Tag: healthy eating

 The wonderful thing about vacation is that it’s a departure from your daily routine. This is exactly why we love it, for the most part. We spend the days and even weeks leading up to vacation daydreaming about not being at work, not setting an alarm, not cooking, not cleaning, about friendly servers presenting wine lists to peruse and hotel room service, or I suppose, kayaking white waters or learning the subway system of Tokyo, whatever vacation scenario fits your daydream. You can become the parent who says yes to ice cream twice a day, the person who sleeps in because hotels invest in the blackout curtains you haven’t gotten around to yet. “Yes” is easier on vacation.

Vacation is wonderful, and taxing. It’s also late nights for children, unfamiliar surroundings, getting lost on new roads and being out of your daily routine. What we daydream isn’t always utopian in practice. Knowing that many of my routines have become a bit specific, and that the rural Midwest might not be as friendly to that routine as urban Denver, I gave myself some options. I packed low-sugar Kind bars, and cashews, and raisins, and my running shoes.

Our vacation began with a couple days in Minnesota with my husband’s family. En route, our airport meal was surprisingly easy. I’ve learned throughout this dietary shift that you can pretty much ask for what you want. If you go to KFC in an airport and ask for a grilled chicken breast with lettuce and tomato, they will happily give you just that, charge you for the grilled chicken sandwich, and move to the next person in line. Summer bbq’s are also pretty easy, because there is always grilled something, salad and fruit, and if I’m the one bringing the salad (and the sour cream and cheddar chips), that’s an easy contribution. So, food as sustenance isn’t really the issue.

More at the heart of the matter when visiting family is that the most natural thing in the world is to show love with food. Breaking out the special recipes means, you matter to me. And turning down special recipes and noting that you no longer eat gluten, dairy or corn feels awkward. Like you’re turning down love. And let me be clear, this is all on me. This is me feeling guilt that hasn’t been assigned because we’re culturally programmed to give and receive food. It feels disobliging to turn down homemade cookies.

At the same time, the most frequent phrase I heard throughout vacation, even from my husband who has been at ground zero during this re-envisioning, was, “You’re being so good!”

I think the idea of being good and bad when it comes to eating is a disservice to us all. As my 7-year-old said after a day of virtuous behavior evaporated in a landslide of boredom-inspired trouble-making, “It’s just too hard to be good all the time!” And it really is. If we’re weighing each choice we make as good or bad, we’re bound to feel like when we’ve tipped the balance enough to the good, we’re due for some bad. But for the first time in my life, I’ve started making choices not on how good or bad they are considered universally, but how good and bad they make me feel. And in that sense, vacation is the absolute worst scenario to be “bad.” If I’m on an unfamiliar road on a stretch of highway that goes 30 miles between exits, I’m absolutely not going to tempt fate by having “just one” of what I’ve discovered are definite triggers to feeling digestively awful. This isn’t me being “good.” Being the person who is always “good” feels obnoxious. No one wants that mantle. This is in no way a virtuous decision of steely self-control. I’m still at odds with my self-control, which is why I can only bring those sour cream and cheddar chips to bbq’s and not have them in my house. Nope, it’s not willpower but an entirely selfish decision, and one that I’d make again because spending 1700 miles in the car with my family without a desperate search for a dubious public bathroom has nothing to do with being good, and everything to do with feeling well.

For the record, once I was safely at home, I overdosed on the amazing smelling roasted (i.e., sugar encrusted) almonds we bought during the trip, and promptly felt awful. And then did it again the next day, just to make sure it was the sugar. It was. Ten steps forward, one step back.