Advice for two week vacation & travel

Hi Folks,

Do you have tips and suggestions for someone who is about to travel to British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest for two weeks?  Any constructive suggestions at all will be so great!

For the first week, I will be in a very small town in southern BC.  The good thing is that the town is small, so I can walk to the store for fruit and veggies and DH is cool with eating the local fair.  But the second half of the trip, I will stay with family.  I am pretty much at my ideal weight (a very muscular 5'7/132 female) and am afraid of the horrendous weight gain I could experience from eating out constantly and being in social eating situations 24/7 for two weeks. 

Here are some things I've already done to prepare

• bringing the food scale and extra battery and a measuring cup so DH and I can enjoy romantic breakfasts in bed (1st week) and so that I can weigh the food during the second half
• bought healthy snacks (including Fiber One) to put in my carry on and checked bag
• made a little note card with RDV of food groups and portion sizes and cuts of meat that are lower in fat (I can't seem to ever remember them, even while at home!)
• discussed my eating habits with family I'm staying with (they say are cool with it), but I don't want to come off as holier than thou and don't want the focus to be on me.  I want to focus on quality time!

If you want honesty, my advice would be to enjoy yourself. I think a food scale and measuring cups are a bit... obesessive.

Sometimes life happens, and you go in and see with your eyes how much food is appropriate for you. You don't need a kitchen scale to tell your body how much to intake. You know how hungry you are.. not the calories in your maintenance diet.

It's good to bring the snacks, make breakfast and lunch on the healthy side, but don't worry about the food. Food phobia blows.

I'm from southern BC actually. The good thing is (especially if your in the Okanagan area) the fruit right now in that area is AMAZING. There are fresh fruit stands everywhere.

hooray, fresh everything is so much easier to manage

It's all the eating out and prepackaged stuff that worries me.  I might just go to a grocery store there and do easy picnic sandwiches and walks around town with DH. 

If during this vacation you will walk a lot everywhere - relax. I just returned from a 10 day trip to London, and while I used portion control (eyeballing and guesstimating) I ate mostly junk food. I did eat a small, protein rich bfast, and a fruit-centric dinner, but at lunch I let myself enjoy a nice fish and chips or a burger and chips. Sometimes even a delicious slice of cake. The result - I'm actually a bit under the weight I left with, and my legs are MAD toned.

Soooo, yeah, I agree about the measuring cups, and scale. C'mon, it's a vacation. To gain even one pound, you'd have to eat 3500 calories OVER your necessary number. I ate about 800-1000 calories over my sedentary requirements EVERY DAY, and I was fine burning it just from touristy stuff.

I think being prepared before hand is a great idea, and that using a 2 week vacation as an excuse to abandon your well-established habits isn't a good idea.

Yes... "Sometimes life happens...", but those are the times you want to plan ahead of time for whatever may come up.  I definitely think you should relax and enjoy yourself, but still make an effort to stay active and make healthy choices.  If you were going on a weekend vacation, that would be a different story.  But a lot of damage can be done in two weeks!

Quite frankly I admire your desire to keep things in check!

So I'd say - you don't have to be paranoid about it, but still lean toward the best of all your options, with a few indulgences here and there.  You'll thank yourself when you get home :)

Thanks, Samantha81.

"Giving myself a break" for special occasions and making exceptions is how I gained weight in the first place.  I needed to find a way to truly work my lifestyle into every aspect of my life, including extended vacations. 

I didn't gain any weight and also didn't feel deprived.  I can't exercise much because I have a foot injury, so I measured my food as much as possible and stuck with plain salads and whole foods when eating out. I turned into the substitution queen and by the end of the trip though nothing of completely changing the listed menu item into something much healthier just through subbing things out, requesting items on the side or removed entirely.  Instead of ordering sweets and desserts, I ordered familiar brands of beer in bottles, because I know what the damage would be. 

My discipline actually had a positive effect on the relatives I visited, because we played active games outside most of the time and ate healthy snacks such as fruit and veggies, instead of cookies and chips.   We made some really good memories.  It was great! 

i would suggest a visit to Whistler Mountain, if you can. While known for it's winter skiing, the summer time version of Whistler is just as rewarding. I was there in 2001 and walk the trails up the mountain. I took the gondola up to upper hill and walked up to the glacier. There are people there walking the trails and even mountain biking down the hill. It was fun and a nice view.