Tips for eating well when out and about

Today is my third day on vacation while following my diet, and I thought I’d update you with a few tips I’ve accumulated:

• Look for fruit and vegetable sides. Enough restaurants offer these as options that it’s not actually that difficult to find them. I was thrilled to find an epically awesome fresh fruit bowl (actually fresh and flavorful, can you believe that?) at a cafe in Portland with lunch, and a salad with dried cranberries and soup for dinner in the airport. Yesterday we went to a restaurant that didn’t have fruit sides, so I bought a bottled 100% fruit smoothie to drink instead.

• Don’t look too hard. I was so focused on getting the seemingly elusive fruits and veggies that I ended up missing my protein goal for the first day by nearly half. Oops…overcompensated .
• Try to choose low-sodium options. Every time I’m teaching about a low-sodium diet, I tell patients to expect to blow their sodium goal out of the water when they eat out. I did – the recommendation is for 2,000 milligrams of sodium each day, but I topped out at 3,300 on my traveling day (yikes!). The best way to keep that under control is to go for fresh options and avoid things like processed foods, breads, lunch meats, and soups. My biggest mistake? Soup for both lunch and dinner.
• Pay attention. My body is really pretty good about telling me what it wants. I’m usually pretty good at ignoring it. My lunch portions, for example, were about the same as I might have eaten pre-MyPlate, but I got full part of the way through. I didn’t eat all the fruit and I gave my fiance part of my soup.
• Work it off. If you expect to creep past your calorie goal for the day, find some activity to do to compensate. On my flying day, I was about 150 calories over. I carted my backpack and carry-on for a brisk lap around the airport during my layover and closed the gap some. Yesterday, Abbie wanted to take me to a delicious Mexican restaurant (with gargantuan portions) and I expected to be quite a bit over my calorie goal. But after snowboarding for 4 hours and a 40-minute hike with a beautiful view of Lake Tahoe, my calorie tracker actually put me at 500 calories UNDER my goal because of the activity I had done. And check out these views…totally worth it, right?