Making Your Way through Trials and Tribulations: Managing emotional eating dilemmas, Testing your willpower in the long runand Handling special situations away from home.

Making Your Way through Trials and Tribulations

In This Chapter

� Managing emotional eating dilemmas

� Testing your willpower in the long run

� Handling special situations away from home

 

Along the path to weight loss, you’re going to run into some inevitable twists and turns. Sometimes you lose your motivation and have to turn around and find it. Maybe you overindulged last night and so now you’re thinking of giving up. Perhaps you’re bored with your routine, even though it’s working for you. You may even get to a point where, no matter what you do, your weight just won’t budge, even though you still need to lose 20 pounds. You may feel frustrated and want to give up your goals. Please, don’t! You can get your thinking and your behavior back on track. The secret to success is to nip any problems in the bud.

Many people give up (and eventually gain back any weight they lost) when they get thrown off track, lose momentum, or find themselves stuck in a weight-loss rut. But you have to stand strong and renew your commitment to losing weight and keeping it off, especially during these trying times. The type of commitment you need when faced with dieting challenges is to see yourself through every stage of change.

You knew changing your lifestyle wouldn’t be easy when you first decided to lose weight, but if you had the motivation to get started on a low-calorie plan, you can find the motivation to keep going. If you cheated on your diet last night, one big meal or one big dessert or even an all-out binge didn’t blow everything. If you overeat one day, all you have to do is wake up the next day and get back on track. If you’re bored with your diet or exercise routine, remember that you’re not stuck with it; it’s simply time for a change.

This chapter can help you solve problems common to emotional eaters. You also find ways to cope with everyday dilemmas that are likely to occur in the long run, regardless of the nature of your eating habits, and tips to help you eat sensibly away from home.

Recognizing and Solving Predictable Problems for Emotional Eaters

Food has a way of filling gaps in people’s lives. People don’t just eat to survive, which can be a big problem. People eat to kill time, to make themselves feel better, and to distract themselves. Many people eat whenever they feel emotional pangs, good or bad, and overeat in response to highly emotional situations. If you’re an emotional eater, you eat when you’re happy and when you’re sad. Eating is the way you deal with your emotions, and what’s usually happening is that you’re overfeeding yourself to try to “stuff down” feelings that are hard to cope with.

When solving your emotional eating problems, you need to look at the problem in two ways.

� Recognize the emotions that are driving your eating behavior. For an emotional eater, boredom, loneliness, anger, sadness, anxiety, and every- day frustrations are all potential roadblocks to weight-loss success. Other situations that may cause you to turn to food for relief include

• Getting rejected. If you get passed up for a promotion or an intimate relationship goes sour, you may naturally feel insecure or unwanted and turn to food for comfort.

• Playing the martyr. When your children talk back to you, your mate ignores you, or you feel taken for granted at work or at home, you may eat instead of expressing your feelings of denigration.

• Feeling rebellious. Overeating may help you send out a message that says, “Nobody tells me what to do!”

• Losing sight of your dreams. If you’re unhappy with the life you live, or you have regrets, you may be overeating to try to make up for not feeling satisfied or complete.

• Facing challenges. Success can be as scary as failure; you may overeat to avoid taking that next step.

• Developing intimacy. Being overweight may help you cover up your fear of developing an intimate relationship.

� Get to the root of the problem, one way or another. If you eat to satisfy emotional hunger, as opposed to true physical hunger, you still have to deal with your emotions while you’re trying to lose weight. (If you struggle with emotional eating, Chapter 11 has helpful resources.)

In the following sections, I provide tips on how to handle several typical emotional situations while keeping your low-calorie diet on track.

Busting boredom

When you’re bored and have nothing to do, what’s your first instinct? Do you say “to eat”? Boredom is many a dieter’s downfall, but I have an obvious solu- tion: Do something! Find something you enjoy doing, something you can do on a regular basis that has nothing whatsoever to do with eating (unless, of course, you decide to take a class in healthy cooking). Look for something longer lasting and more fruitful, such as taking up a new hobby.

