Posted by You can enjoy it even when you’re trying to lose weight! But you gotta know what you’re doing. Always remember that you cannot spell “Cheesecake Factory” without the letters “C” and “F”
My sister was impressed with my weight loss success. A couple weeks ago she sent me a pair of jeans as a gift.
She also sent me a gift receipt in the event that the jeans didn’t fit or I didn’t like the style, and I could exchange them for a gift card and get something else I might like. Which was great, because they didn’t fit and I didn’t like the style.
The retailer was Nordstrom Rack. I went there with my family on Sunday to exchange the jeans. I now have a gift card I can use at Nordstrom Rack or the regular Nordstrom store. I have my eye on some dress shoes I will need soon.
But the point of this post is to discuss where we went along the way to fulfill this exchange.
As a family we like to go out for breakfast or brunch together on the weekends. Typically it’s a Greek restaurant or a breakfast-and-lunch place. But the location of the Nordstrom Rack presented a rare opportunity for us.
We love The Cheesecake Factory (shortened to CF for the remainder of this post). There is only one CF in the metropolitan area where we live, and it is in a large commercial area full of indoor and outdoor shopping malls. The Nordstrom Rack is in one of the outdoor malls. The CF is in one wing of the giant indoor mall across the road (and actually next to a regular Nordstrom which is an anchor store in this mall).
We had been to this CF before—back before I started seriously trying too lose weight. This was after going to CFs in Chicago (Michigan Avenue, under the John Hancock building) and in another mall in another town near where I used to live.
But this time my wife and I were going to be smart about what were going to eat, especially for dessert. After all, we were only going there as part of a mission to exchange a gift that I had gotten for losing lots of weight. I was going show gratitude to my sister by eating at The Cheesecake Factory. Think about that for a moment, what a grateful brother I am.
No, seriously. I am going to show you that CF can be good for weight management and for health and well-being generally. Just bear with me here—and don’t let the graph at the top of the post freak you out.
The CF Menu—No turquoise venison as an orderable item, but the whole thing is a TL/DR
This particular CF has three entrances: one accessible directly from the parking lot, another from the vestibule between the two sets of doors leading into a passageway that takes you into the mall, and a third from the interior of the mall proper. All three have the menu board pictures above.
Aside from the fact that the CF menu is gargantuan, this menu board shows the prices of all the items (which is great—I hate places that show a menu and don’t list the prices).
What it doesn’t show are the calorie counts for all the items. I actually think that is fair, considering that the wall of text that is the CF menu on a single sheet of paper is plenty busy enough. However, once you actually enter the CF, you will find that the calories are not only available but are prominently displayed—not just on the tables de menus, but in the cheesecake display next to the host’s stand.
The last time I had been at CF, I didn’t remember calories appearing on the menus or in the bakery display, except for perhaps the “healthy” menu choices. It is possible they had been there all along and I had forgotten it after so long.
But I kind of doubt it, because this time when I saw the numbers on the nameplates next to the cheesecakes in the glass display, I was in a state of shock.
Cheesecake Pictures (no trigger warning here—y’all had fair warning before clicking on this post)
I turned to my wife and asked, “This is for the whole cake, right? This can’t be just one slice, right?”
Nope. That’s a per-slice calorie count, friends. Confirmed on pages 19 and 20 of the tableside menu—and where else besides CF do you see a menu with page numbers on it?—we see the calorie counts for the cheesecake slices that you see in the graph at the top of the post.
Each cheesecake has 12 slices. You can buy whole cheesecakes and carry them out, of course. If you buy an Oreo Dream Extreme for your holiday gathering, you will be carrying 19,440 calories out to your car (along with 1,118 g fat, 2,124 g carb and 1,596 g sugar—that’s 2 1/2 pounds of fat and 3 1/2 pounds of sugar). On the bright side, if it is indeed the holidays, and you buy it from this particular CF at the mall, you will have to park in the back of the mall parking lot and will burn off more calories than usual in getting it home—which should turn your ensuing “cheat” week into a “maintenance” one. 🤣
But actually, my wife and I had a plan going in. We would get only one slice to share amongst the four of us. I’d let my son (4) and daughter (3) have as much as they wanted. I would only have a bite or two.
In the end, our saving grace was the Low Carb Cheesecake with Strawberries, which is only 620 calories per slice (55 g fat;, 8 g sugar; 44 g carb including 11 g fiber for a net carb count of 33 g).
