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Dinner and Drinks: How I Go Out and Still Lose Fat

You don't have to skip the steakhouse or the happy hour to get lean. You need to think ahead. Here's exactly how I plan a night out.

The first conversation my wife Vanessa and I have every morning ends the same way: "What are we doing for dinner?"

It sounds funny, but we do it every single day. Dinner is our time to unwind, reconnect and decompress. We love our dinners. Sushi, a great steak, Italian, a couple of cold beers. So we decide dinner first, and then we plan the rest of the day around it.

That one habit is how I go out, eat what I love and still stay lean. I call it thinking ahead, and it might be the most useful thing I teach.

Why thinking ahead works

Most of us are reactive with food. We get to 7pm, we're starving, and we say, "It's late, let's just order a pizza." The decision gets made by hunger and fatigue instead of by you.

Thinking ahead flips that. You decide what you want while you're calm and fed, then you set the day up so dinner fits. No sense of deprivation, because you're planning your favorite food in, not out.

Step 1: Nail lunch

Build lunch on protein, fat and fiber. Somewhere around 500 to 800 calories and 40 to 60 grams of protein. My go-to is a Cobb salad with double meat and a vinaigrette instead of the heavy dressing. Grilled chicken or fish with vegetables and avocado works just as well.

Lunch like that keeps you full all afternoon, knocks out a big chunk of your protein and leaves you at least 1,000 calories to play with at dinner.

What I don't want you doing is skipping lunch to "save up." You show up starving, the bread basket disappears in four minutes and the plan is gone before the entree lands.

Step 2: Give your carbs to dinner

Carbs aren't the enemy. They're the only nonessential macronutrient, but they're delicious, and cutting them out completely almost always backfires. It creates a sense of deprivation that lights the fuse on a ticking time bomb.

So keep your big carb hit to one meal a day: the bread, pasta, rice or potatoes. On a night out, that meal is dinner. Or, if you'd rather open a bottle of wine, the wine is your carb hit. Pick the one you want most and enjoy it.

Step 3: Protein first, carbs last

When the food lands, eat the protein first. Then the fats and the vegetables. Carbs last.

Protein and fiber fill you up fast. By the time you get to the pasta or the fries, you're already satisfied, so you eat less of them without trying. Same restaurant, same order, noticeably fewer calories.

Step 4: Pick your food before the first drink

The drink itself is rarely the problem. The behavior around it is. As the drinks flow, inhibition goes, the appetizer sampler shows up and the water disappears.

So before you order a drink, look at the menu and decide what you're eating. Make it protein-based. Then put a glass of water next to every drink.

And the order matters. A vodka soda with lime is about 100 calories. A glass of dry wine is about 110. A beer is closer to 200, and you're probably having more than one. I love a good beer, so I start the night with a mixed drink and finish with the beer, not the other way around. The full playbook is in How to Drink Alcohol and Still Lose Fat.

Step 5: Zoom out to the week

Fat loss runs on averages, not single days. If your daily calorie limit is 2,000, that's 14,000 for the week. A 3,500 calorie Friday leaves 10,500 for the other six days, which is 1,750 a day. Very doable. You didn't starve, you didn't skip anything, and you still had the steak. More on that in The Law of Averages.

The morning after

This is where people actually get hurt. Not at dinner. The next morning.

The scale jumps two or three pounds from the salt, the carbs and the drinks. That's water, not fat. But it feels like failure, and "screw it, I already blew it" turns one great dinner into a lost weekend.

Same cheeseburger, two different tomorrows. The person you're becoming just thinks: "That was a big dinner. Cool. Breakfast tomorrow is normal." No punishment, no starving all day, no two hour workout. Go for a walk, drink your water, eat your normal lunch. I wrote the whole idea out in The Skill of Returning.

Your takeaway

Tomorrow morning, before you do anything else, answer one question: "What are we doing for dinner?" Then build the day around the answer. Nail lunch, give the carbs to dinner, eat protein first, pick your food before the first drink, and make the next meal normal.

If you don't know your daily calorie limit and protein minimum yet, get your two numbers here. It takes about a minute, and it's what makes the whole plan work.