Lest you think of a burrito as a fat- and calorie-laden bomb of a lunch, consider Tara Doyle’s strategy.
When the 32-year-old sales director needs a Mexican fix, she heads to Chipotle Mexican Grill, a national chain whose gimmick is allowing customers to select their own burrito ingredients, rather than having them choose from a set menu.
Instead of loading on the cheese, guacamole and sour cream that are popular north-of-the-border accents, Doyle asks for a simple filling of grilled chicken or pork, rice and chili-corn salsa. The combination tastes good and fills her up–but not so much that she’ll nod off during a 3 p.m. client meeting or need to add a notch to her belt.
“I like that freedom,” Doyle says of Chipotle’s laissez faire ordering system. “Monday to Friday I eat healthy so I can have fun on the weekend.”
In a world where the fat and calorie contents of most fast-food places are enough to make a sumo wrestler queasy, there is hope. Around Chicago, several restaurant chains, among them Chipotle, Cosi, Subway and Potbelly Sandwich Works, not only allow, but encourage, patrons to customize their sandwiches and sometimes salads. At places like Corner Bakery, a customer can substitute the bag of chips (300 calories, 16 grams of fat) that comes with sandwiches for a gleaming green apple (80 calories and 1 gram of fat).
But where there’s hope there’s also peril. To qualify as healthful, the customized ordering systems require customers to have the discipline to resist the ever-ready squeeze of mayonnaise (100 calories and 11 grams of fat per tablespoon) or splash of oil (122 calories, 13.6 grams of fat per tablespoon), not to mention that cookie at the end of the Potbelly line. And even at restaurants known for their fresh, balanced offerings, unwitting customers can go astray.
For instance, at Corner Bakery, one popular entree is black-bean soup served in a bread bowl with a baby-greens salad. Served in the bread bowl, the entree racks up an impressive 1,277 calories–almost two-thirds of what an average woman needs for an entire day–and 13 grams of fat. Substitute an inedible bowl, an adjustment the Corner Bakery staff will gladly make, and the calorie total plummets to 333 and the fat count to 8 grams.
In this age of empowerment, giving customers options simply makes good business sense, says Carl Segal, senior vice president at Potbelly, which has eight locations around Chicago that swiftly manage the snaking lunchtime lines of customers.
“People are more comfortable mixing and matching and doing what they want,” Segal says, especially when they are following all sorts of eating plans, from the Atkins diet to a vegetarian regimen. At Potbelly, he notes, customers can get whatever they want left off their sandwich–including the bread.
A brief note about bread: It’s not all bad. To be sure, the bread bowl at Corner Bakery can add considerable calories to an otherwise low-calorie meal. But bread, especially whole-grain, is full of fiber and essential vitamins, among them folic acid. And in reasonable quantities, plain bread isn’t all that high in calories: One slice has anywhere from 80 to 100 calories.
And besides, what kind of lunch is a sandwich without bread? Put it this way: It’s a lot better than no lunch at all.
“If you’re going to make it through the day and be productive, feel good and have enough energy, you have to have a good lunch,” says Miriam E. Nelson, associate professor at the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston and author of “Strong Women Eat Well” (Putnam, $24.95).
That assessment is echoed by Janet Helm, a registered dietitian and managing director for food and nutrition at the public relations giant BSMG Worldwide in Chicago.
“Most people think breakfast is important, but lunch is critical too,” says Helm, who is also a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. “It’s important to get things you might have missed at breakfast or will at dinner.”
Consider nutritional density
Nutrition, after all, is a lot more than calories and fat grams. If you have a roasted veggie sandwich on whole-grain bread, you’re getting more fat and calories, sure, but it’s packed with more nutrients than a greasy burger on white bread. Or, take avocados, for instance. They are high in calories and fat, but are nutritional wonders–chock full of magnesium, potassium, vitamin A and even iron. And the fat is not saturated. The idea is nutritional density.
With that in mind, the two nutrition experts agree on what doesn’t make a healthy lunch–too much fat, too many calories, and alcohol. All of those slow the system and contribute to midafternoon sluggishness.
They also agree what does comprise a healthful lunch: protein for staying power, complex carbohydrates for energy, fruit and vegetables for vitamins and minerals, and a drink, preferably water.
Hydration is important to maintain energy, Nelson says. Even mild dehydration can make you sleepy or mistake thirst for hunger, contributing to overeating.
If you’re counting calories, beware of juices. If you choose iced tea, opt for one that’s not sweetened. Corner Bakery, for instance, offers its own brand of mango iced tea that has no calories–a nutritional bargain considering that a big bottle of sweetened iced tea can pack as many as 250 calories, or about half the caloric content of a small meal.
But there’s no magic formula for lunchtime nutrition. How much you eat depends entirely on you and your needs, says Jason Conviser, vice president of clinical services at Bally Total Fitness in Chicago and an exercise physiologist. Conviser suggests experimenting with different lunch food combinations until you hit on one that sustains you and makes you feel good and energetic all afternoon.
Nelson stresses that eating some protein at lunch is critical. In addition to helping maintain muscle mass–critical for women who work out–protein keeps the body from feeling hungry.
There’s another element to a healthful lunch, too: It must taste good.
“You have to eat foods you enjoy, foods you get pleasure from as well as sustenance,” Nelson says.
That’s where the chains gladly step in to help. Chipotle’s founder, Culinary Institute of America-trained chef Steve Els, says he had good taste, not necessarily healthful eating, in mind when he opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993. (The company is now partly owned by McDonald’s Corp.)
“Healthful eating is about balance and variety and eating things that are fresh, not processed,” Els says. “Good taste goes without saying.”
If you’re more tuned to fat than calories, keep in mind that calories do mean something, says Karen Doty, a food scientist and head of quality assurance for Dallas-based Corner Bakery.
