The other day at my work, we had a "free chipotle day". I was SOO excited!! Basically, you could get any type of burrito or bowl you wanted - even with double meat and/or guacamole and then at the register you just had to show your Piper badge and it was free! Yay!!
The first Chipotle was in downtown Denver, CO in 1993 so by the time I went to high school in Thornton, CO (just north of Denver) in 2000 they were a pretty big hit. There were several around town and they were very popular. We went often at lunch from school because they offered a free drink. Plus, I usually just got chicken and cheese with a little rice and they would often charge me only $3 for a quesadilla - what a deal! Thus was born my first "favorite" chipotle meal:
Wowzers - 750 calories??!! When I moved to Florida to go to college, I was so upset that there wasn't a Chipotle in our area. But at 750 calories for my burrito (or more since I usually asked for a LOT of extra cheese), it's probably a good thing I didn't. I eventually started getting more opportunities to eat at Chipotle and they built one near my work so I quickly decided I needed a healthier option. So, I switched to a bowl and added a few ingredients to make up for missing the tortilla that I liked so much. The thing about a bowl is somehow it's much easier to just eat half when you can see where the half way point is on the bowl
Not too bad right? Dropped to 675 calories if I ate the entire thing but I was only eating half so I was right at around 390 calories. This became my new favorite for quite a while. Still a little high in calories carbs. So I decided to drop the rice and add fajita veggies and beans.
In my quest to keep eating healthier, I wanted to try even harder to get lower calorie and more protein. For lunch, I'm always aiming for around 300 calories but to get 30 grams of protein (40% of my calories would be from protein that way). Well I went to double chicken and dropped even more ingredients out and I think I finally found a winner. It's funny that I started with only a couple of ingredients, added a whole bunch more and then removed most of them to end up back at only a couple things again.
Keep in mind that I'm still only eating half of the bowl each time - so that leaves me with 290 calories and 38g of Protein...wahoo! And it was still just as tasty :) Now I did read some articles about portion sizes and caloric estimates from restaurants that said Chipotle was often under on calories by up to 100 calories per burrito or bowl (so that would be 50 calories per meal if you split the bowl) but even with an extra 50 calories this is still a pretty decent meal. So happy I found something at Chipotle that meets my needs nutrition-wise and is just as delicious as my old favorites!
Anyone else as obsessed with Chipotle as I am?
Anyone else as obsessed with Chipotle as I am?
