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How to eat fast food without gaining weight

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We once again take a detour from points, miles, and travel to talk about eating! Like many Americans, I eat fast food with some frequency, usually at lunch during the week. After all, it’s cheap and convenient. But unlike many Americans, I am no longer overweight, as I have now lost about 30 pounds since I first started eating better.

I enjoy finding easy, efficient ways to achieve goals, and as others have learned fast food can actually be helpful in losing weight. I know it’s been helpful for me: I have a few go-to meals at various restaurants I can eat that will help me achieve my goal of maintaining or losing weight. Herewith, some tips for optimally managing your fast food dietary habits:

  • Use the nutrition charts to tabulate calories and decide what you’re going to eat ahead of time. It’s easy to eat much more than you need at restaurants, and in fact restaurants have an interest in that arrangement since your overeating pads their bottom line. If you’re concerned about your weight, you should already have figured out how many calories per day you need. Since people tend to be creatures of habit, your fast food consumption will be from a handful of restaurants. Go to those restaurants’ websites, look over their menus, figure out how many calories your daily caloric budget leaves for your lunch (or whatever meal), and figure out a meal that can fit within your parameters. If you plan ahead of time and stick to it, you can avoid falling prey to the various tricks marketers use to get you to eat more.
  • If there are no nutrition charts available, estimate. You may be surprised at what you find.
  • Say no to caloric beverages. If you’re concerned about your weight, be extremely careful about drinking your calories. I’m talking about (non-diet) soda, sweet tea, fruit juice, frappucinos–all that stuff. It’s a lot of sugar with little to no nutritional value. Moreover, some people will mentally discount any calories gained from drinks and then find themselves wondering why they’re gaining weight. Stick with things like water, unsweet tea, or black coffee. Is diet soda okay? It depends on who you ask. Some people can lose weight with it, but in my case it tends to make me more hungry later on, so I try to avoid it if I’m in weight-loss mode.
  • There are good options everywhere, and there are bad options everywhere. You can get a reasonably healthy chicken salad at much-maligned McDonald’s for a few hundred calories, or you can consume 2,000 calories in the form of a burrito and chips at Chipotle. Don’t think you’re eating “healthy” or “unhealthy” just because of the halo around a particular restaurant or particular food.
  • What counts as a good option or a bad option varies from person to person. For example, some people might consider Panera to be “healthier” than McDonald’s. And that is no doubt the case for some people. But their entrees which appeal to me tend to have a lot of calories, plus it’s agonizing to look at those pastries and not get one, whereas at McDonald’s I’ve found it’s not too hard to have a satisfying meal if I avoid the sweet drinks and say no to french fries. Speaking of which…
  • French fries are the devil. They are calorically dense and they are delicious. One large serving of fries will set you back almost 500 calories. That’s one quarter of the entire day’s energy needs for a lot of people, and it’s only a side dish.  Stay away!
  • Rice may be the devil too, but I’m not as sure about that. It’s easy to eat a lot of it without realizing it. And this is a YMMV thing, but it almost always leaves me hungry a few hours later if I have more than a few bites. I leave it out of my order at Chipotle.
  • You can still have “unhealthy” foods–just pay attention to the calories and don’t overdo it. It’s really hard to maintain any diet if too many foods you love are out of bounds. For example, I love pizza. I have it about once per week since the best pizza in town (it’s run by a guy from New York named Luigi, need I say more?) is right down the road from my office. Except now that I’m better at counting calories, instead of having two pieces for lunch (800-1,000 calories), I only have one piece (400-500 calories, these are big pieces). And since I’ve been eating better for several months now, my stomach has adjusted and one piece fills me perfectly.

So… who’s up for a Big Mac?

How much is a flexible schedule worth to you?

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I’m currently reading “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. In the chapter on happiness, he identifies schedule flexibility as a key to happiness:

The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want… Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

Parents understand what I’m talking about. Most parents love their kids and are glad they had them. At the same time, kids remove almost all of the flexibility in your schedule, especially if you’re the stay-at-home parent.

…In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision.

Based on where I am in life, this is solid advice. There are a couple of areas in my life where flexibility has proven to be a tremendous benefit. The first one is my job: I still have a regular corporate job to pay the bills, so I don’t have the freedom of the full-time bloggers to write from wherever, whenever. But I still have a pretty good deal at the moment: a job where I’ve been in the same group for a few years, a stable group where we’re all known commodities; where working from home occasionally is no problem; and where employees are expected to have personal lives. If I need to work from home one day so the wife can go to the doctor, no problem.

How much is this worth? A lot. Having had my fair share of bad jobs, I am sufficiently satisfied in my current job that I want nothing to do with recruiters. It would take a ridiculously unrealistic pay increase to get me to leave.