Something like knitting or cabinet making not only keeps you busy, but also provides a reward when you’re done — a finished product! If you aren’t into hobbies or feel you need to get out of the house, consider volunteering your time at a hospital, museum, or school. If boredom threatens to sabotage your weight-loss goals, check out the list of diversions suggested in Chapter 7.

Dealing with everyday frustrations

For most people, each day brings its share of aggravation, whether you’re at work, at school, or at home. Your boss treats you badly, you don’t have time to pack a healthy lunch, or you haven’t been able to get to the gym in a week. How you handle frustrating situations can make the difference between diet failure and success. Why? Because if you give in to overeating when you feel frustrated, or if you often feel frustrated because circumstances that are seemingly beyond your control are preventing you from eating well, you may feel that you have no choice but to give up on your goals.

In the following sections, I provide tips on handling several common frustrations so that you can stick to your low-calorie plan.

Coping with stress

Anger. Pressure. Change. Any of these stressors can drive bad eating behavior. You may be eating to cope, to give yourself a treat when everything else looks bleak, or to punish yourself. When stress (and eating from stress) gets out of hand, something has to give. You have to find a way to relax and escape the pressure you feel. You may need help. Consider the mind-body exercises in Chapter 8 or some of the counseling options in Chapter 11.

Boosting low confidence

Self-doubt leads to self-criticism, which is known as negative self-talk. Nothing and no one can make you feel all that bad about yourself unless you feel bad about yourself to begin with. Review Chapter 4 for advice about positive self- talk and how it can help you stick to your low-calorie diet plan.

One way to boost your own self-esteem is to force yourself to focus on every- thing right about your life, rather than on everything wrong with it. At the end of each day, look back and find at least one event that was positive.

� Look for some accomplishment, big or small. Did you buy a fitness magazine? Did you eat fruit salad for lunch instead of a cheeseburger? If you ate the cheeseburger, did you take a walk after lunch?

� Look for anything that can make you feel good about yourself and dis- tract from the negative. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with your diet or exercise program. Maybe you smiled at a stranger who smiled back. Maybe you cleaned out your kitchen cabinets. Maybe someone thanked you for a job well done. These events are all positive and life affirming, and they deserve recognition.

If you take a few minutes every night to write down your accomplishments in a journal, you’ll soon have a good collection of “feel-good” anecdotes to look back on when your confidence needs a boost or when you feel like giving up on yourself.

Handling the pressure of keeping a meal schedule

The pressure of trying to adhere to a “normal” meal schedule may actually be sabotaging your efforts to lose weight. Most people with a history of out-of- control eating, dieting, bingeing, and compulsive overeating benefit from a regular meal routine, but some people just don’t fit that mold. You need a plan, but planning three square meals at the usual times of day is fruitless if that plan just doesn’t fit into your lifestyle.

You can always make routine eating a long-term goal. (For more about setting goals, see Chapter 4.) For now, have a plan that suits your schedule. The trick is to create your own routine by having the type of food you need available wherever you are, whenever you need it. For instance, if you work late most evenings, stock a shelf in your office or invest in a minifridge to hold foods that can serve as dinner. You can also order an appropriate dinner from local restaurants or delis that deliver your food (see “Dining out at restaurants,” later in this chapter to help you eat out the right way).

Feeding your sorrow

Do you overeat because you’re unhappy, or are you unhappy because you overeat? That’s a chicken-and-egg question if I ever heard one! If you’re an emotional overeater, you probably overeat because you’re unhappy and then you become even unhappier because you overate. If you find yourself in this state of unhappiness for months on end, with no sign of let-up, you may be clinically depressed. This type of deep unhappiness often leads to self-deprecation and the type of negativity that can really block your best attempts at losing weight and living a healthier lifestyle.

Exercise (which I cover in Chapter 8) helps with sad feelings and mild depression because it raises your levels of endorphins, brain chemicals that help improve your general outlook. But if you think you suffer from clinical depression, speak to your physician, who can help you decide if you need further professional help. Chapter 11 provides more information on the type of help that may be available to you.

