Eating Healthy and Travel

I just realized this is timely for many people who are traveling this upcoming holiday, but it’s on my mind because we just got back from a weekend trip.

Travel is another hard area for me.  I love traveling and part of the fun for me is eating out and picking up gas station snacks.  Plus when we are visiting friends or family, I don’t have control of the menu.  Here are a few tips I have picked up and ideas I’ve had (though we won’t talk about well I implement them):

• Water, drink more, and buy it if you have to. *Anecdote below
• Take snacks with you.  This trip, I took along granola bars and Hershey kisses (the lowest point chocolate I’ve found).  It definitely helps me with the temptation to buy candy bars.
• Take healthy food with you.  I take cereal that I always eat at home.  I hate using points on breakfast.  I don’t love most breakfast foods, and the ones I do like are high in calories and fat.  Depending on the length of the trip, I pack a cooler and take sandwich stuff, carrots and fruit along too.  That gets complicated with replenishing ice and if you are stopping at more than one location, but sometimes it’s worth it.
• McDonald’s Ice Cream Cones.  Yummy, low-cal, low-fat, inexpensive and the cone seems to cleanse the palate so that you are not left craving more.  We get plain sundaes for Bethany because they are less messy.  When we’ve been on the road a long time and nothing else sounds good, these hit the spot.
• Grilled chicken sandwiches and salad.  I like Wendy’s (their Grilled Chicken sandwich has a low point Honey Mustard sauce) but most fast places have these now.  Just make sure to get reduced fat dressing and small salads that are primarily vegetables, not fattened up with cheese, eggs, bacon and other yummy things.
• Control your portions.  When you don’t have control over what you are eating, try to control your portion sizes and load up if there are fruit or vegetable dishes.  Now, when it comes to my grandma’s chicken noodles and mashed potatoes, this advice flies right out the window.
• Set yourself up for success.  Do some research on your route, and plan your stops.  Beware of what you buy at the grocery store ahead of time, trying to save money.  I have shot myself in the foot by buying snacks that I know we’d like on the road, disregarding the fact that they are high calorie/high fat foods I wouldn’t keep in the house.  A bag of chips might be cheaper than French fries but it’s isn’t any better for my diet. :P
• Discipline and Endurance.  I need more of this when traveling then I do at home.  There is so much more temptation driving down the road then there is at home, where I would have to load up the girls and seek it out.  Decide before you go to make good decisions, and plan a couple of splurges if it will make the trip more fun for you. ;)

Feel free to chime in with your own favorite ways to cut calories or dollars while traveling.

*Buying water – I personally feel compelled to buy something if I stop at a gas station to use their restroom.  My mom says she taught me this because we usually traveled on minor highways and several times she saw signs at the gas stations that said “If you want us to be here the next time you are, please buy something”.  (That’s probably not a direct quote, but you get the idea.)  For years I bought a Pepsi, even if I didn’t really want one.  It finally occurred to me that if I really wanted water, it is ok to pay for a bottle.  At some point my health needs to matter more than money.  When I travel with Al, we try to utilize rest areas to avoid extra expenses, or fill up the gas tank instead of buying snacks.

Breastfeeding and My Weight Loss – Totally Cheating

***Disclaimer: Every woman is different.  If you choose to breastfeed, you will have to balance your individual needs.  My attitude on this topic is totally derived from my current experience with my own diet.***

In my case, losing weight while breastfeeding is incredibly easy.  My status as “milk cow” raises my metabolism significantly.  (I am very grateful for my supply.  Finally, my body excels at something physical!)  When I decided to go back on Weight Watchers a couple of months ago, my friend recommended that I be aware of cutting back my diet too drastically for fear of jeopardizing my milk supply.  So I tracked my diet for a couple of weeks once my weight had stabilized, just to see how much I was consuming.  Then I cut back a little until I started losing 1-2 pounds a week.  Since that’s a healthy amount to be losing, and my milk supply is good, I am comfortable with the amount of points I am using.

