How to Eat Out on a Liver Cleanse: What to Order and What to Say

A liver cleanse doesn't put your life on hold for three weeks. Birthdays, work lunches and Friday dinners keep happening. Almost every restaurant can make you a plate that fits, as long as you know what to ask for. Here's how Dr. Jarod Ward thinks about food away from home, and what the research says about restaurant meals.

A typical restaurant meal runs about 1,200 calories, so the order matters

Researchers bought the most frequently ordered meals from restaurants in San Francisco, Boston and Little Rock and measured their energy content in a lab. Meals from independent restaurants averaged 1,205 calories, about the same as the big chains. American, Italian and Chinese food came in highest, at 1,495 calories on average, and 92 percent of all the meals exceeded typical energy needs for a single meal.

A lot of that comes from the extras: the bread basket, the creamy sauce, the fried side, the sweet drink. Your liver handles all of it. Dr. Jarod describes what a fast hit of sugar asks of it:

"A lot of processed foods, they spike the blood sugar so fast that the liver has to be like, oh my gosh, I gotta get this down. ... When the blood sugar is so high, the liver is like, come here, I'll scoop you in, and they throw it in the closet."

That closet is glycogen, the sugar your liver stores. The goal on a cleanse is a plate that doesn't keep refilling it.

Build the plate around a protein and vegetables

Scan the menu for a protein you recognize: fish, chicken, steak, shrimp, eggs. Then look at the sides. Most kitchens will swap the potatoes, rice or fries for another vegetable if you ask, and a side salad works almost anywhere.

The cleanse takes grains off the table along with sugar and alcohol. In Dr. Jarod's words, "we avoid the grains, we avoid the sugars, we avoid the alcohol." At a restaurant, that rules out the obvious things like pasta and sandwiches, plus the hidden ones: breading on fish, flour in a cream sauce, croutons on a salad, the tortilla under the tacos. Steakhouses, seafood places and Mediterranean menus tend to be the easiest. A burger without the bun, or a bowl built on greens, works at a lot of casual spots.

Ask for sauces and dressings on the side, because that's where sugar hides

Barbecue sauce, teriyaki, sweet chili, honey glazes, ketchup and many house vinaigrettes are built on sugar. So are some marinades, which means the sugar is cooked into the meat before it reaches your plate. Dr. Jarod points to refined sugar and flour, "your favorite sugary Starbucks drink, right? Because sugar overloads the liver."

Sauce on the side puts you in charge of how much you use, and it lets you see what you're getting. When you're not sure what's in a dish, ask. Servers field questions like this all day.

Ask how it's cooked: grilled, roasted or seared beats fried

Two questions cover most of it. Is it breaded or fried? And what does the kitchen cook with? Many restaurants cook with a blended vegetable or seed oil by default, and many will use olive oil or butter if you ask. Grilled, roasted, baked, steamed and pan-seared are the words to look for on the menu. Crispy, battered, glazed and smothered usually mean flour, sugar or a fryer.

At a party, head for the protein and the vegetables

Parties are harder than restaurants because you can't order. Look for the plain proteins, the vegetable tray and the fruit, and skip the cured meats on the charcuterie board. Dr. Jarod calls out lunch meats specifically: "They have different preservatives in them that are really not healthy for you."

Drinks are the other trap. In the Framingham Heart Study, people who drank at least one sugar-sweetened drink a day had 61 percent higher odds of fatty liver disease than people who drank none. Sparkling water with lime keeps a glass in your hand, and nobody asks what's in it. Why alcohol stays off for all three weeks is in Can You Drink Alcohol on a Liver Cleanse?

What to say when someone offers you a drink or dessert

Keep it short. People rarely push past a friendly, finished answer:

• "I'm taking three weeks off sugar and alcohol. Ask me again in three weeks."
• "No thanks, I'm good with this."
• "I'm on a three-week reset, and I feel great."

You don't owe anyone a lecture on your liver. If someone is curious, send them this post. And if a meal out doesn't go to plan, your next meal is a clean start. Why the cleanse is built this strictly is in Why Is a Liver Cleanse So Strict?, and what's worth putting on your plate at home is in Foods That Support Liver Health.

The full plan comes with the cleanse

Love Your Liver is Dr. Jarod's 21-day guided liver cleanse, and it's self-paced. The full meal plan, supplement schedule, shopping list and daily texts come with the cleanse. Your supplements ship to your door, and Day 1 starts the moment you tap start.

Prefer to start with a conversation? Dr. Jarod runs functional medicine and lab testing at Crown Chiropractic in Fort Myers. Call (239) 441-2275 to book a consultation.

Sources

• Dr. Jarod Ward, Crown Chiropractic. Liver episode on YouTube.
• Urban LE, Weber JL, Heyman MB, et al. Energy contents of frequently ordered restaurant meals and comparison with human energy requirements and USDA database information: a multisite randomized study. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 2016;116(4):590-598.
• Ma J, Fox CS, Jacques PF, et al. Sugar-sweetened beverage, diet soda, and fatty liver disease in the Framingham Heart Study cohorts. Journal of Hepatology 2015;63(2):462-469.