Traveling with the Lifestyle Balance Diet

Just because I was traveling didn’t mean I wasn’t supposed to continue with the Lifestyle Balance program. Luckily for me it just so happened that the regular meetings dropped from once a week to once a month by the time I left for Indonesia. I only missed one of them. As to everything else….

I already knew there was no way I would be able to either count the calories or weigh myself during the trip, no matter how much they pushed for it. It simply wasn’t an option. I was supposed to keep an eye on MyPlate just like at home. I had expected to get a lot more exercise than at home, so I wasn’t worried about that.

This trip was a major motivator for my diet. Knowing there wasn’t time to get surgery, my only hope of not getting dumped on a plane and sent home early rested in my ability to get myself mobile again. My mobility partly depended on my ability to get the weight off.

Keep in mind that in February I could barely walk around the block and weight over 217 pounds. The information from the travel company said you had to be able to walk unassisted by any device for at least three miles. Right before the trip I weighed in at 182 pounds. If you count the weight I lost in January before the program started I lost 40 pounds. My suitcase came in around 33 pounds, and I could barely handle it. Throughout the trip I thought about what it would have been like to try it without loosing the weight. *Shudder*. I’d have been sent home for sure.

So how’d I do? In place of trying to keep track of calories, I tried to take pictures of everything I ate. Maybe I could piece it together later. Hah! Fat chance. Even after eating it, I couldn’t be sure what half of it was. There was no way I could “join the dirty plate club” when an entire wait staff hovered over us, asking if everything was all right.

Due to my allergies there are a lot of desserts I can’t eat. To me, the proper solution is to simply skip dessert. To all the restaurants along the way the solution was to come up with an alternative desert which was then served only to me with great fanfair and much concern.

At one point I trimmed off the batter from my deep fried bananas and left it behind in an effort to at least pretend I was still dieting. After we got up to leave I glanced back to find three of the wait staff surrounding my plate with creased brows and furtive whispers that I wouldn’t have understood across the language barrier anyway.

Yet again I have found that when traveling in places like Africa it is really hard to ignore the old adage, “Eat everything on your plate. There are children starving in Africa.” You may see them at the next stop. I’ll tell you this much, despite the fact they buy coconut oil by the gallon most Indonesians are not over weight.

So, what about exercise? Get enough and the extra food won’t matter, right? We got plenty of it. We were never on the bus for more than three hours as a whack. Every day we got out and wandered around somewhere. At one point we went directly from the airport to a cave for some spelunking, then hit a local market to marvel over corn and beans then hit a restaurant for lunch.

The only problem was that non of it was heart-healthy exercise. Most of the time we would walk for a minute or two, then stop to talk to someone or look at something, then walk a few more feet. Rarely did we go ten or more minutes at a whack. When we did, we went way past aerobic and into the panting, In many places if I hadn’t had trekking poles with me I’d have been sunk. I used them to haul my sorry butt up so many sets of stairs.

There wasn’t time for blogging, let alone an extra walk at the end of the day. I simply turned myself over to the good graces of the travel company and hoped for the best. I got lucky. At the end of the trip I might not have been much healthier on the heart front, but I’d lost another five pounds.