Another area of my life where I’m seeing more flexibility is my children’s schooling. We started homeschooling this year, and while homeschooling is more work it also provides more flexibility. I’ve grown dismayed at the trend toward more homework for younger kids in schooling these days (yes, they have homework for kindergarteners now), as it’s a lot of work for no apparent benefit (the opposite of how they do things in Finland). My wife and I concluded that we could do a better job of educating our children than any available schools could, AND that we could do it with less stress and busywork.

It’s still early in the process, but so far we’re happy with the decision. We have less stress in the morning and less stress in the evening. And from a points and miles perspective, here is one benefit I’m looking forward to: we don’t have to travel when everybody else does. We can schedule school for whichever days we want so long as we have 180 days of instruction. Or we can travel and have some schooling on the trip.

This benefit is purely theoretical at the moment but we’ll give it a test on our field trip to Asheville next month (I’m finally getting rid of those Club Carlson points from that promo a few years ago!) and then during our trip to Nicaragua a few months after that. Will we have a science lesson on volcanoes during that trip? Will there be lessons on Central American geography? You bet!

Obviously, career and schooling decisions are huge YMMV situations. I’m not telling you what to do or how to do it. But for those of you early in your career, I do recommend you keep flexibility in mind as you’re figuring out what to do with your life. One of the formative experiences of my MBA came during a mixer between us full-time students and a bunch of the executive MBA students, who were older and further into their careers. Several of them seemed really beaten down: they were working long hours, they didn’t see their families, and they were more or less trapped in their current jobs, or at least they felt like they were.

The encounter made enough of an impression on me that one of my goals in life is Don’t end up like those guys. So far, so good.

Does the Dave Ramsey debt snowball technique actually work?

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Most of you have heard of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, and most of you have heard of his debt snowball tactic. From his website:

Myth: I should pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first to get out of debt quickly.
Truth: You should pay off the smallest debt first to create the greatest momentum in your debt snowball.

The math seems to lean more toward paying the highest interest debts first, but what I have learned is that personal finance is 20% head knowledge and 80% behavior.You need some quick wins in order to stay pumped enough to get out of debt completely. When you start knocking off the easier debts, you will start to see results and you will start to win in debt reduction.

But the question needs to be asked: how well-founded is Ramsey’s assertion that paying off the smallest debt first is the best way? You can get anecdotes and metaphors to support any point of view, but is there anything more rigorous underlying Ramsey’s marketing pitch? [Read more…]

How much is an hour-long commute worth?

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This article is a couple of years old, but still interesting and relevant, and it involves something that many of you have probably run into at some point in your lives. How much is a short commute worth? Or, looked at another way, how much should you be compensated for a long commute? As you might have guessed by this point, economists have looked into this:

How much would we need to be compensated to make up for the hellish experience of a long commute? Two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, actually went about quantifying it, in a now famous 2004 paper entitled “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that for an extra hour of commuting time, you would need to be compensated with a massive 40 percent increase in salary to make it worthwhile.

Long commutes are the worst, aren’t they? There are some more interesting facts in the same article:

This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.

And:

Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist and author of Bowling Alone, names long commuting times as one of the most robust predictors of social isolation. He posits that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer “social connections.” Those social connections tend to make us feel happy and fulfilled.

And:

According to research from Thomas James Christian of Brown University, each minute you commute is associated with “a 0.0257 minute exercise time reduction, a 0.0387 minute food preparation time reduction, and a 0.2205 minute sleep time reduction.”

Given my fascination with people at the tail end of the bell curve, I have to point this out: in 2006, Midas sponsored a contest for the nation’s longest commute. The winner: 7 hours round-trip every single day. That’s 372 miles total. (H/T: Priceonomics)

TRACK YOUR CREDIT CARDS: Via Mommy Points, here’s a site called Card Watchdog that’ll help you track annual fees, minimum spend requirements, and so forth.

NATE TOBIK MAKES BOOK VALUE INTERESTING: For those of you into stock valuation, an interesting point over at Oddball Stocks:

I have a friend who runs a factoring business, he sent me an email recently discussing how many client receivables are hopelessly overstated and will most likely never be collected.  He brought up a good point, a point that Graham discussed in Security Analysis.  In all companies liabilities are real, whomever a liability is owed will ask for it to be settled at some point, but assets are never sure, cash is sure, but the value of receivables, inventory and property is often a best guess.  While inventory might be overstated, a debt on the balance sheet is never wrong.  I have yet to read a financial statement with the note “We borrowed $10m, but the lender decided they only wanted $9.5m back.”

The whole article is a pretty good discussion of book value for those of you who are interested.

COLLEGE JOB-HUNTING ADVICE FOLLOW-UP: Last week, I advised college students not to worry about grades and to focus instead on making friends. You know who else has similar sentiments? Google’s head of HR, that’s who:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

The whole article is actually pretty interesting and confirms my suspicions nobody really knows how to hire very well. It’s not an easy task.

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