Eating on Vacation with Enjoyment and Control

Image by Quinn Kampschroer from Pixabay

I haven’t written much while we’ve been on our trip, although I hope you got the recipe in the previous post for the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, a true winner. At some point I’ll do a calculation of the sugar content of it and the buttercream, but that’s a subject for another day. In this post I want to give some random ideas on vacation eating, a topic I’ve discussed rather thoroughly before. But hey! There’s always room for more info about eating mindfully and well.

So I’d say that, while I held the line pretty well on this trip and am hoping for good news tomorrow morning when I get on the scale, I violated a major helpful guideline, which is:

Begin as you mean to go on.

In other words, the way you start out can help to determine the longer path. Here’s how I started out this trip last Wednesday, May 15: I ate practically nothing until lunchtime, as we got on a plane at 5:15 AM, that’s AM, folks, and there was certainly nothing eaten before we left the house at 3:30 AM and nothing served on the plane but a couple of cookies and some other snack-y thing, then we went out for lunch at this great place in Durham, NC, where I ate more than I should have and more than I planned, then, quite late, after doing a bunch of other stuff, we went out to eat at this nice Italian place, where I again ate more than I had planned. Then we went to Goodberry’s Frozen Custard where I got a mini concrete (an extremely thick shake that you eat with a spoon) instead of the kid’s cup that I had planned, Do you see a pattern here? I kept telling myself I was only going to get X, but then I’d cave in and get Y, including in a second trip to Goodberry’s. Perhaps it’s just as well that the rather scatterbrained waitress at the Peking Gourmet Inn in Falls Church, VA, where we went out to dinner on Friday with some of our old neighbors, forgot to bring my Shrimp Imperial with Asparagus. I still had plenty to eat, though. And so it went, at least to some extent, throughout the first part of the trip. But as we set out across country to drive Gideon’s car back home to Denver (Gideon came along, too, just to be clear), I did manage to pull things back.

Here’s what can be so difficult about going on trips where you spend a lot of time with people: much of that time can be spent at restaurant tables. You’re talking and enjoying yourself, and the food is in front of you, and often you don’t want to take leftovers with you as you may be traveling. So you end up eating way more than you normally would. Or, not as bad but still bad: you end up wasting food by leaving it on your plate. Either way the food is wasted, if you think about it, because it’s not being used properly, so if those are your only two choices you’re better off with not eating it up. So much better not to order the too-big item in the first place, though.

So here are some thoughts to keep in mind:

First of all, don’t feel that you have to deprive yourself of delicious food, on vacation or indeed at any other time. And particularly if there’s a local specialty or a famous dish at a certain restaurant you want to try then go ahead and do so. Just be aware of how much you’re eating and sort of “bank” calories by being restrained at other occasions. Goodberry’s Frozen Custard in the Raleigh/Durham area, for instance, is a real local treat and I’m not going to deny myself. It is true, though, that you stop enjoying and savoring an item after the first few bites. After I’d eaten about half of my mini concrete I was just sort of eating it up. In other words, the ice cream stopped being a treat at about the point where I’d have been finished if I’d ordered the kid’s cup as I’d planned. Don’t ever worry about ordering the smallest size you possibly can. So what if they look at you funny? Be strong!

For restaurant meals that are several ideas to keep in mind:

