the best results, keep eating out to a minimum.
This part continues how to count calories.
How to count calories when eating out
For the best results: limit eating out as much as you can.
If you’re okay with slower results: eat out at a few places you know, order the same dishes, and log them the same way every time.
With delivery and restaurant food there are a few options, from most accurate to least:
- The dish has a recipe card with known calories and macros. Then you can save it as your own dish in the app, ideally adding 10–20% on top. Many chains list calories on the menu or the website.
- There’s no recipe card and the calories aren’t known, but the food comes apart easily. For example, a poke bowl is easy to take apart and weigh ingredient by ingredient. You can do this once and save the ingredients.
- The food doesn’t come apart (try taking apart a pad thai or a gyro). You can take a similar dish with the highest calories from your food tracker.
How to count calories in delivery food
If you order the same food again and again, and it comes apart easily, take it apart once. Weigh the parts, save them as a recipe, and reuse the recipe every time. Poke bowls are a good example: save what’s in them as a recipe, or copy the ingredients from your history. You won’t know the exact sauce, but you can estimate it.
Some food doesn’t come apart: try taking apart a curry or a pad thai. Then pick the closest entry in your tracker (all popular food is there), or take a photo and let AI estimate it. You’ll never hit the exact calories, but you’ll know the rough range. And remember the rule above: the less of this food you eat, the better your results.
How to count calories at a restaurant or café
For food outside the home that you eat again and again: take your scale with you, weigh it a few times, log it in your tracker, and always pick the same thing. I weighed my favorite cheese sandwiches, and found out by trial that they have 110 to 140 g (3.9 to 4.9 oz) of bread and always 40 g (1.4 oz) of cheese. The butter you can’t count, but it’s surely no more than 5–7 g (about a teaspoon). Some places will show you a dish’s recipe card if you ask.
Don’t want to carry a scale? Take a photo of the dish once, save the result as a custom food, and pick it every time.
For food outside the home that doesn’t repeat, and for restaurants:
Option A: take the most similar dish or ingredients you can find. It won’t be exact, but you can try. You can usually find out the weight of the meat, and log at least the protein and fat.
Option B: don’t stress and leave the day alone. If it’s dinner with friends, or a night out with someone you love, just forget about calories. This doesn’t mean it’s a cheat meal and you can eat everything in sight. A flexible diet is flexible because any food is allowed, so it has no cheat meals (a license to overeat). It means you go by what you’ve learned while counting, and put that knowledge into practice.
Option C: take a photo of the food and let AI count it. Deficit, the tracker I build, can log a meal from a photo. It’s still an estimate: AI can’t see the oil and the sauce any better than you can, so treat the number like option A.