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Annoying or Smart? Why I Pay Full Price to Order Half Entrees

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In front of a restaurant that wouldn’t serve me a half portion of food (I’m not so good at making a frown face)

Yesterday, I was featured in a NY Post Article titled The Annoying New Dining Trend – Ordering Half Entrees.

From that article, I was asked to do an interview with Fox 5 News to give a more in depth report on why I order half entrees and sometimes pay full price for it.

Obviously, I would prefer to pay half the price if I’m getting half the food another patron is getting, but sometimes that’s not possible. In those situations I would rather pay the full price for half an entree.

Why would I ever do that? I promise you, there is a method to my madness, and here it is:

* What’s the price of your goals?

Especially when I first started losing weight, I had to come to the realization that I needed to stop trying to get the most bang for my buck when it came to food. Most of us have been taught to finish everything on ours plate since we could eat on our own, but if you blindly eat what’s put in front of you when eating out it will be very hard to not fall into the overweight / obese category so many Americans are trapped in.

Since the restaurant weren’t going to help me with portion size, I had to make sure I helped myself! That meant creating an environment that would ensure I did not overeat (if there is no more food left on your plate it’s impossible to eat more of it).

Now that I have reached my goal weight, eat slower, retrained my hunger (which I teach you how to do in my book, “The Thigh Gap Hack,”) and know what it feels like to be satisfied, I am apt to paying the full price for the entree, stop eating when I should, and have the rest boxed to go.

* What are they going to do with the leftovers?

I understand the hesitation of some restaurants to half the price of an entree when a diner only wants to order half the food. After all, what are they going to do with the leftovers? Who are they going to serve it to if there are not many other diners requesting the same dish halved?

That being said, if I find a restaurant that can accommodate my needs (and the number of restaurants catering to this need is growing every day) I am more likely to return to that establishment than the ones that won’t.

* Sometimes you don’t want to carry a doggy bag!

If I won’t be home for a few hours after eating and can’t refrigerate my leftovers (in other words the food would probably spoil from seating in a hot car or I don’t have my car to store the food while I go about the rest of my day) then it just doesn’t make sense to receive what is likely to be a huge portion of food and then force myself to eat it all.

As I mentioned in the Fox 5 interview, your stomach shrinks when you start to eat smaller portions and overeating to the point of feeling uncomfortable just so that I don’t waste the food is not worth it to me.

* It’s not such a foreign concept

Whenever I travel internationally I am served smaller portions of food and pay the equivalent of what I would pay for a meal here in NYC. Additionally, whenever I eat at more upscale restaurants, I pay a lot more money for a small portion of food.

To me, eating out is not so much about stuffing myself like a bloat fish, but being social and enjoying the company I am with, especially since I try to cook most of my meals at home.
New York News