Vacations

Posted September 11th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider

Vacations are hard when you’re trying to eat right. (They’re a lot of fun when you don’t care what you eat.) Beth, the kids, and I spent a little over a week on vacation last month, with five days at a family reunion in Arizona and a few days in California for my cousin’s wedding. Generally, when we go on vacation for a week or more, we both come back significantly heavier than when we left — usually around 7-10 pounds for me and 4-5 pounds for Beth. We like to eat out when we’re on vacation, because we don’t have Jack in the Box or In-N-Out here in Utah. We eat to alleviate the boredom that comes from sitting around houses that aren’t our own. We eat because there are NO RULES when you’re on vacation!

So this last vacation, coming as it did only ten days or so after we started this current endeavor, had us both worried. Would we stick to our goals, or would the vacation kill our momentum and be a setback for us?

Without our scale, neither of us knew for sure how we were doing. We bought a lot of healthy food to snack on. But we didn’t exercise much (treadmills are kind of bulky to take on vacation). But we resisted the urge to eat pizza when it was readily available. But I did have half of a Coldstone ice cream at a Diamondbacks game. But I didn’t even touch the ice cream at my parents’ house. So by the time we got home, we weren’t sure what to expect. Did the good outweigh (I never get tired of that pun!) the bad?

Yes, yes it did. When we stood on the scale upon our return, we were pleased to see that we had each lost a little over a pound. Sure it’s not much, especially when I had lost nearly twenty pounds in the two weeks before the vacation. But when the usual result is a gain of ten pounds, I will take a loss of one any day. It reinforced my confidence that I really can do whatever I set my mind to.

Why am I writing this now, three weeks after the fact? Because in 14 hours, Beth and I are getting on an airplane and flying to New York for a fun little weekend trip. We’ll be sitting in Yankee Stadium on Friday night — which means temptation of nachos and hot dogs. We’ll be on Broadway on Saturday to see “Wicked” — which probably means eating out at a nice restaurant. And we’ll be spending three nights in a hotel, which means cooking healthy meals won’t really be an option.

I’m not really nervous, necessarily, but I am definitely realistic enough to recognize that I need all the extra motivation I can get. So I’m posting it here, for all the world to see, and when I get back on Sunday, I will have to be accountable for what I have done over the weekend. This blog is my own personal WWJD bracelet, except it’s WWASGD (What Would A Skinny Guy Do?).

Wish me luck!

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