Last week I made my weekly run to the Chipotle down the road for a lunchtime burrito. Instead of getting a diet Pepsi from the vending machine at work I got a Nantucket Nectars Pomegranate Cherry from Chipotle because I want something more “healthy” and I felt like a juice anyway. I took a look at the nutrition label. I forget the exact amount but it was something like 260 calories :eek: . It might be healthy but damn that seems like a lot of calories for a drink. Today I check the Chipotle website nutritional information page. 290 calories for just a flour tortilla. :eek: !
My usuals are either a chicken burrito with pinto beans or a chicken fajita burrito.
So a chicken burrito (cals): flour tortilla (290), rice (130) pinto beans (120), chicken (190), red tomatillo salsa (40), cheese (100) sour cream (120). Total: 990 calories. My chicken burrito plus the Nantucket nectars is like 1250 calories. No wonder I’m nodding off. Substituting fajita veggies (20) instead of beans knocks off 100 calories. I guess the sour cream and cheese can go too. sniff. My fully loaded chicken burrito is around 2 nice slices of NY pizza, I figure.
So here I am picking at a bowl - rice (130), chicken (120), fajita veggies (20), green tomatillo salsa (15) and a diet Pepsi (0). total 285 cals. I’ll probably burn it off pushing away from my desk. Sure would be nice to have some sour cream in there to take the edge off :(.
A website called peertrainer has even higher values for the Chipotle stuff. The burrito above would be 1185 cals.
I’ve been working out some, so I’m trying to pay a little more attention to these things these days.
Let me plug the calorie counter that some of us Dopers are using for weight control, sparkpeople dot com.
I find that if I track what I eat, then I just eat less. I don’t do it to restrict my food, but I notice that certain foods fill me up more if I am not just eating on automatic.
I highly recommend tracking your food and liquid intake. It is amazing what high calories some restaurant food is. I was blown away when I found out how many calories things like bread and tortillas have! The ‘wraps’ are much worse for you than the same thing on a bun, in most cases! Conversely, seeing how few calories tomatoes and mushrooms and asparagus have is really interesting. I love tomatoes! I could eat a whole gallon, and still come in less than a single PB&J or ham & cheese sandwich!
Yeah, did it not occur to you when they handed you a burrito the size of your head that maybe that’s a little more than you should be eating at one go?
That’s always the hardest thing for me. I usually end up eating the whole of whatever’s in front of me, unless I feel stuffed. I’m a lifetime member of the clean plate club.
Chipotle burritos never struck me as being overly large. I think they’re kind of small compared to a lot of other places. At least I’ve never looked at one and thought ‘man, I’ll never finish that’.
I adore Chipotle! I am formerly obese (maintaining a 70lb weight loss for 5+ years) and Chipotle is one of the few “fast food” places I go to. I always get the chicken bol no beans, extra lettuce, 2 scoops of pico de gallo and a side order of guac (which I split with my husband).
Approx. 500 calories and I think their chicken is FANTASTIC!
But yeah, restaurant/fast food calorie counts are often a shocker. After calorie counting for 6+ years, I got a shock at Claimjumper’s recently. Now, I know this place is no bastion to healthy eating. I always get the BBQ chicken salad with dressing on the side and it’s a pretty tasty low cal option. I got sticker shocked by the “mini indulgence red velvet cupcake.”
I was sad and horrified to see what I thought was a VERY REASONABLY sized dessert - the mini indulgence red velvet cupcake was 800 calories. It is a **small **cupcake. In my head, I figured it was 300-400 calories (comparing it to a big muffin from Starbucks). I also mentally compared it to the little desserts from PF Chang’s (they’ve had their nutritional info posted for years) and are around 200 calories.
I have ordered them in the past thinking - oh it’s so small, I had a small dinner, this will fit into my calorie range for the day.
And I know, it’s everyone’s responsibility to be informed, but some places just refused to post their info until recently. How can any person guess that a little cupcake could be 800 calories? I thought I was pretty calorie-savvy, but it was a shocker to me.
