Favorite Low Calorie Fast Food!

Yes, I know it's not the best for us but let's face it we don't all ALWAYS have time to cook a gourmet meal.

Just wanted everyone to share their favorite low calorie fast food options. Maybe it will save someone from giving up and going with an unhealthy option sometime.

:)

If I must, I go for Taco Bell Crunchy Beef Taco Fresco Style- only 150 calories!

There is an in-n-out right by my house, and my indulgence is this:

Hamburger w/grilled onions, protein style, with ketchup + mustard instead of spread. It comes out to (!) 160 calories. 250 calories if you get a cheeseburger. Not bad, seriously.

Mmm! At Wendy's the "Spicy Chicken Fillet" is a great choice! It has about 440 calories, but it is BIG.  I am very full and satisfied after I eat it, and with a diet coke or water, yummy.  Plus, since it's a bit on the spicy side (but not too bad) it takes me slower to eat.  Which makes me feel 'fuller' in the end.

Wendy's Chili is another amazing choice! I get it with a side salad.  Some people I know put the chili on the salad, like a taco salad, without the chips.  The chili has around 200 some calories.

My faves include the chicken tortilla soup from Wahoo's Fish Tacos - great low-cal, quick and tasty option (without the tortilla strips if you can give them up!). (The Wahoo's salads are nice too - dressing is virtually fat free but very tasty).

Also really enjoy the Starbucks oatmeal with the mix-ins (brown sugar, nuts, dried fruit). An easy, quick and nutritious breakfast on the go!

i like the good ol mc d's hamburgers with zero coke or just subway you can make anything healthy really its all about sizes and what you can do to change the order i love bk burgers but i always ask for no mayo not only cos it cuts the cals in half but i just hate mayo overall..but nowadays i dont eat fast food except for subway and thats only occasionally.

Original Post by oxsunrisesunset:

mcdonald's southwest salad with grilled chicken. love love love. only like 420 calories.

 Actually, since I work there and go crazy with knowing restaurants' nutrition facts, the Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad has only 340 calories. That is with 1/2 packet of the Newman's Own Low fat Balsalmic Vinaigrette. I LOVE this salad. =]

either subway, mr. sub, extreme pita, or pita pit.

Eating so-called lo cal fast foods is a gamble.  When a fast food restaurant offers lo cal they usually replace the fat with sugar and salt and other additives.  I knew a guy who opened a healthy restaurant with naturally lo cal offerings prepared without all the fattening additions.  He wasn't making money so he began selling the calorie laden foods to draw customers.  McD et al aren't going to make money selling healthy food unless it's got a secret little some'n' some'n' to make you crave it.

And they fudge on reporting the actual calorie count.  They want you to buy food from them and they are not beyond lying about what's in the food or how it's prepared.  Without preparing it yourself you can't ever know what is in the food.   Besides, fast food employees don't actually prepare the foods; they warm them up, fry the frozen patties on the grill, drop the frozen fries and nuggets in grease, pour the powder or mix or solution into a freezer and flip a handle that fills your cup with "sundae" or Frosty or froyo.  

For me, it's all about control.  I need to control how my food is handled.  I used to work in a stadium selling crap to spectators.  The nasty food handling I've seen behind the scenes is enough to put me off fast foods forever.  I've opened ketchup pumps to clean them and found them full of mold.  The same with soft drink lines.  Some food handlers are concientious about food safety and some couldn't give a rip.  I've seen food dropped on the floor and not even brushed off before they sell it to you (it should be discarded).  The popcorn in stadiums?  It sits around for weeks in gigantic plastic bags until it is scooped into cups and put under the heat lamps.  The hot dogs that don't sell are taken out of the buns, washed off and put back into plastic bags and frozen to preserve them.  One dog can be washed and frozen a couple times until all the food coloring is washed out from reheating it in boiling water and it looks too gray or green to sell.   In my lifetime I've worked at J in the B, in Safeway's deli  and a small soda fountain-type cafe and had to clean things up so they could pass the health department's inspection the first time rather than the second time as was the usual case before I went to work there.  I'm OCD about food cleanliness and it never ceases to amaze me what poor cleaners others, even my supervisors, in the food business have been.

I'm grateful for posts like this.  They literally make me queazy as I mentally talley the more accurate content of these foods and they fortify my resolve to avoid the kind of thinking that says it's okay to eat these foods, even  every once in a while.  There are some people who can eat these foods every once in a while but for others of us every once in a while becomes once a month, and then once a week and then once a day.  The kids' meals eventually become the extra value meals, the extra value meals eventually get super-sized, and so do we. 

I have no choice but to eat fast food from time and thank you to everyone who gave me some delicious new stuff to try. When I started I was at 150lbs and I'm down to 134!!! 9 more to go yayyyy

I think you always have a choice in what you eat. Think about it, running into a grocery store to grab a piece of fruit, a veggy platter, some bread/bagels takes just as much time as ordering that greasy burger.

Sometimes you're not always near a grocery store, etc.  Like, I just started working at McDonald's, and lunch breaks aren't long enough to go run to the grocery store.  And in southern California, it's just too hot sometimes to pack a lunch in a cooler and leave it in your car.  Even bread will melt.

Original Post by jjcakes:

I have no choice but to eat fast food from time and thank you to everyone who gave me some delicious new stuff to try. When I started I was at 150lbs and I'm down to 134!!! 9 more to go yayyyy

 Congrats on your progress! 

Original Post by katesorad:

Sometimes you're not always near a grocery store, etc.  Like, I just started working at McDonald's, and lunch breaks aren't long enough to go run to the grocery store.  And in southern California, it's just too hot sometimes to pack a lunch in a cooler and leave it in your car.  Even bread will melt.

 You can probably pack a lunch and bring it in with you to work and keep in in the freezer/fridges that they have. That is what I always did when I used to work at Tim Hortons.

I never eat from burger fast food places (McD's, Burger King, KFC etc) but I will occasionally go to Subway and get a chicken fillet 6-inch on wheat bread with veges and mustard or honey mustard. From memory it's about 350-400 cals, filling and pretty healthy for a take-out option.

I do eat out a lot but I'm living in Malaysia and the "fast food" is mostly incredibly healthy - think a cup of vege soup with prawns or soup with noodles, veges and beef.

If I had to go to McDonalds I would have no idea what to order. It's probably been about 5 years at least. It just doesn't taste good to me - I have more of a sweet tooth than a salty one.