That’s the low carb cheesecake there. My wife actually insisted on eating this because she ate too much bread during the meal (more on that in a minute).
I will put it to you that this cheesecake is one of the best I have enjoyed at CF. I actually liked it better than most of the conventional cheesecakes that require you to open an entire bag of cane sugar and empty it into a giant mixing bowl in order to manufacture a single 12-slice wheel.
I believe this happened in part because I largely quit eating sugar that I didn’t have to as part of my new eating habit. I quit drinking pop (soda in other parts of the country), both sugared and diet; and I quit eating cereal and muffins and doughnuts for breakfast. I started eating Greek yogurt without sweeteners and gotten used to it. So eventually I didn’t have the intense craving for it that I used to.
The sweetness of the Splenda cheesecake is different than that of the sugared cheesecakes. It’s more subtle. One thing I liked was that my teeth didn’t feel like they were rotting in real time, like they would if I ate the sugared stuff.
My wife split about three quarters of it, and my son had a few bites (including the fresh strawberries which he likes). My daughter eats nothing but bacon and Go-Go Squeez and wasn’t interested. CF needs to create a bacon cheesecake.
The rest of the menu
Well, it’s huge as I’ve said before. But there’s something for everyone.
Along with the book that serves as a menu, they have a large “Skinnylicious” menu. Lots of things are under 600 calories.
I asked the waitress how they pulled them off and she told me that in a lot of cases they shrink the portion sizes from what they normally are on the menu. I think that actually means you get a “normal” portion, similar to what you might prepare for yourself at home, instead of a typical monster portions associated with the normal menu. She told me the Skinnylicious hamburger was 4-5 ounces as opposed to the conventional one which is about 10 ounces.
If you are going to have dessert there—and hopefully you will; if you’re at CF and skipping dessert that means you’re there against your will and probably miserable on the inside—then you may want to do a Skinnylicious entree. This is especially true if you are sharing an appetizer or grubbing on the free bread—or both. Think about the stacking up of calories if you fashion yourself a multi-course meal consisting of bread, appetizer, entree, dessert… If your beverage is something not non-caloric, you get to add that too. We could be taking totals greater than the sexiest of prizes that Healthy Wage likes to advertise.
One downside of Skinnylicious is that most of the entrees are almost as expensive as the conventional ones, and they are substantially smaller. If that bothers you and you are dining with a friend, consider splitting an entree with your friend and you can both cut your calories down for less money.
My wife and I actually did not follow the advice I just gave. I got a relatively new item called Brick Chicken, which is a roasted half chicken with roasted potatoes, onions, and peppers. It comes with a green verde sauce on the side (not pictured here).
It’s about 1,120 kcal (not on their PDF yet) which isn’t terrific but not too bad either compared to a lot of other menu items.
It tasted great. A little spicy, which I liked. It did not need salt. This morning my weight was up and I think it was water weight from this dish. But it was very good.
My wife had the Carne Asada steak (1,260 kcal).
Next time I go, if I don’t do the Skinnylicious menu, I’ll try some of the steaks, which can be under 1,000 kcal; or maybe omelettes, which are always great. Maybe..,
Coda
In the end, though, you have to forget about most of what I just wrote and remember why you have chosen to go to a place like CF to begin with. Because it isn’t an everyday restaurant experience.
At CF—or CP, the greatest restaurant in the world, and worthy of a future post—you are there to enjoy the company of friends and loved ones. So you have to prioritize that and not worry too much about the caloric damage.
This is pretty good advice, and so is this.
What I will add to that is: you can get high quality bread just about anywhere, but a Godiva chocolate cheesecake is a rare treat indeed. Sure, it has 1,400 calories and 4-6 times the recommended daily intake for sugar—but that’s only if you eat the entire thing. Sharing is caring.
Have a snack at lunchtime, get in the car with your friends, go in there, order some fancy drinks (or H-two-oh), split a couple of entrees, and draw lots to on whether y’all get the Cinnabon or the Red Velvet.
As for me, I need to head back to the Nordstrom at some point to get my shoes. I am going to wait until my second Healthy Wager is finished, however. Expect a picture of my phone showing the mobile app, with the “shattered glass” dashboard on display, next to a slice of Celebration.
Merry Christmas in advance…
Weight Betting Odds 