I was out with my wife Angela and step-daughter Raeann last Saturday and we decided on Chipotle for lunch.  Chipotle is a favorite of mine because I can choose a burrito bowl which is sans tortilla and feel like I have made a great nutrition decision.  Or have I?

When we entered the restaraunt, Raeann noticed a brown card with nutritional information on it.  I scanned down the list of ingredients and started adding up calories in my head.  Wow.  For someone my size with my height, weight and activity level, my calorie intake per meal should be around 550 calories with a couple of snacks during the day of about 200 calories.  I know 550 sounds like a lot but when you start adding up the contents of a burrito bowl, it is small by comparison.  Some interesting items that I found are:

• The chicken, beef and carnitas all have the same number of calories for the same portion size (190 calories per 4oz.).  How can that be?
• The 120 calories for brown-rice doesn’t sound bad until you realize it is only 3 ounces.  I’m just guessing but I would say they are probably putting about 5 times that in the buttito bowl.
• Guacamole is a good fat to choose but again, it is 150 calories for 3.5 oz.  The big spoonful they give you when you request guacamole is way more than 3.5 oz.

While I applaud Chipotle for supplying this information, the problem is that there is no serving size.  The oz. they have chosen are just random numbers and not actual serving sizes. 

So as I stood in line, I had to do some fast thinking and calculating.  First, I decided to forego any kind of meat (even though I love meat) because I was still wondering how chicken and beef can have the same number of calories.  I decided instead on the vegetarian bowl because I figured I would still get my protein from the black beans and cheese.  So, I had my brown rice, my black beans and the fajita veggies (onions and peppers) along with green-chili salsa (less calories and fortunately is my favorite anyway), lettuce, cheese and guacamole. 

My vegetarian burrito bowl with unsweet tea

Now since they put a ton of rice in the bowl and it was on the bottom, I creatively ate everything off the top and just grazed the rice.  That way, I left probably more than half of the rice in the bottom of the bowl and didn’t eat it.  I also moved about half of the guacamole to one side.  I found that even with the rice and guac that I didn’t eat, I was very satisfied by the end of the meal.  It was an eye opening experience and really shows how vigilant you must be to make sure you don’t sabotage yourself!