Meeting Typical Long-Term Challenges and Temptations

For most people, dieting unfortunately is one of those situations where some things get worse before they get better. Early on, you’re motivated by hopes and dreams, by the novelty of a new and challenging lifestyle, and I hope, by your initial weight loss. As the weeks and months go by, however, you may have to work harder to prevent old eating habits from sneaking back in, to resist giving in to food cravings, and to stop yourself from all-out bingeing to make up for all the food you haven’t been eating. The honeymoon is over and now the real work begins.

The following sections provide tools that can help you face challenges as you continue your low-calorie plan.

Figuring out whether you’re truly hungry

What happens when you don’t eat? You set yourself up for a binge in the not-so- distant future. Food deprivation never helped anyone lose weight in the long run. The trick is to figure out if you’re really hungry, and to eat just enough to satisfy your hunger. One way to know if what you’re feeling is true physical hunger, and not emotional hunger, is that when you’re truly hungry, you’ll feel better by eating just about any type of food. When you’re emotionally hungry, you usually crave very specific types of foods that you’ve used to comfort your- self in the past. (See the following sections for more about cravings and binges.)

The secret to eating without overeating is to eat mindfully, which simply means paying attention to the food you eat and how you eat it. Chapter 4 has info on mindful eating that can help you put this technique into practice.

One component of mindful eating that dietitians and other weight experts often use is a hunger scale, like the one that follows, that can help you deter- mine just how hungry you are or how full you are. The scale ranges from 0 to 10, with 0 being so hungry you could eat a bucket of beans and 10 being so overstuffed you can’t get up out of your chair. You want to avoid these extremes by using this scale to decide when to eat and when to stop. I recommend starting at 2 and stopping at 5; you may have to gradually work your way into that range.

0 Extremely hungry

1 Very hungry

2 Hungry

3 Slightly hungry

4 No longer hungry but not yet full

5 Comfortable

6 Beginning to feel full

7 Beginning to feel too full

8 Uncomfortable

9 Very uncomfortable with a slight stomachache

10 Extremely overstuffed and uncomfortable; possibly nauseous

Whenever you’re following a low-calorie diet and you feel hungry, you need to eat. Period. Don’t give it a second thought. Better yet, try not to let your- self get to the point where you actually feel hungry. Eat something.

If you’re an emotional eater — someone who eats when you’re excited, angry, distressed — you may turn to food when you’re not really hungry. Your challenge (and something to keep in mind the next time you’re updating your psychological and behavior goals — see Chapter 4) is to wait until you really feel hungry before you put anything in your mouth. Easier said than done, I know, but try these few tips:

� Try to express your feelings with words rather than with food. Write down your feelings if you’re not in a position to speak them.

� Start walking in the opposite direction of any food source. The walk does you good and the food is less accessible.

� Set a timer or watch the clock and wait ten minutes to see if the urge to eat passes.

Satisfying cravings

When you get a craving, you’re probably not craving a cucumber salad or a lean slice of chicken. Cravings are usually reserved for foods high in sugar, fat, or salt, or some combination of the three. Studies have shown that women are more likely to crave sugar-fat combinations like chocolate cake while men crave protein-fat combos like meat. Surveys have also revealed that, overall, salty foods, breads, and sweet foods top the most-often-craved list.

The hungrier you are, the more you yearn for foods that you may not other- wise be craving. To help control cravings, make sure you eat something every three to five hours.

If you’ve been depriving yourself of your favorite foods, chances are you’re craving them all the time. If that’s the case, indulge yourself — with a reason- able amount of food, that is! Deprivation is a way of setting yourself up for a binge, so don’t do it. (See the next section for more about binges.) Instead, find a way to enjoy the foods you like in reasonable amounts on a regular basis. Give yourself permission to eat what you want, whenever you want, but not necessarily as much as you want.