So, just for fun, I checked to see how many points I should be allowed at my current weight if I weren’t breastfeeding.  Are you ready?  24 daily, plus 35 weekly flex points.  How much am I actually allowing myself?  50 daily, plus 35 flex points.  This is why I’m totally cheating.  This is also why I am not going to feel guilty about eating some of that leftover cake.

Now talk to me in 7 months when I am done nursing…  That is going to be one hard transition!

Can I Afford It? Food as a Status Symbol

I grew up in a family of 6.  My dad was a pastor and my mom was a stay-at-home mom.  We had no money.  Really the churches provided houses and we always had food and clothes and school supplies and things beyond our basic needs.  But junk food and eating out were not in the budget.  Then my oldest brother started working a part-time job, and with some of his hard earned money, he would bring home Ding-Dongs and Pepsi.  Or Ice Cream and Pepsi.  And, oh my, what a party we had!  Somewhere along the line, I developed a mindset that the only reason we didn’t eat out or buy junk food was because we couldn’t afford it.

So when I started making money, food became a status symbol to me.  I could afford to eat out or buy donuts and Pepsi for breakfast on my way to school.  It reminds me of times past, when being overweight was a sign that a man could provide himself and his family as much food as they wanted.  Overcoming this attitude is difficult for me.

This is a double whammy issue for me too.  When we talk about our budget and say we don’t have any more money to eat out, it stirs my emotions and makes me want to eat out all that much more.  I don’t even want to think about how much of our credit card debt came from eating out when we thought we could afford it.

It should not matter if we have money to eat out.  For the sake of my health, I can not afford to eat out all the time or keep a lot of junk food in the house.

Why It Seems Normal: Eating Out

When I was in high school, I worked at Wendy’s.  When I was in college, I waitressed at a steakhouse.  I saw a constant stream of people eating hamburgers, fried chicken, French fries, steaks, ribs, “Texas-sized” plates of yummy food.  Eating out seems very normal to me.  Doesn’t everyone eat out every day? What? No?  Huh. Weird.

And then there’s the Gilmore Girls.  Gilmore Girls is a fun TV show featuring a mother-daughter relationship.  These two beautiful, skinny women are portrayed as eating out every day and lacking basic cooking skills.  They eat pop tarts for breakfast and frequent the local diner.  Eventually the writers acknowledge this impossibility by having other characters commenting “how can anyone eat like that”, “they should be 500 pounds”, and “they must have incredible metabolism”.  There is also an odd dynamic with the diner owner, who chooses a very healthy diet for himself, but serves his costumers typical diner food.  He often tries to discourage the Gilmores from ordering hamburgers, French fries and other unhealthy food on his menu.

Not that the writers of Gilmore Girls are alone.  The media bombards us with food.  Movies and TV shows of skinny-mini people on the go, whose “important” lives do not leave them time to eat healthy.  Commercials for restaurants serving every yummy food imaginable.  But then they tell us we are only beautiful if we are a size 2 dress.  No wonder so many of us have issues with food and body image.  All I can say is Praise God for the Biggest Loser.  It’s about time someone addressed these issues so boldly. But that’s a topic for another night.

Because eating out was so normal to me, imagine my surprise when I found out that a regular size combo at all of my favorite fast food places contains an entire day’s worth of calories and fat.  And my favorite DQ Medium Blizzard is almost an entire day’s worth of calories and fat all by itself.  Crazy. That is Crazy.  Needless to say, I have had to realize that eating out should not be a regular part of my diet.

*Note: I have not given up fast food and Blizzards entirely.  We seems to go through phases where we eat out a lot and then phases where we don't eat out much.  It's one of my harder issue, both from a healthy diet view and also from a financial aspect.

Why I Love the Weight Watchers System

I should clarify.  I am not officially on Weight Watchers.  I use their calculations for points and track everything in a spreadsheet.  

