Weight Watchers and Panera Bread: A Safe Guide to Happy Dining

Eating out is a way of life for Americans. Restaurants can offer anything from the quick and easy to the luxurious and exotic. But large portions, rich sauces and fried food choices can really make it hard to stick to a healthy lifestyle. Weight Watchers is a terrific option for changing your habits to healthier choices and a more active lifestyle. Doing a little research and checking out some positive choices can make eating out while staying on plan a lot easier. Panera Bread is a restaurant and coffee shop known for delicious pastries, bagels and café style lunches. So can someone counting Weight Watchers points for better health find something among the starches, sugars and fats?

Absolutely!

Panera Bread offers fresh salads, sandwiches and soups for lunch and dinner and by perusing the menu, you can easily make choices that will make your Weight Watchers day delicious, satisfying, and still leave enough points for later!

The best overall menu choice is to start with the Pick Two option. This is a "choose your own adventure" meal where you can pick your own combo of two items from three categories: half sandwich, half salad, or soup. The portions are satisfying and the variety is great! In addition to the two category items you can also select a side.

So what are the healthy choices?

Salads. Panera has several light salads you can choose for just a few points. The summer seasonal favorite, the half size Strawberry Poppyseed salad is a blend of sweet summer fruits, pecans, and romaine lettuce with a fat free poppyseed dressing for around 90 calories and 1.5 grams of fat. Add chicken for just a few more calories and some additional protein. Another great choice is the half Classic salad. Mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and balsamic vinaigrette also clocks in with 90 calories and 5 grams of fat. For a few more points, you can opt for the Asian Sesame salad, served with low sugar sesame dressing.

Sandwiches. Some of the best sandwiches at Panera include the Mediterranean Veggie, with cilantro hummus, feta, cucumber, tomato and peppadew at 300 calories and 6 grams of fat and the Smoked Turkey Café Sandwich at 230 calories and 8 grams of fat. The half Chicken Salad sandwich comes in with 290 calories and 14 grams of fat. Lose the extra mayonnaise for even lower calories and fat! Taking a careful look at the ingredients on some of the other sandwiches can bring them down into the 6 and 7 point range and is worth the effort.

Soups. Panera Bread has a few soups that are available every day, and a few they serve on select days. Overall, most of these are excellent choices to round out a Pick Two healthy meal. The Low Fat Chicken Noodle, Low Fat Black Bean and Low Fat Garden Vegetable will add very few calories and fat to your meal, ranging from 90 to 160 calories and half to 2 grams of fat. The French Onion is another good choice, especially if you forgo the cheese and croutons.

Sides. Panera has a few good sides that can add to your healthy meal. The best choices are the fresh apple or the whole grain baguette. If soup is part of your Pick Two, the baguette is an excellent addition.

Eating out healthy can be tough. But checking out menus and nutritional information can really help you out. Head to www.panerabread.com to see a breakdown of all of their menu items from the decadent pastries to the fresh salads. Put in a few minutes of prep and see your healthy lifestyle blossom, even when eating out!