Uncovering the clues to your cravings

If you want to know exactly why you get cravings, I can’t help you. Scientists aren’t sure, but one theory is that cravings are the way your body tells you that you need specific nutrients. I don’t buy that one, because nobody needs ice cream or chocolate cake or potato chips, although it’s quite possible that there’s some- thing in ice cream, chocolate cake, and potato chips that fills either an emotional or physical need. According to a small study done at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a physiological change occurs in the brain when you experience a food craving. This research suggests that food cravings activate the same areas of the brain — the hippocampus, insula, and caudate — that are activated when an addict craves drugs, alcohol, or goes on a gam- bling spree. These areas of the brain are linked to emotion, memory, and reward. That could explain why people crave specific, familiar foods; they’re etched into your memory as a reward that soothes the emotions. Other scientific studies have come up with similar findings, but other theories exist as well.

Some experts say people’s cravings go back to the beginning of mankind, when cave people filled up on food whenever they came across it. Others say people are simply surrounded by too much food that tastes too good and they just can’t resist. Although the jury’s still out on this one, most nutrition experts now agree that crav- ings are somehow linked to brain chemistry and, more often than not, occur when you don’t eat enough or you go too long without eating. In other words, your cravings may be a result of real hunger.

Indulging in cravings is good advice for some people, but it isn’t for every- one. If you’re not satisfied with small amounts of your favorite high-cal foods, or if you know that eating certain foods will set off an episode of binge-eating, then abstinence is your best policy until you have your weight under control.

Avoiding binges

An eating binge means one thing to one person and another thing to the next. Binge eating is relative to individual circumstances and just how much food constitutes a binge for you. Generally, an episode of true bingeing is defined as an out-of-control eating episode during which great quantities of food are consumed in a short period of time. The key phrase here is “out of control.”

People usually binge in response to an emotional upheaval. Not every emotional overeater binges, but most bingers are emotional overeaters. If you’ve ever had a bad day at the office or a fight with your mate and then turned around and downed a pint of ice cream along with handfuls of cookies and maybe even more food than that, you went on a binge.

If you binge once in a while but you’re able to get back on track the next day without too much residual damage to your physical or mental health, then I don’t consider it a big problem. Your solution could be as simple as trying to distract yourself or getting out of the house if you feel a binge coming on, or reviewing your diet strategies to see if maybe you’ve been too rigid and need to allow in some of the foods you’ve been denying yourself.

However, if you binge several times a week, for months at a time, you may be showing signs of a clinical eating disorder known, not surprisingly, as binge- eating disorder. The signs of binge-eating disorder include

� Quickly eating large amounts of food in one sitting, sometimes when you’re not even hungry

� Filling up past the point of satisfaction and to the point of great discomfort

� Planning binges

� Eating alone, or hiding any evidence that you’ve eaten, to cover up the amount of food you eat

� Feeling ashamed, guilty, disgusted, and depressed about bingeing

� Getting to the point where you avoid loved ones for fear of being discovered

You don’t necessarily have an eating disorder just because you binge once in a while. But if you frequently binge and experience guilt, fear, or other behaviors described in this section, then seek treatment from a professional. (Flip to Chapter 11 for more advice.) Dieting isn’t a solution for anyone with an eating disorder. Left unchecked, binge eating can put you at a particularly high risk of obesity, which can lead to an assortment of medical problems.

Maintaining your interest and motivation

One reason why I wrote this book is to help you find ways to stay motivated and live a low-calorie lifestyle. I don’t want just to help you lose weight right now, but also to help you lay the groundwork for maintaining a healthy weight for the rest of your life. For many people, sticking to a low-calorie lifestyle after the excess weight is gone is harder than losing weight in the first place. That’s why keeping your low-cal lifestyle fun and interesting is so important by personalizing your diet plan to suit your own lifestyle and making adjustments and changes whenever your plan starts to stale.

