How I Order Takeout During a Cut

Everything you do needs an approach. With the right approach, there's no problem you can't solve.

People who work away from home and have to eat out or order takeout while cutting often struggle with meals. Eating out and ordering takeout is just hard. Apart from salad bowls, there's hardly anything worth ordering.

In my view, salad bowls are actually the most troublesome thing to order during a cut. Most of the ones on the market today are a big jumble. They mix the vegetables, the staple and the meat together, leave out the oil, and call it a diet meal. The calories aren't high, but it's very hard to quantify what you're actually eating.

When you're cutting and you order takeout or eat out, the right approach is to keep the staple and the protein separate.

Staple ➕ Lean Meat

People who are cutting eat very little fat, usually hovering around a few dozen grams a day. On a diet like that, my approach at mealtimes is to not think about fat at all. I just keep it as low as I possibly can.

What do I mean? The way I see it, apart from salad bowls, whatever you eat will come with at least some fat. If you're eating two or three eggs and a carton of milk every day, there isn't much fat left in your budget for lunch and dinner. So when you order takeout or eat out, the smartest thing is to stick to one rule: minimum fat.

So what's the staple-plus-lean-meat model? Simply put, you keep the staple and the dishes separate, and the dishes are mainly lean meat.

Here are a few typical examples. Take braised chicken with rice, long famous in fat-loss circles. Apart from a bit of skin, the chicken in it is almost all lean meat. Add the rice it comes with and you've got a standard cutting meal (just don't pour the sauce over the rice).

Following this approach, you'll find plenty of things you can order:

• Fish with pickled cabbage: fish is a great protein source, it's cooked with relatively little oil, and it's easy to drain off the oil while you eat.
• Qiaojiao beef: my recent favorite, the absolute best of the best. Very little oil, plenty of beef, and the soup has napa cabbage and carrots, which fills the vegetable gap nicely.
• Chicken leg rice: like braised chicken, long famous in fat-loss circles. You mostly find it at Shaxian snack shops, but some pork-knuckle-rice takeout places sell it too. Take the skin off the chicken leg, and add a note to the order: less oil, less salt, no sauce, extra vegetables. A cheap, tasty cutting meal.
• Hainanese chicken: a light way to cook chicken. Basically it works because chicken is mostly lean meat, with excellent protein content.
• Lanzhou beef noodles: something I often pick for lunch. Go for the clear broth, add an extra portion of beef and an egg, and it's a nice clean carbs-plus-protein combo.

Lanzhou beef noodles are actually fairly low in protein, but once you add extra meat, things change. By the same logic, though, without added meat, noodles and rice noodles don't meet the standard.

Rice bowls with toppings, the most common choice when ordinary people eat out, actually don't meet this standard at all. They're low in lean meat and often quite high in fat. On top of that, some rice bowls in Sichuan and Chongqing pack the dish and the rice together, which turns the whole thing into a sugar-and-fat mix.

Note that the key word here is lean. It matters more than you'd think, because some meats look lean but are actually pretty fatty, like guobaorou, sliced fatty beef, luncheon meat, sausages and the like.

Don't Overdo the Carbs, Don't Overdo the Fat

Whether you're ordering takeout or eating out, stick to one rule.

Don't overdo the carbs, don't overdo the fat, and eat as much lean meat as you can. If you can't get enough, find other ways to top up.

Protein powder, ready-to-eat chicken breast and so on. These are easy to carry, and you can buy them all online.