Tips for eating out with PKU (when you can't pre-plan)

A while back I wrote a post on tips for eating out with PKU focusing on when you are able to pre- plan. Now, as a follow- up to that I thought I would try and tackle the other side of it. Spontaneously eating out with PKU can be very difficult, but it is possible if you are ‘prepared’ to some extent. Let’s be real, unless you’re one of the most organised people on the planet, it’s just not always possible to plan every moment of every outing you go on and plus it’s nice to be able to live a little freely every now and then.

If you’re going on a day trip somewhere, there’s no harm in taking weighing scales with you. This way you will be prepared for pretty much any restaurant you visit, unless you are going to a restaurant which only serves meat. I would say that more often than not you will find something suitable on the menu (even if it’s just a salad and a side of chips!). I recently took a trip back to Lincoln to visit a friend and as I decided to catch a later train home than I had originally planned, we decided to go out for something to eat. Although situations like this have been made much simpler for me because of how relaxed my diet is, it would still be possible to do this even on a strict diet. I tend to stick to the vegetarian options (which are more likely to have less protein in), but if you are truly stuck for options then I would suggest asking if the cooks can either swap an ingredient for a more suitable one or just remove it completely.

In Florida looking very happy with salad

Growing up, I don’t recall there being many times that we went to eat out just off the cuff because it wasn’t the easiest thing for us to do. Apart from back in 2006 when my family and I went to Disneyland in Florida for two weeks – a holiday of a lifetime for us and so we weren’t going to let the complications of my PKU stand in the way. During that holiday I probably ate out with no pre- planning the most I ever have done in my life before. But we didn’t really have an alternative choice; we knew we would be out at the Disney parks all day every day and so we would definitely need to eat at some point. Also as we were going all the way over to America we didn’t really know what to expect in terms of food. I can’t really remember the specifics of what I ate, but I think it was mostly chips and a lot of fruit – not the most varied of diets, but I made it through nonetheless. I got to swim with dolphins whilst I was in America (one of my favourite animals when I was little) and this is a fond memory which I still vividly look back on now more than ten years later. So in my eyes, eating nothing but chips for a solid two weeks was completely worth it.