You can use your new diet plan as a tool to prevent boredom and keep your low-cal lifestyle interesting by getting creative with your menus, trying new foods, and discovering new ways to prepare food. The more excited you feel about your food plan, the more motivated you’ll be to stick with it. Chapter 7 contains plenty of ideas for “alternative” menu plans and ideas for making your low-cal diet more interesting and more fun. Some of the recipes in Chapters 12 through 15 can also inspire you to try something different once in a while so that your diet doesn’t become too routine or too boring.

Breaking through plateaus

Like any mountain you may find yourself climbing, the process of losing weight is tough going uphill. Unlike mountain climbing, however, where reaching a plateau or other flat service is a welcome break for the climber, a weight plateau, which is a stable period during which there is little or no change, is no relief to a dieter. A plateau is a source of real frustration because it’s a period of time when, for no apparent reason, you stop losing weight before you reach your goal. It happens to just about everyone.

You may be at a plateau stage because you’ve been slipping on your diet and/or exercise routines. Maybe you’ve been feeling a bit cocky and thought you could sneak in a little extra food here or there or sneak out of the gym a little sooner than usual. Doing so is okay once in a while, but those added and unburned calories mount up (and usually in places you don’t want).

The actual reason you get stuck on a plateau probably has to do with your metabolism slowing down after you’ve lost a bit of weight. When you lose weight, you inevitably lose some muscle along with excess fat. Along with muscle goes some of your calorie-burning power. As a result, you may need to add weight-bearing exercises to your exercise routine to keep your muscles as strong and healthy as possible. (Chapter 8 can tell you more about that.)

I have good news and bad news about weight plateaus. First, the good news: Eventually, every plateau breaks. The bad news: It can take weeks, or (gulp!) even months. You may get stuck at the same weight for several months, and all the usual calorie counting and burning won’t make it budge any quicker. You can only go so low in calories and you can only do so much exercise.

If you’re doing all you can do to stay on your low-cal plan, then be patient and hang in there. Whatever you do, don’t use a plateau as an excuse to give up. When you reach a plateau, consider the following tips to help you, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll break through your plateau stage a little sooner:

� Remain calm. Worrying about a weight plateau won’t make it go away.

� Practice positive thinking. (See Chapter 4 for help.) If you tell yourself, “I can do it,” you’ll eventually break through your plateau and continue losing weight. If you allow yourself to feel defeated, you may give up and, out of frustration, go back to some of your old overeating habits.

� Stop weighing yourself for a while. Instead of weekly weigh-ins, wait two or three weeks. Getting on the scale can be very discouraging when you’ve reached a plateau. (Chapter 4 has tips on weighing yourself.)

� Make some changes to your diet. Now is a good time to try out some of the “alternative” menu plans in Chapter 7 that you can follow for just a day or two. If you’re still up around 1,500 calories or more a day, cut back to 1,300 or 1,400 and see what happens after a week or so.

� Break your exercise routine. If you haven’t been challenging yourself lately, add another 5 or 10 minutes of exercise to what you’re already doing on a regular basis. If you’re already exercising as much as you can, try something different. For instance, if you normally cycle for 30 minutes, devote 10 of those minutes to an elliptical trainer. (See Chapter 8 for more on exercising.)

� Attend more meetings or stay more closely in touch with other members if you belong to any type of weight-loss group or program. Many of your fellow dieters have “been there,” and they probably have some encouraging words to say while you wait it out. (See Chapter 11 for more info on joining a group.)

� Be sure you’re drinking at least 8 cups of water every day. Water aids metabolism and helps you feel full so you’re less likely to overeat.

Eating Away from Home with Ease

The best advice anyone can give you if you’re eating anywhere outside your own home is to have a plan. You’ll always be tempted with restaurant foods, birthday celebrations, holiday feasts, and times when you have to eat on the road. Be prepared! I help you out with great tips in the following sections.

Dining out at restaurants

There are two schools of thought about dieting and eating out at restaurants. The first school says to make low-calorie food choices at the restaurant; the other school says to eat what you want but watch your portion sizes. I know which school I graduated from. Most of the time, when I eat out at a restaurant, I don’t want to limit my choices to low-calorie foods. I want to eat food that I don’t normally prepare at home. I want to have fun and enjoy my food while I’m out.

