No kidding there, and more than once it has bitten me. Spend enough time eating restaurant meals, and a sane portion size soon seems way too small, unless you're disciplined enough to chop your portions in half and bring the rest home.

Pay-by-the-weight buffets (as opposed to all-you-can-eat) seem to offer me the best way to control portions and get a variety of healthy things to eat without the prep hassle, but it still costs a good deal more than it does for me to make my own meals.

That depends on your activity level. When I was working out 5x a week, I'd want two of the most calorie-packed things on the menu.

Sure. I'd venture a guess that maybe 1% of restaurant users have the problem of needing as many calories as possible. Everybody else needs much less.

From my broke college student mentality, they are too small for what you pay. You want twenty bucks for three hundred calories?