I love the WW system for several reasons:

• Some people seem to naturally know how much is too much food.  I have never been one of them. WW gives me a framework for deciding how much to eat every day.  
• I never knew that 3 mounds of mashed potatoes (~ 3 cups) was not “1 serving”.  Calculating points makes me very aware of standard serving sizes.
• What? I can’t eat McDonald’s for lunch AND Wendy’s for dinner? Using points encourages me to eat lower point meals before or after a high point meal.  *See anecdote below
• Adding points to 25 is a lot easier than tracking calories to 1500 in a day, especially with my (self-diagnosed) dyslexia.

Other good elements of the official program:

• Accountability – Weekly meetings give you an opportunity to talk about how the week went and receive encouragement that helps you keep going.  I have a friend that’s been through WW, and I made her my accountability partner just by bringing up the topic whenever we happen to be together, which is often because our kids play really well together.
• Official Weekly Weigh-ins – This helps keep you off the scale all day every day and alleviates stress.  After the first couple of weeks, I realized my weight fluctuates during the day and throughout the week.  But only the official weekly weight counts, so I stopped obsessing all week when it didn’t really matter.  I picked a day of the week to always take my official weight, and that’s the only number that I keep in my records.
• Tips and Recipes – Again, this is where my friend substituted for the official program.  She is really great because she helped me brainstorm foods I like (have I mentioned I’m *cough* kinda picky…?)  and helped me figure out how they could work within WW.  I’m guessing WW recipes wouldn’t be too helpful to me, because I don’t like cooking and I don’t like to try new foods.  I know, this is something I need to work on still.

* One of the first weeks I was serious about my weight loss, my mother-in-law came for a visit.  It came time for supper on the first day of the week, and I had used all my points earlier when we had eaten out for lunch.  I was hungry again, but I didn’t want to blow my diet so early in the week, so I decided to be creative. My mother-in-law still teases me about this “meal”:  

     ½ can of green beans (0 points)

     Mustard (0 points) spread over 2 slices of bread (½ point) then rolled up

     16 oz of tea sweetened with Splenda (0 points)

In my defense, the mustard rolls were a snack my brother Phil created when we were kids, so it was a sweet memory for me.

My Weight-Loss Journey So Far

  

May 2009

Weight: 219 lbs

Dress size: 18W (a tight fit)

This was the most I’ve ever weighed, outside of pregnancy.  

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September 2009

Weight: 199 lbs

Total Loss: 20 lbs

Dress size: Still 18W, but very loose fit

These were taken right before I “fell off the wagon”.  But a few weeks later I became pregnant, so I’m glad that I wasn’t on a strict diet.

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October 2010

Weight: 189 lbs
Total Loss: 30 lbs
Dress size: 16 (Misses again!)
During my 2nd pregnancy, I only gained about 20 lbs.  Within a week of delivery (via C-Section), I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight!  Over the summer, I lost another 10 lbs.

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Next Goal:

A couple of weeks ago, I made a New Year's Resolution to lose 10 more pounds by New Year's Day, which was 10 weeks away.  I've lost 3 lbs in 2 weeks so far!

My Weight-Gain Journey

1995, Size 8

I have never felt thin or graceful or athletic.  Growing up, I dreaded P.E.  I didn’t enjoy walking, much less running, and I wasn’t very good at sports.  I wasn’t overweight until college, but even as a size 8 in high school, I thought I was fat.  I know that is crazy.  Looking at my pictures from back then, I can see I was thin.  But when I already felt fat, it was easy to not care about 5 more pounds, or 5 more pounds, or 5 more…etc.  When I was 19 years old and dating Al, I was a size 10.  When I was 20, my wedding dress was a size 14.

1997, Size 10

When I was 24, I quit my restaurant job and gained 10 lbs in a month due to decreased activity.  That put me over 190 lbs and I was a size 16.  I had my first baby at age 29, lost all my baby weight in the first 6 months, but gained a lot of it back when I stopped nursing.  That put me around 215-220, size 18 Women’s.  That was when I heard a friend's weight-loss story, and with her help and inspiration, I started my weight-loss journey.

Top Picture: Dancing with my Dad at my brother's wedding. It was a great day! (Not to mention the best hair day I've ever had, hehehe.)

Bottom Picture: Al & I when we were first dating.  Notice my dark blue nail polish? You have to love fads.