Sonic Drive-in restaurants try to capture the essence of days gone by. If you don’t look too closely, you might get a sense that they embrace a healthy lifestyle. After all, their servers bring your meal to your window while gliding around on roller skates or roller blades.
After reviewing the menu, I’m gonna give you my bottom line assessment up front: Run away. Don’t do it. Not even in a pinch.
With very little effort, you can eat more than an entire day’s worth of calories in one sitting at Sonic. But it’s not just the calorie count you need to worry about. A lot of those calories are coming from fat, including saturated fat. Their burgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken products are also heavy in sodium content. Sonic doesn’t offer a single, solitary salad.
If you absolutely HAD to eat something, and you had absolutely no other options, limit yourself to the Junior Breakfast Burrito. Seriously, that’s really the only thing on the menu that I can suggest. Even so, that one little burrito is 280 calories– half of that is from fat, including 7 grams of saturated fat. And if you’re craving a little something to drink after downing that 5-bite meal, it could be because you just consumed 830mg of sodium– more than 1/3 of the maximum daily recommended amount.
Even the seemingly healthy Classic Chicken Sandwich-Grilled has a respectable 450 calories, 150 of those from fat. But it has 1240mg of sodium. If you have high blood pressure, this can wreak havoc on your body.
Sonic is known for its fun, brightly-colored drinks, and those aren’t much better when it comes to packing on the calories. You could treat yourself to a small Pineapple or Strawberry Real Fruit Slush. Those are only 190 calories, with no fat, and low sodium. It does have 50 grams of sugar, but a girl’s gotta live a little. A small Frozen Lemonade has similar stats.
Ultimately, in this day and age, we ARE going to eat out once in while. For some of us, it’s a lot more than once in a while. Knowledge is power– when you’re armed with information and know in advance what you’re going to order, all those brightly colored photos will have no power to tempt your tastebuds.
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