In this section you can find helpful tips from both schools, and many of them cross over, depending on where you’re eating and how determined you are to stick to your diet when you go out to eat.

These tips may come in handy if you don’t want to worry about calories and just want to watch your portion sizes when you eat out:

� Have an appetizer, side dish salad, or vegetable side dish, and then split an entree with your eating partner.

� Choose child-size portions when possible.

� If you order a higher-calorie entree and don’t have anyone to share it with, ask for half your dish to be packed in a take-home bag before you even start to eat.

� Share a dessert.

If you’re not ready to tempt the fates, or you’re perfectly happy to eat lower calorie foods when you go out to eat, these tips are for you:

� Stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets unless you’re quite confident you’ll make wise selections.

� Order an appetizer as your main course.

� Scan the menu for dishes that are steamed, poached, grilled, stir-fried without heavy sauces added, boiled, or broiled.

� Ask for all dressing, gravies, sauces, butter, sour cream, or any other optional toppings on the side.

Whichever approach you take to eating out in restaurants, always ask for a glass of water as soon as you sit down. Also, ask the server to hold the bread that often arrives at the table before you’ve even ordered. Balance higher- calorie choices with lower-calorie, and always start your meal with a green salad or a bowl of broth-based (clear, not creamy) soup.

No ethnic cuisine is necessarily any healthier or lower in calories than another, although you can probably find more light offerings at, say, Japanese or Southeast Asian restaurants than at Mediterranean or South American restaurants. All cuisines have their fried foods, their starchy foods, and cooking techniques that add too many extra calories to otherwise healthful food. Often, the less “Americanized” the food is at an ethnic restaurant, the lighter the fare. (French food may be one big exception to that rule!) Here’s a sampling of the “best of the best” choices for low-calorie dieters at different restaurants:

� Chinese: Anything steamed — vegetables, tofu (bean curd), fish or shell- fish, chicken, dumplings — with sauce on the side. Use the sauce as a dip instead of pouring it over your food.

� French: Meat, poultry, or seafood en brochette or grilled, steamed vegetables; sauces on the side.

� Greek: Souvlaki (kabobs) made with chicken, fish, lamb, or pork and vegetables, plain rice, small Greek salad.

� Indian: Chicken or seafood Tandoori, lentil dishes, masala (curry) dishes, basmati rice, cucumber raita.

� Italian: Mussels marinara, pasta primavera, chicken piccata, spaghetti pomodoro (with tomato-basil sauce), grilled seafood, margherita (or plain) thin-crust pizza.

� Japanese: Miso soup, negimaki (scallion wrapped with thin slices of beef), edamame (fresh green soy beans), sushi, sashimi, chirashi, teriyaki, and yakitori (grilled skewer) dishes, noodle soups.

� Mexican: Ceviche (fresh seafood marinated in lime juice), fajitas, vegetable chili, burrito, enchilada, or soft taco with chicken, seafood, or vegetables, Tex-Mex salad in a grilled (not fried) tortilla basket, rice and beans (not refried), grilled seafood. Avoid sour cream, cheese, and guacamole top- pings; opt instead for diced tomato, onion, and other vegetable toppings.

� Thai: Bean thread noodles (glass noodles), green papaya salad, squid salad, grilled or steamed meats.

� Vietnamese: Summer rolls, green papaya salad, fish or shellfish wrapped in lettuce with mint and cilantro, fish soups.

Enjoying parties

If the celebration is at your house, you have more control over the type of food that’s served. However, if you’re partying at someone else’s home, you can’t assume that the host will serve many low-cal foods. You can take several steps to help prevent yourself from overeating at a party.

� Eat a little bit at home, just before you leave to go to the party. If it’s a dinner party, and you don’t want to kill your appetite, just be sure to have at least one full glass of water before you leave home and ask for another as soon as you arrive.