“It’s a misnomer that people can eat as many SnackWells as they want because they’re low in fat–you’re still getting the calories and you’re not getting nutrition,” Doty says.
Portions can be big pitfall
Then there’s portion control, a pitfall when it comes to dining out. A foot-long submarine sandwich is, in reality, five or six sandwiches, Nelson says.
“They may be low-fat but they are high in calories,” she says.
Nelson suggests ordering half a sandwich, or immediately bagging half of the sandwich in the office refrigerator and saving it for the next day–a budget-wise measure as well.
Cut down further on calories by asking for only two slices of whatever meat or cheese the sandwich will contain.
When ordering salads, even the occasional dieter knows to order dressings on the side. Because they’re all oil-based, clear dressings and creamy ones aren’t that different nutritionally. A tablespoon of standard Italian dressing has about 85 calories and 9 grams of fat, and a tablespoon of Thousand Island, 80 calories and 8 grams of fat.
Of course, eating out isn’t the only option. Many women opt for the old-fashioned brown bag lunch when noontime rolls around. Nelson, who sometimes works from her home in Concord, Mass., feasts on textbook-healthful lunches, such as melted cheese, avocado and sprouts served open-face on whole-wheat bread.
(Like bread, cheese is another unfairly maligned food. One slice of Swiss cheese has 105 calories, but it also has a whopping 272 grams of calcium, plus B-12 and other essential nutrients. Simply have a slice, not half a pound.)
Her lunches might not be quite as fancy as Nelson’s, but Sherry Hastlestad, a magazine editor who lives in Chicago, brings a brown bag to work nearly every day.
Hastlestad packs either leftovers from dinner–she and her husband cook almost every night–or a turkey-and-cheese sandwich or salad and a piece of fruit, plus a container of yogurt or some animal crackers for a mid-afternoon snack.
“I like the control,” she says, over both what she eats and how much it costs.
(If you’re the type who would devour your brown-bag contents by 10 a.m., try this trick: Stash your bag in a co-worker’s cubicle so you’ll at best feel sheepish if you come to fetch it three hours before lunchtime.)
Have a stroll for dessert
When the weather cooperates, Hastlestad finishes off her lunch with a walk. That’s a fabulous idea, says Conviser.
Even a quick 10-minute stroll helps contribute to the 30 minutes of aerobic exercise you need each day to keep minimally fit, Conviser explains.
“A little exercise goes a long way,” he says, adding that a majority of Americans do absolutely nothing in the way of daily exercise. An after-lunch stroll, in addition to providing exercise, can help cut stress, aid digestion and avoid circulation problems, an often-overlooked hazard of spending long days in front of a computer.
Conviser is all for exercise–that’s what he’s paid to do–yet he warns against working out in lieu of eating during the noon hour, for two reasons: First, a body needs food within a half-hour after working out to help restore glycogen to the muscles, essential to rebuilding them.
Second, no matter how invigorating a workout, without at least a snack afterward you’ll fall prey to the midafternoon doldrums–just as if you had eaten a huge plate of fettuccine Alfredo.
Doyle, for her part, isn’t afraid of a big lunch. In fact, she has made lunch her main meal of the day. She eats a healthy lunch, such as that nice big burrito. Then, upon arriving home around 6 or 7 p.m., she exercises, then drinks water and perhaps snacks on fruit for dinner.
The result is a feeling every woman wants.
“I feel nice and light the next day,” Doyle says.
Bare facts
Nutrition goes far beyond fat grams and calories, but for those who are counting, here’s a snapshot of three popular choices at area lunch spots.
CORNER BAKERY
BLACK-BEAN SOUP IN A BREAD BOWL, SERVED WITH BABY-GREENS SALAD
1,277 calories
13 grams of fat
POTBELLY SANDWICH WORKS
VEGETARIAN SANDWICH
Vegetables plus Swiss, provolone and American cheeses and condiments
790 calories
53.8 grams of fat
McDONALD’S QUARTER POUNDER WITH CHEESE
530 calories
30 grams of fat
The lunch box
Here are calorie and fat-gram counts for some popular lunch dishes around town. Einstein Bagels and Corner Bakery supplied their own information; the American Dietetic Association calculated the counts for Potbelly’s and Cosi’s lunch items based on information supplied by the restaurants.
POTBELLY SANDWICH WORKS
– Turkey and Swiss sandwich with condiments: 664 calories, 38.4 grams fat
– A Wreck (salami, roast beef, turkey and ham with Swiss cheese): 753 calories, 46.7 grams fat
EINSTEIN BAGELS
– Asian chicken salad: 480 calories, 4.4 grams fat
– EBB-Q chicken sandwich: 380 calories, 8 grams fat
– Turkey sandwich: 420 calories, 1.5 grams fat
– Tuna salad sandwich: 430 calories, 10 grams fat
CORNER BAKERY
– Chicken pomodori panini with a side of mixed berries: 564 calories, 16 grams fat
– Roasted Vegetable Sandwich: 543 calories; 23 grams fat
– Turkey-swiss sandwich (no mayonnaise) with gazpacho salad and a side of watermelon: 832 calories, 16 grams fat
– Mom’s Ham and Swiss sandwich: 595 calories, 15 grams fat
COSI
– Smoked turkey with brie and honey mustard: 407 calories, 23.5 grams fat
– Tuna with cheddar cheese and vinaigrette: 568 calories, 30 grams fat
– Pesto grilled chicken with sun-dried tomato spread: 437 calories, 23 grams fat
FOR COMPARISON:
Homemade PBJ on whole-wheat bread (two tablespoons of peanut butter): about 250-300 calories; about 18 grams fat
McDonald’s Chicken McGrill: 450 calories, 18 grams fat
–Compiled by Lisa Bertagnoli