  • Keep activity levels in mind and order accordingly. If you’re going to be going out and about, doing a fair amount of walking as you tramp through a museum, for example, you can get something bigger than you would if you’re just spending much of the day in the car.
  • Take advantage of the option that at least some restaurants offer, with more and more doing this all the time: ordering a half-size item. You’ll pay more than half, since the non-food costs remain the same, but the savings in waste are well worth it. I’m trying to make it a rule that I always order the half size if it’s available. Just before we left Kansas City this afternoon to get back into the car for about eight hours of driving we ate a late lunch at a pizza place. I got a half-size Cobb salad that was absolutely delicious; I wanted to lick out the bowl because their homemade ranch dressing was so good. It had big chunks of avocado, tender pieces of chicken, crisp romaine lettuce . . . you get the point. I was perfectly satisfied and didn’t get into the car feeling stuffed. Now I have a nice memory of that meal instead a feeling of guilt.
  • Always take a look at the soup section of the menu. I realized on this trip that I don’t do that enough. One of the nicest memories I have of a meal back in 2017 at a lovely restaurant in Charleston SC is of the bowl of crab soup I got. It came with a roll, was absolutely delicious, and left me with a margin for dinner later on. You may want to order soup and a side salad for lunch, say, especially if you’re not all that hungry and/or you know you’re going out again for dinner. And I’m going to make a firm rule from now on that I’m not going to order the lunch special at Chinese restaurants. It’s just too big. Egg rolls and soup make much more sense. Even if I’m in a situation where I can take home my leftovers, I often don’t eat them up and they end up being thrown out.
  • Always be aware that some appetizers are meant to be shared, so you may end up with more food than you need if you order one of those for your meal. That section of the menu isn’t designed to give you any kind of balance; you probably don’t want to just eat an order of fried mozzarella. But there are some appetizer items that can work; Mexican restaurants often have something called “taquitos,” which are small fried rolls, almost like their version of egg rolls. They usually come with fresh salsa and perhaps guacamole and can make a perfectly satisfying small meal.
  • You can sometimes split an entrée with someone else. Restaurants, of course, aren’t wild about this practice, but I’ve never seen the request denied, and they’ll even bring you an extra plate. As restaurant portions have gotten bigger and bigger, they’ve put themselves in the position of having their customers realize that they can literally get two for the price of one. I would suggest that you tip as if you bought two of whatever-it-is, as your waitperson actually did the same amount of work as he/she would have done with two entrees. You’re still saving money, although that’s not necessarily the point of doing this. Any time you walk out of a restaurant saying, “I’m stuffed,” you’ve eaten too much.

Better stop for now. I will say as a little additional helpful hint about trips that it’s probably not the greatest packing strategy to do so at 11:00 PM when you’re exhausted from preparing a meal for 75 people and then doing enough cleanup in your kitchen so that the rats won’t invade while you’re gone and when you’re getting up at 3:00 the next morning. (Oh, right–I already said that.) I always need to remind myself that just because I did a stellar job of packing for the last trip doesn’t mean that I will necessarily do so for the current one. I ended up feeling rather disorganized this time, with not enough tops and more pants than I needed. I brought along a pair of pants that I never wore. And my much-vaunted ziploc bag system kind of broke down. One thing I plan to do when I get home is to pack for the next trip by stocking said bags with items that can just sit in the suitcase without harm.

Oh, and BTW (and then I really will stop), as an update this morning: I weighted 118. Totally chuffed about that! And, in a further health-related update, I went ahead and did an A1C test to see if I had messed things up too badly with my indulgences over the past few weeks. (Funny story: the test was a birthday present from my in-laws. You don’t hear of that sort of present very often! But I thought it was really, really great. My mother-in-law knew that I wanted to do periodic tests, so she decided to make it easy for me. Her gift epitomized what we should all strive for in this area: giving something that’s truly desired and that won’t end up as clutter.) Anyway, a couple of months ago I got a 5.3 result; this morning it was 5.4. Since an A1C reading is a three-month average, that little upward tick is a warning sign. But I’m still well below the threshold of 5.7 for pre-diabetes and will now get back into my stricter sugar-intake practices. In about three months I have to go in to my doctor for prescription refills and will ask for a lab test then. The home tests have tracked very closely with regular lab tests in the past, but I want to be sure I’m doing what needs to be done. If the reading holds steady I’ll take the second test in my gift kit six or so months from then. So far, so good, though. I’m very thankful that I’m not having to go on any diabetes medication.

What about you? What trips are you taking this summer, and what guidelines can you put in place ahead of time so that you don’t go overboard?