� Bring your own platter of low-calorie foods, such as cut up vegetables and the Yogurt-Cheese Dip with Spinach and Dill from Chapter 15.

� Position yourself away from the buffet table or any place that’s a safe distance from temptation.

� Always keep a glass of water or seltzer with lemon in your hand.

� If you normally drink wine, drink wine spritzers — wine diluted with seltzer or club soda — instead, and pack your glass with ice.

� Try talking more and eating less.

Celebrating holidays

For many dieters, the problem with holidays is that they’re loaded with tradition, and food usually plays a big role in holiday traditions. Traditional foods served at holiday celebrations aren’t usually low in calories. What can you do? For one thing, you can bring your favorite lower-calorie vegetable, legume, or rice side dish to the table and introduce a new tradition. I can also think of several other solutions, none of which involve avoiding the big meal. Try out these few ideas:

� Bank some calories. Don’t skip meals throughout the day and then pig out at dinner. However, you can eat very light meals during the day — yogurt with fruit for breakfast, a huge green salad with low-cal dressing for lunch, another piece of fruit for a snack, and plenty of water, all day long — so that you can enjoy normal serving sizes of some of your favorite holiday fare without worrying about your calorie count.

� Drink water or another calorie-free beverage before, during, and after the meal. You can jazz up a glass of water or seltzer in many calorie-free and near-calorie-free ways. Mint leaves, lemon, lime, or orange slices, a couple of raspberries, or an herbal tea bag can all help a humble glass of water rise to the occasion.

� Remember that it takes 3,500 extra calories to gain a pound. Heavy as Thanksgiving dinner can be, if you’ve been sticking to a low-calorie plan, you’re not likely to blow it with one meal. But if you feel like you blew your diet with a single holiday meal, go to bed, rest easy, wake up the next day, and get back on your plan. You’re only one day behind.

Traveling light

Like all “special situations,” eating on the road (or in the air or on the tracks) is risky business when you’re trying to watch calories and lose weight. You never really know what type of food choices you’ll have while you’re traveling and when you get to wherever you’re going. Your best bet is to have a travel plan.

A travel plan doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you’re taking a car trip or traveling on a bus, train, or airplane, you can easily pack a selection of foods that don’t require refrigeration so that you’re not forced to choose from vending machines, dining car options, or meals you’d just rather not eat or, worse yet, go hungry. Some ideas for easy-to-carry foods that are easy to eat (especially if you’ve packed your own utensils!) include

� Shelf-stable lowfat milk in 8-ounce containers

� Small bottles of water

� Applesauce and pop-top cans of water-packed or juice-packed fruit in individual serving containers

� Fresh fruit such as apples, cherries, grapes, and pears

� Individual cans or packages of tuna or salmon

� Crackers or pretzels in sealed plastic snack bags

� Individual boxes of cold cereal

� Packets of instant hot cereal (if you have access to boiling water)

� 100-calorie cookie or cracker snack packs

My favorite food and travel anecdote, which is really a bit of advice, is the story of my friend Joyce, who travels to France whenever she gets a chance. She always packs a plastic knife, fork, and spoon in her carry-on bag so that she’s prepared to pick up some crusty bread, a small hunk of cheese, and a piece of fruit at a local market and enjoy a picnic meal wherever she goes. That way, she’s not limited to hotel or restaurant food. She not only has more control over what she eats, but she also saves money! I followed Joyce’s lead several years ago and found it extremely helpful. Everyone laughed when I packed my own chopsticks before I left on a trip to China, but I had the last laugh because I ended up using them every day while I was there. I was on a very hectic schedule and often had no time to sit down for a snack or regular meal. It didn’t matter, because I bought packaged or prepared foods to go, and ate in my hotel room or in the vans and buses I was using for transportation. Ever since that time, I’ve kept a complete set of plastic utensils with me in my handbag (and in my daughter’s backpack), at all times. Keeping a set of eating utensils in your bag and your car can open up your options for eating away from home, wherever you go.