A Quick Guide to Finding the Healthiest Places to Eat

There’s little question that eating at home is probably the healthiest option when it comes to prioritizing your health. The reasons are numerous: you get to control the amount of sodium that’s in the food, you know precisely what’s in it, you can faithfully eliminate allergens, etc. Although eating at restaurants is a very convenient alternative, you have a lot less control over how the food is prepared – which isn’t to say that you can’t make requests of the chef at most restaurants. Here are some tips on choosing the right place to eat.

In the following, we’ll try to combine the best of both worlds: the convenience of sparing yourself the energy and effort by eating out, and the potential for healthier food you would get by preparing your own meals. Whether you’re traveling or simply out and about in your own city, you can still eat well (healthy!).

Find Places to Eat With Your Local City Guide

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Judging by television and by Google ads, the drive towards a healthy diet plan seems to be a major priority for most people these days. This market has, of course responded – which is why there are now more eating establishments that are billing themselves as healthy fast food restaurants. 

The question is: how do you find them? Well, one way of is courtesy of your local city guide, of course! This is a viable way whether you’re staying in your home town or traveling abroad; many independent bloggers and small businesses have actually created their own city guides online, and Google has arranged them (more or less) by the “best” ones. You need not leave the first page of the search engine giant to hit on a city guide that meets all your needs.

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You will find travel bloggers and long-time city food connoisseurs that have collected prime choices all in one spot for you. To get started, try the following longtail keyword searches for restaurants that serve a healthy diet, substituting “City” for the name of your location of interest:

1. Gluten Free Restaurants in “City”
2. Healthy Fast Food in “City”
3. Healthy Diet Menu in “City”
4. Vegan Guide in “City”
5. Healthy Fast Food Restaurants in “City”
6. Healthy Places to Eat in “City”
7. Chinese Food in the “City”

You will have no trouble coming up detailed information and reviews for these and similar keywords. Get out there and sample the food and then write your own reviews!

Use Social Media to Ask Friends and Family About Their Favorite Places to Eat

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There are many possible social media platforms that you can use to find healthy fast food restaurants; one of the best is the eponymous Facebook. With billions and billions of people on the world’s foremost (although it has been dwindling of late) social site, you will undoubtedly know someone who knows someone that is intimately with places to eat in the city of interest. 

Log on and reach out to your Facebook community; or, if you don’t know where to start, check out the prominently-displayed “Recommendations” utility. When you use this mechanism to ask your question, then your desire will crop up in the Facebook feeds of people in your social network and beyond.. It is a proven engagement platform, and you shouldn’t be surprised when people start reaching out to you with suggestions. Insofar as non-direct contact is concerned, people will begin sharing their healthy fast food places in response to your recommendations jumpstart.

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A recently added feature to the ever-evolving Facebook is the ability to add your favorite restaurants (others, in this case, since you’re the one in need of suggestions) and have them pop up in your feed. The reviews will also show up, making them doubly useful. There will even be photographs attached so that you can enjoy a visual treat and decide if you want to eat there or not. Like most people, you probably already have a Facebook account – so give it a shot and see if the healthy restaurant feature is as useful as advertised.

With all of these high-tech options, it can be easy to overlook what should, perhaps, be the very first one: ask your family members! People are traveling more than ever now (well, before the recent COVID-19 epidemic, anyway), and there’s a better-than-even chance that someone in your family/friends circle has been to your travel destination. Get a list of recommendations, and look them up on Google for more in-depth information on those places to eat.

Trip Advisor Can Help Your Eating Out Diet Plan

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Although Google is the king of search engines, Trip Advisor is no slouch – and its more focused, too. Since they are geared exclusively towards travel, you can expect hyper-focused search results on places to eat and visit. You don’t actually have to be traveling to take advantage of it, either, since obviously they’d have a compilation of choice dining spots in your city, too.

To begin, download the Trip Advisor app on to your phone; or use the webpage if you have a tablet. Since it’s a travel app, you’ll be able to quickly find places to eat near any tours or activities that you plan to undergo once you get there. Even better, when the reviews come up, you can perform a search string within the reviews themselves and find really focused recommendations.

Where Trip Advisor really shines if you want to find healthy fast food is the ability to quickly and efficiently filter your search results for important factors like price range, number of stars, gluten-free eateries, vegan/vegetarian restaurants and more. Of course, the photographs of the food will be often be personally taken by the person that left the review; this has its pros and cons. You will generally see a wider variety of food photographs than the official ones, as well as any dishes that are especially preferred by the diners.

Instagram: Find Healthy Places to Eat on The Top Picture Site

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Currently, the Instagram stories feature may be the most searched picture site on the web – if not, it’s darn close. Instagram stories was created to allow you to watch an influencer’s travels in-depth, via the photos they post and the short stories they tell. This almost always includes stops at local restaurants, with tags about the food – whether healthy, vegan/vegetarian, fast food options and more.

If you want to use Instagram in an even more hyper-focused way, then go ahead and follow some food bloggers – they are almost always posting diet plans and healthy diets (as well as excessive ones) on their Instagram pages. Best of all, Instagram is especially functional on a mobile device, so you can take the stories with you and access them in moments to track the latest recommended restaurant in your city. The screenshot functionality of your phone is especially useful here.

Websites and Mobile Apps Dedicated to Healthy Eating

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These have been a thing for over half-a-decade now, when a survey by the National Restaurant Association showed that people were 70% more likely to dine out at a healthy restaurant than just any old eatery. Websites such as www.HealthyOut.com and www.HealthyDiningFinder.com rose up to answer the call and meet the public demand. You can download the associated apps if you prefer to do everything on your mobile device, making it child’s play to find the healthy restaurants in your travel location. 

Stepping it up a notch, there is a site such as www.GoPure.com that even allows you to see where the restaurants you choose obtain their ingredients, meat, veggies, etc. For example, perhaps you strongly prefer grass-fed beef, or you don’t want to support chicken coups (for your personal reasons). You can bring up this information through the GoPure app, and decide whether or not you wish to eat at the restaurant in question. Look for even greater convenience as these apps continue to evolve, and as new ones spring up.