Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: What about Restaurants?

Eating out gets easier as you get more familiar with the diet. You'll have to learn to question the waitstaff closely to find out what's in food. I find it really helpful to do my homework before I get to a restaurant - do a search on the Board to see if anyone has anything to say about the restaurant and call ahead to explain my situation and see what they can do for me. (Never underestimate the power of the Board - I posted a while back that I was going to a Moroccan restaurant and got responses from 2 people who'd actually eaten at the very one I was going to!)

I always make sure the restaurant serves at least one safe soluble fiber food I can start with: rice, plain baked potato, plain bread, flour tortillas. Then I have that first. Mexican restaurants, for example, will bring you an order of flour tortillas as an appetizer; Chinese will bring you rice.

This topic has come up a lot, so a Search should turn up lots more info. It can be a little tricky to search on generally, since the words "eating out" and "restaurant" don't always appear in the posts. Here are a couple of old posts I know about that should help get you started:

Thread 1

Thread 2

As for fast food, it pretty much won't work for IBS. You can try searching on specific fast food chain names and see if anyone has found anything okay to eat, but it's a long shot. Other people in this thread have given you a couple of pointers. I don't know if anyone mentioned Wendy's, but I'm pretty sure you can get a baked potato there and if you get it with nothing on it, that should be okay. I've found that McDonald's, while it doesn't have anything I would eat, does serve hot tea, so I pop in there when I'm traveling to get hot water for my own herbal teabags.

In better news, you can Search on "pizza" - don't use the quotes, Diet board only, All Posts. You should find a number of hits, including one where AlyssaKaye contacted some nationwide pizza chains and found out what's in their ingredients - and got some good news! I'm nominating her for President in 2008.

HTH. Bon appetit!

--------------------
[Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. - Sandra Boynton]

Print Remind Me Notify Moderator