Eating on the road

One of the hardest aspects of eating healthy is traveling. Especially when the motel room has only a small microwave and mini fridge. Impossible to cook anything and they don't make many healthy microwavable options. So you're essentially forced to eat out. Now, as I've said before, I love food. I love a good burger, with fries of course. I love deep fried anything. And that's always been my go to choice when at most restaurants.

Over the weekend the wife and I took a trip to the coast. No kitchen in the room, not a lot of healthy eating out options in Lincoln City, so it was a struggle. However, I made an effort to step outside of my usual box and explore other menu items that carried a few less calories than my usual choices. Fish tacos anyone? Something I had never tried before. I've always heard them to be good, but was leary of trying them. A taco, to me, is burger, cheese, lettuce..... Who puts fish in a taco?? Wasn't I surprised when I liked them? OK, so I could have had a salad, but dammit, baby steps here. Fish, corn tortillas and cabbage is far better than burger, cheese, bacon, bun and a side of deep fried fries. So OK, we can add fish tacos to the list of things I like.

First experience with fish tacos

We went to another restaurant in town, one we've wanted to try for a long time. Short story, what a disappointment. If you've ever eaten at your grandparents retirement home you've eating at Kyllo's. Utterly flavorless food. But again, I decided to go for the lesser of evils and ordered a fish sandwich with slaw instead of fries. OK, so it had pretty much zero flavor and the slaw was not only runny but room temperature (I'm honestly kind of surprised I didn't get food poisoning) but I made better meal choices than I usually have. And I'm happy about that. I explored the menus and tried things I normally wouldn't. 

If only it had had any flavor

Traveling is one of those triggers. It's so easy to eat crap when you're on the road. It's a habit too. Hit the drive-through, eat in the car. Stop at that roadside burger joint. Order a pizza (OK, so we do that on the last night). In the past, on the way out of town we would stop and buy crap. Chips, chocolate, crackers... Road food. Who wants carrot sticks while on a road trip? People who don't want to weigh 600 pounds again, that's who. 

We shopped before we left because we knew it would be an issue. We tried to buy things that worked on our eating plan but didn't need cooked. Crackers and cheese. Sandwich meat, hummus, veggies. Healthy option to keep us from eating the bad ones. Because the bad ones are so damn easy. When you go to a restaurant you don't instantly go to the salad section of the menu. But it is possible to make better choices. It's hard to be healthy on the road, but not impossible. We've made eating crap way too easy in this country. On the coast most sit down restaurants close early, drive-throughs are open till midnight or later. The healthy choices are usually more expensive, crap is cheap. Seriously, $12 for a salad?? So I wasn't perfect over the weekend, but I was better than I used to be.