Greg's Running Blog

Today was the last day of my son’s soccer camp and for the past four days I’ve been eating lunch with him at various places. Monday we went to McDonald’s, a place where he’s only been about 3 times in his entire life. Tuesday I took him to my favorite lunch spot, a Thai restaurant where he had his very first Pad Thai and he liked it a lot. Wednesday we went to another favorite of mine, Chipotle, and he got a taste of their chicken quesadillas. For some reason today he said he wanted to eat Chick-fil-A. It was a really odd request as he’s only been to Chick-fil-A about as many times as he’s been to McDonald’s which is not many. I wasn’t even sure if he knew what Chick-fil-A was serving.

Since he told me about his lunch plan in the morning I had plenty of time to look up their nutrition information and calorie counts on the Chick-fil-A website. Since their menu is rather simple it was very easy to make my choices. I knew that i would not eat anything that was fried so that left me with their grilled chicken options which were two sandwiches, one with cheese and bacon and one without and two salads, one with fruits and one without.

I carefully weighed the calorie count and decided that I would have a salad for good filler and good volume and I would also eat a chicken sandwich for taste and some more carbs. The two salad options were Chargrilled & Fruit Salad or the Chargrilled Chicken Garden Salad. If you look on the nutrition page the fruit salad is 230 calories and boasts 17 grams of sugar while the plain chicken salad is a mere 180 calories and only 6 grams of sugar. So you would naturally say that the fruit salad is the worse choice and you would opt for the regular salad. But those extra 9 grams of sugar all come from healthy fruits such as strawberries, apple, grapes and mandarin oranges. So it’s a bunch of healthy stuff. And the story doesn’t end here.

What Chick-fil-A doesn’t make apparent at this point is that this calorie count does not include the dressing, croutons, sunflower seeds, granola or whatever else you might end up putting on the salad. The fruit salad comes with Harvest Nut Granola (60 calories per serving, 2 grams of fiber) while the garden salad comes with Butter Garlic Croutons (60 calories, no fiber) and Honey Roasted Sunflower Seeds (90 calories). So once you put all the add-ons onto the salads the fruit salad is sitting at 270 calories while the garden salad is up to 330 calories. So at this point the Fruit salad certainly looks like a better choice in terms of calories. but the story doesn’t end here.

We still have to add salad dressing to the equation. If you go with Ranch or Caesar dressing you just added another 160 calories to either of these two salads. If you opt for the Light Italian dressing you’re only adding 15 calories to your salad. The fruit salad comes with the Reduced Fat Berry Balsamic Vinaigrette which clocks in at 70 calories per serving, but you can certainly opt for something else. So if you get the Fruit salad as listed, with the balsamic viegarette,  it would be a total of 340 calories for the salad. If you ordered the garden salad with ranch it would be 490 calories while if you opt for the light Italian you’d be at 345 calories. At this point I have decided to go with the fruit salad and the balsamic vinaigrette for a total of 340 calories. But the story doesn’t end here.

For the sandwich I chose the Chargrilled Chicken Club, with bacon and cheese for 410 calories. But it’s only 410 calories if you skip the Honey Roasted BBQ Sauce packet that comes with it whether you want it or not. That small packet of BBQ sauce adds 60 calories to the sandwich if you choose to squeeze it on there. I decided ahead of time that I would not use the packet and only eat the sandwich. So I was ready to go in and eat 750 calories for my lunch which is not a terrible amount of calories if you’re eating 2,300 calories a day. It’s actually quite a healthy amount of calorie with decent macronutrient breakdown. But the story doesn’t end here.

Once I ordered my salad and sandwich, to my surprise, they not only gave me the salad, the sandwich, the BBQ packet, the salad dressing and the granola packet but they also threw in the sunflower seeds, which were clearly not listed as an ingredient on their website. They have clearly just “supersized” my lunch by adding another 90 calories to it with a mere 0.5 oz of sunflower seeds that most people would not even notice whether they ate it or not. But that wasn’t even the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was the salad dressing. The size of the packet was something that could serve a family of four and the label clearly mentioned it. Serving size: 2 tbsp (37g), Servings Per Container: about 2.0. So Chick-fil-A just gave me an extra 70 calories worth of salad dressing which would be invisible to the casual observer. Had I opted for the 160 calories per serving (a serving of Ranch is only 30 grams vs. the 37 grams of the vinaigrette) Ranch Dressing I’d be in the hole for another 160 calories. So that 180 calorie garden salad can end up being a 650 calorie meal once you factor in the croutons, sunflower seeds and the two servings of Ranch dressing that you’ll receive whether you want it or not.

Don’t misunderstand me, I really like the fact that every addition is clearly labeled with calorie content and that Chick-fil-A lists all this on their website and the separate packets give you the option to have a 180 calorie salad or a 650 calorie salad but it’s a minefield and a danger zone for the casual observer. I’d also mention that they list no sandwich on their menu that would beat the 650 calorie salad monstrosity in calories, not even their most calorie dense Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich can top that with its measly 580 calories. And let’s not forget that while the Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich contains an impressive 27 grams of fat, 8 of which are saturated and 9 grams of sugar that dream garden salad with double ranch (who could stop at half a packet I mean one packet is one serving, right?) dwarfs those numbers with a whopping 49 grams of fat, 9.5 of which are saturated, and 10 grams of sugar. And if you’d think that at least you’re getting some fiber if you go with the salad, think again as it’s only 1 gram more fiber vs. the Spicy Deluxe Sandwich with 5 grams vs. 4 grams.

I have enjoyed my lunch at Chick-fil-A today despite all the horrors that I have witnessed, but it just shows that if you’re serious about controlling your weight you have to be on the absolute lookout for yourself as everywhere you go things will try to sabotage your every move towards healthier eating.

Just for the record, I actually ended up eating the Fruit Salad with only 14 grams (less than half a serving) of the Berry Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing, I didn’t eat the granola nor the sunflower seeds and I had the Chargrilled Chicken Club Sandwich sans BBQ sauce for a total of 664 calories. As for my son? He was very happy with his two strips of fried chicken, waffle potato fries and Milk for a total of 650 calories. It’s kind of shocking to see that he ate as much as I did and this is the very reason why he’s only been there 3-4 times in his lifetime which is not much fewer than the times I happened to end up there.