Sometimes I get a vegetarian bowl, which a bowl with rice, fajita veggies, sour cream, cheese, and guac: 540 calories. Sometimes I get chicken instead of guacamole, which is 580 calories. I then eat half at lunch and half midway through the afternoon. I could easily make this healthier by getting lettuce instead of rice, skipping either sour cream or cheese, etc. but I figure it’s not bad where it’s at.
Chipotle only has to be ungodly unhealthy if you want it to be. Obviously a tortilla as large as a giant pizza is going to be full of calories, so are things like sour cream, cheese, and guacamole.
Much like Glory, I’ve also been calorie counting lately and it’s pretty astonishing how bad fast food is for you. Chipotle is just about the only fast food that isn’t a total diet killer, so long as you do it right.
Seriously? Those fuckers are enormous and heavy to boot! I mean, granted, compared to the local Mexican place’s “EL GRANDE HUGE MEGA!” burrito they tout (which is a few thousand calories and like, 5 servings), it’s small, but uh. . .that thing is big by normal standards.
I’ve always gotten the vegetarian black bean burrito there, and it isn’t too heavy, probably thanks to being veggy. And instead of loading it up with sour cream, instead I give it green chili and, what else, chipotle Tabasco sauce. I must have just slashed a few hundred calories right there.
The vegetarian bowl sounds enticing and I must have it next time I’m there.
Probably more like 1200-1500 on a daily basis - I do have a sweet tooth that drives me to chocolate. I’m a fairly small woman who doesn’t get a lot of exercise. But I seldom eat breakfast, eat about 350 calories for lunch, snack when I get home, eat a light dinner, then snack before bed. Snacks tend to be things like cheese or yogurt.
I then go out to eat and splurge though.
If I eat much more than that, I put on weight. Then I have to eat less than that to take it off. I don’t like to do that, because I don’t eat much.
The thing I felt betrayed on was Pretzels.
I thought I was being good, No cookies, no chips, no candy just good healthy Pretzles with low fat, and I don;t care about salt.
But, now they are big sticks of super processed white wheat which is now about as healthy as deep fried plutonium apparently, as the worst kind of calories imaginable
Wait a bit Wolfie White wheat will be healthy again…Eggs? Used to be bad. Butter? Used to be bad. Margarine? Used to be good, now it’s bad. Alcohol? Good…then Very Bad…now Very Good. Sugar? Bad…now better than HFCS. HFCS bad? It’s only 2% different that sugar…Saccarine? Cancer on a spoon…now, not so much. But now we have Stevia, Splenda, and a host of others!
Just before I had my gastric bypass, I had one of my Last Meals at Chipotle. Never have I had food poisoning that bad…both ends, all night long. Now, when I couldn’t eat a whole one of those things in under two days, I never ever want to eat there again, so it’s all good.
I should have been warned. My daughter used to work there, one fall, and got sick with a bad cold. They wouldn’t let her call off…their policy was no call-offs in the first 30 days of employment…they just fire you if you call off sick. So she went to work, and after an hour or two they would send her home. She told me everyone there was sick (cold and flu season) at some point or another, but needed the work…and were too poor to go get a doctor’s excuse for a simple bug.
So last night my mom is reading some old article about Chipotle and is intrigued, and wants me to go get her a burrito. Maybe I should tell hr about the calorie counts…
Mr. OP, and please take no offense, it seems to me that if you’re looking to be more watchful of what you eat and Chipotle surprised you that you need to be thinking less “what” and more "how much. Because the new American monster burrito should set off warning bells in your skull. Now, it’s harder to tell with food in roll form, but it does help to think in Weight Watchers terms - a serving of meat is the size of a deck of cards. No, really. A Chipotle burrito should be two meals for a normal, healthy person - not one. When you think of your food in terms of piles on your plate it may become more obvious to you exactly what you’re taking in and how much of it would really make you satisfied - if I give my boyfriend a pound of meat, he’ll eat it, happily. If I give him a little bit of meat, he’ll eat it, and if he’s still hungry he’ll have some more. Appetite-driven. Think this way.
