Breathe Magazine

I think most people would agree that healthy eating is easiest at home. With a well-stocked kitchen of fresh ingredients, healthy eating is fun! Venturing from your house into the busy world poses a bit of a challenge, but with a little planning, tackling eating on the go isn’t hard. You’ll find some tips and recipes in this month’s feature that I wrote: Healthy Eating On The Go.

Eating in restaurants is a bit more challenging. A salad at one place might be perfectly light and fresh, but at another restaurant it might be covered in dressing and other high-fat ingredients. You never know what goes into the preparation behind restaurant food, but you can usually assume butter and oil were involved. 

This past week I spent seven days in perhaps one of the most challenging eating environments imaginable: a cruise. If you’ve cruised before, you know exactly what I’m talking about: 3-course meals (all included in the price!), 24-hour pizzarias, alcohol on every deck from morning to night, and the best/worst part of it all: the midnight dessert buffets. 

While I likely disembarked the boat with an extra pound or so, I think I did a pretty good job eating as intuitively and healthily as I could over my week. Visit my blog, KathEats.com, for a photo diary of my on-board meals! Here are some tips I used throughout my week:

1. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re full. We’ve heard this advice a thousand times relating to everyday life, but it applies even more so when there is unlimited food all around you. The easiest way to balance eating for fuel and eating for pleasure on a cruise ship is to eat when you are hungry. Skip the snacks and save your appetite for the fancy dinners. Or eat a lighter dinner so you’ll be hungry for the midnight buffet if that’s where you’d like to end up dining. Hunger is the best sauce! Eating when you’re hungry will help you feel your best too. 
2. Take the stairs. We were on the 4th floor of the ship, and many of the activities were on the 9th and 10th floors, so we took a lot of stairs. One day I counted 40 flights in one day! Consider it hidden exercise and refuse to wait for the elevator. 
3. Balance your food groups. How do you decide what to have off of the buffet? At our lunch buffet there were probably 20 different foods I wanted to eat, so my strategy was to put my top choices for each food group on my plate. I started with vegetables. This doesn’t always have to mean a salad, as I found a number of yummy ethnic veggies as well. Choose a protein next – a small piece of fish, some shrimp, beans on your salad. Round out your plate with something from the grain category. A roll, some rice, a cookie. Balancing with food groups will help you feel like you’re eating a nice meal instead of piling too much of one thing on your plate and feeling like you missed out on others.
4. Share. It’s no fun to go to a restaurant with three courses all included and not get all three – including dessert! You’re on vacation, and it’s fun to try new dishes and eat dessert. So to help minimize weight gain, try sharing your food with the table. Each night when my entree arrived I immediately put half the portion on a bread plate and passed it around the table for my family to try. It helped me with portion control and allowed the table to experience more dishes. Do the same with dessert! Have two bites and then pass it around. Hopefully your family likes to share
5. Walk the plank! Er, the deck! A little exercise not only will help you burn off some of those extra bites, but it will make you feel your best too. Our ship had a nice Promedade Deck that went all the way around the ship. I made a point to walk and run around it a little bit each day. How many chances are you going to have to walk laps around the ocean!? It was breezy and beautiful and I’m not sure I would have known about it had I not been seeking places to exercise. The gym wasn’t bad either, and it’s amazing how much better I felt each day after 30 minutes of sweating. I even got off the ship to run around Bermuda one morning when we were docked. How many chances do you have to run around an island? Take advatage! Think of a run or walk as a sight-seeing advanture and a chance to see sights you wouldn’t see by car or boat. 

And finally, remember that no matter how much you eat, life goes on. Enjoy the vacation while it lasts – you’ll have plenty of time to eat healthy again when you get home. If you focus on feeling your best rather than preventing weight gain, you will likely have a more pleasurable vacation all around.

Kath

Kath Eats Real Food