Travel Hurdle Recap

Well, I'm  back from my trip. The weigh in result is: +2.5 lbs.

Actually, considering that I normally would gain anywhere between 5 and 10 lbs after a work trip, I'd say this was a success...... Of course I'm disappointed, but it could have been much worse.

My game plan going into my trip was simple: eat like a vegetarian and consume no more than 1 beer a night. For the most part, I held to that goal. But it was difficult because the menu options were a bit limited. There was mostly meat on every menu! And, when I didn't eat meat, I'd be wide awake in the middle of the night with a growling stomach. So, I decided that only one meal would have meat. For lunch, I'd either have a chicken cesar salad or a cheese sandwich. Dinner was the tough one. We went to Italian, Indonesian, French-Fusion, Mexican and an Irish pub. Nearly all of them had limited options, so I made due with what they had. Margarita pizza, veggie pastas, taster plates, etc.

FYI......the Dutch version of a vegetarian burrito is apparently cheese, banana, mango and pineapple wrapped in a tortilla. Um.....yeah. Not my kind of vegetarian burrito!!

As for the drinking, there's no way I can go out with my coworkers and not drink. They just won't let me. (HEY. don't roll your eyes at me.) Despite the fact that I LOVE European beer, this was probably the toughest part of the trip. I was pretty good at staying with the one drink a night. There were two nights that I had more than that - our customer event and our company dinner.

To counter weigh the eating and drinking, I brought along my travel boot camp cards. And the walking.....you can't be in Europe without walking everywhere. It's the common mode of transport (well, that and biking, but I didn't have access to a bike). In case you don't know what the travel boot camp cards are, let me explain. I go to a boot camp class twice a week. Because I travel for work a lot, I had asked my instructor to give me a list of hotel room friendly exercises that I can do while I'm out of town (and so that when I come back to class I won't die). She was AWESOME enough to make me my very own travel boot camp. It's a deck of regular playing cards and she wrote out (and even illustrated with stick figures....too cute!) an exercise on each card. You shuffle them, pick a card and do that activity for 1.5 minutes and keep selecting cards till you reach 30 minutes (or however long you have to workout). I only had time to do a few minutes a handful of time during my trip, but it's better than nothing, right?

Anyways, that's pretty much the gist of my trip. I'm back and now it's back to work on my diet. I picked up a few vegetarian cookbooks today and I'm eager to get back into meal planning.