Part of being successful on a low carb diet is having excellent working knowledge of all the food around you. When you're tired, in a rush or you just don't feel like cooking, not knowing the carb counts at your favorite restaurants can cause you to eat too many carbs, or worse yet, to go off your plan entirely. There are ways to eat at popular fast food joints without ruining your progress. It just takes a couple quick minutes of research.
McDonalds
McDonalds is a prime example of how many low carb foods can be altered during processing to include carbs. For example, their chicken Caesar salad with dressing has 10 carbs total. Adding the chicken increases the carb count by 30 grams. This is because the chicken, a generally zero carb food, is infused with additives like high fructose corn syrup during processing. Aside from salads without chicken, the best foods for low carb dieters are the scrambled eggs at 5 carbs per serving and the sausage patty with 2 carbs.
Burger King
At Burger King, you can enjoy low carb version of many of the sandwiches they carry. Ask for your sandwich to either be wrapped in lettuce or to not include the bun. Simply removing the bun will leave bread pieces stuck to your meat, increasing your carb count. Also ask for no ketchup or mayo. Low carb Whopper Juniors have only 1g carbs. A regular Whopper has and Double Whopper both have 3g. Double Stacker has 5g and the triple stacker has 6. Adding cheese to your sandwich adds 1 carb per slice. The Tendergrill Chicken Sandwich has 3 carbs.
Chipotle
Chipotle offers their famous burritos in bowls or as salads. Skip the rice and beans and avoid the corn salsa and salad dressing and you can create a bowl for under 10 carbs. Add any kind of meat plus cheese, sour cream, fajita veggies and lettuce to get you to approximately 10 carbs. Add en extra carb for extra cheese. Salsas add between 8 and 12 gams of carbs per serving.
Wendy's
According to official company nutrition data, Wendy's hamburgers don't have carbohydrate-increasing additives in them, so a hamburger patty comes in at zero carbs. Add an additional carb if you add cheese to them. The chicken fillet they use on their grilled chicken sandwich has about 2 carbs. Order it on a chicken Caesar salad and you'll have about 5 carbs total, before dressing.
Subway
Due to the size of the containers, you can add as many vegetables as you like to your subway salad and have it come in at about 10 carbs without the dressing. Full fat dressings, like ranch, will add about four to five more carbs, depending on how much you use. Adding grilled chicken or steak to your salad is the best bet, as deli meats are sometimes cured with sugars. Add an additional one gram of carbohydrates if you have cheese on your salad. The side salad comes in at 5 carbs. The blue cheese dressing and the oil and vinegar dressing have zero carbs per 2 tablespoons, while the ranch and Caesar have one carb.
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