Meditations

I have been on vacation for almost three weeks(two different trips).  I wanted to wait until I returned to write more about making a commitment to stay healthy. I actually wanted to see if I would stick with my healthy eating before I wrote about it.  Otherwise, I would come back and regret every word that I had written.  Good news...it can be done on vacation!  I am not by any means advising you that you should never eat unhealthy on a vacation.  This is a personal choice for each person.  However, for me, I decided long before I went that it was worth trying to make good food and exercise choices on a trip and still enjoy the trip! 
First of all, I realized that every place you go, whether visiting in a home, sitting in an airport for 3 hours or going to a restaurant in a tourist location...you can make a healthy choice.  I did it.  I also found numerous opportunities to exercise.  I came home from the trips feeling good about myself and without a weight gain. I am NOT saying this to make anyone feel guilty about how you handle vacations.  I just know how slippery a slope it is for me to gain all my weight back.  I am not ready to slide down that slope.
First of all, I found a lot of ways to exercise.  Almost all hotels, motels or condos have a room set aside for exercise. My husband and I went each morning, while the rest of the family was relaxing, to either lift weights or walk/run on a treadmill.  It was not a big deal at all.  When we visited out of town guests, they took us on a hike in the mountains.  We even rented mountain bikes and we were rewarded with magnificent mountain views that we would have not seen otherwise.  When we were ready for dinner each night, we walked to the restaurant and enjoyed not having to find a parking spot in a crowded tourist town.
Keep in mind that this is all new for me. In the past, vacation was a time to overeat more than I was already overeating:). I would have never considered exercising. However, I came home from trips with a weight gain...and a lot of guilt.
I must tell you some things that my husband and I noticed on this vacation. My husband tends to be very friendly.  Each night, we ended the day sitting in the hot tub of the hotel.  Mark would talk to each and every guest that happened to be in the hot tub with us. He would make conversation about good places to eat and invariably the most popular places mentioned were the ones they "served the most food." The quality of the food was not as important as the quantity of the food!  Is this what we have become as a nation? Probably no need to mention that Mark and I were the only ones walking to the restaurant in this tourist town. The weather was pleasant and there were multiple restaurants within two miles of the hotel. The traffic and parking was an ordeal but everyone else chose to fight the traffic.  I am not advocating walking everywhere when you are at home.  We chose to walk because we were in a tourist town and it was an easy way to get in a little exercise.
As far as food on the trip, I could order a salad with grilled chicken at nearly every restaurant. At one place I ordered chicken fajitas and asked them to leave out the tortillas. We were a little disappointed at what our hotel called a "hot complimentary breakfast."  That consisted of biscuits, pancakes, and waffles.  I opted to go to a fast food restaurant, ordered an egg McMuffin but did not eat the muffin. My breakfast consisted up egg and a meat, which is a fairly good choice for breakfast. A protein breakfast will keep you satisfied longer than a biscuit. A small package of almonds, kept in my purse, was a nice thing to have if we were nearing an ice cream shop or something like that.  Even when we had a 3 hour delay at the airport, there were salads, cheese, celery and plenty of apples and oranges. I guess I never noticed them before because I was always "on vacation."
This was a stunning revelation.  I never knew that people could actually stay on a healthy diet on vacation. I had the mindset that vacation was a time to splurge.  You had to splurge or it was not a vacation.
 If you want to quit reading, you can. At this point I wanted to relate this to a story in the Bible. In the book of Numbers, the children of Israel were eating only manna, provided everyday by God in the desert. They got really angry about this fact and began complaining.  They were saying "If only we could go back to Egypt and eat that good food again.  We had it made."  Funny thing...they were in slavery when they were in Egypt. Sometimes when I am on vacation, I may get bitter and say "I deserve this delicious desert."  In reality, my overeating kept me in slavery. I don't want to return to that kind of slavery.  To exercise my choice and eat anything I want will mean I have very few choices about what to wear when I return home. Something to think about.