Maintaining weight on vacation

I was getting ready to write an article about staying on track with your diet and weight loss goals while on vacation. To do some research on the subject, I did a couple of searches online, and found a wide variety of answers and philosophies. The answers ranged everywhere from maintaining your exact diet as is with no deviation (because deviation from the plan, especially for the weak, could cause a lot of backsliding), to throwing the diet out the window for the duration (because, after all, it’s vacation, isn’t it?).

Then I found this article from AlmostFit.com, and it really resonated with me in a lot of ways. For me, I’ve been doing the ‘eating healthy and exercising’ routine for a long enough time now, that the bad habits I’ve had aren’t likely to come roaring back due to a week-long vacation - I’ve seen too much success with what I’m doing now to jeopardize that by going hog wild.  However, I also know that part of the fun of vacation is experiencing things you’ve never experienced before, whether that be riding a zipline, going to a major league game in a new town, or trying that special barbeque sauce that ONLY can be found in a little hole in the wall restaurant. That might mean straying from your diet for a bit, and for me, that’s okay, as I know it won’t be enough to knock me off my game.

You can read the entire article by clicking on the above link, but allow me to highlight some of my favorite points:

• Moderation is power - continue to make good choices, continue to exercise as much as you’re able to, but realize that over the course of time, ONE extra dessert (not three, not six, ONE) is not going to make that much of a difference, especially if you include it in your calorie total.
• Don’t look for a scale - traveling sometimes has a way of causing our body weight to fluctuate more wildly than when we’re at home in a routine. Avoid the temptation to just do a quick check, but it may not give you a really accurate view of where you are.
• Avoid the ‘4D’ cycle - As we all know, eating can be an emotional thing. When faced with food choices on a vacation, it’s easy to fall into a 4D cycle (Disaster, Denial, Depression, and Doubt), and moderation in your eating will help keep you from the first D (disaster), so that you’ll naturally avoid the others as well.

So for me on vacation this week, I’m looking forward to a fun chuckwagon dinner, with corn on the cob (one ear, minimal butter, light salt), baked beans (1 serving, not 3 like I normally would have), and a small piece of Texas sheet cake. That will be enough for me to really feel like I’ve had a fun meal, but not so much that I get depressed when I step on the scale when I get back.

So, what are some of YOUR tips for maintaining weight while vacationing?