Making The Best Choices That I Can

At my Weight Watcher meetings, I’ve learned some great tips.  One is to use a smaller plate so that it looks like you’re eating more.  Another is to only put half of what you’re going to eat on that tiny plate so that when it is empty you can go back for “seconds”.  And then there’s my personal favorite: split dessert with someone.  Now before you get all excited and run out to your favorite restaurant and find some random stranger who is sitting alone and try to talk them into sharing a slice of Death by Chocolate cake a la mode with you, let me explain what I mean by “split dessert”.  This isn’t like when we were kids and did “I cut, you choose” to make sure the dessert is halved equally.  The Weight Watchers trick for splitting dessert is that you get the first bite and the last bite, and your dessert partner in crime gets all the bites in between.  That’s it. 2 bites.  And believe it or not, it actually works.  You get to enjoy the flavors of Death by Chocolate cake a la mode without having to unbutton your pants right there at the table.

Gunther.  Awesome hiking companion!

This past week I thought a lot about another trick I learned.  The trick is that if you can’t plan your meals and you don’t know what you’ll be eating next, just make the best choices you can given what you have to work with.  I started off last Sunday at my friend Heather’s house in New Hampshire.  Eating there was easy.  No, I didn’t know in advance what the meals would be, but Heather’s house is stocked with so much healthy food that it’s impossible to eat poorly.  Tack onto that the 8 mile hike that Heather and I took with her dog Gunther on Monday, and it was almost like being at a health spa.

Unfortunately, I had to leave Heather, Gunther and the rest of her family Monday evening to head to Boston for a training I would be attending for the next two days.  I was going to eat lunch at the trainings, but all other meals were up to me to forage for.  When I got to Boston on Monday night I learned that my hotel was just outside Chinatown.  So after I checked in (where they handed me a warm chocolate chip cookie and I incorrectly decided that the best choice was to eat half instead of none; hey, it was WARM), I decided I was having Chinese for dinner and headed back out.  After realizing that Boston’s former “Combat Zone” is on the fringe of Chinatown, and that the word “former” is not really accurate (after I walked right through what I am pretty sure were two separate drug deals), I found a crowded restaurant and went in.  I tried to order well: spicy chicken and broccoli and brown rice, but the waiter spoke to me in a voice that was a mix of annoyed and condescending when he said that no restaurant in Chinatown would serve brown rice.  Ok, I’ll have white rice.  It’s the best choice I could make.

Tuesday morning started off well enough.  Instead of a crappy fitness center with an old treadmill and some free weights, this hotel had a deal with the YMCA next door to it, so I got to take an amazing (read: grueling) spin class to start off my day.  On the way to my training I got an egg white veggie wrap.  So far so good.  And then the training started.

The training itself was fantastic.  The food, not so much.  Lunch was bagged sandwiches and salad.  Ok, I thought this wouldn’t be so bad.  But my hopes were dashed when it was my turn to make a salad and saw that it was just iceberg lettuce and creamy dressings.  The bag the sandwiches came in were more nutritional than that. Skipping the “salad”, I grabbed a bag marked turkey only to be disappointed again when I found a sandwich loaded with mayonnaise on a hero roll big enough to sleep on. And keeping the sandwich company in the bag was a big bag of potato chips.  But I did my best, discreetly wiping off as much mayo as I could and only eating one side of the bread.  I donated my chips back to the lunch table and pounced on one of the few bottles of water hidden amongst all the soda.

Later in the day they had “snacks” for us: cookies.  Enormous cookies.  They weren't warm so were easier to pass.  Fortunately I had a few packs of nuts stashed away in my backpack.

That night I met up with a Boston friend, Bethany, for dinner.  We had Vietnamese food and I admit that by that point I was frustrated foodwise.  I ordered one of those big  bowls of soup and should have left half of the noodles behind, but I didn’t.

Wednesday was a new day.  I prepared myself with a 5 mile treadmill run at the gym (I didn’t think that running alone through the “former” combat zone was such a hot idea) and got another healthy breakfast.  I also bought an apple and a banana to use to defend myself against large cookies.

The food at the training on Wednesday was similar to the day before, except that now the turkey sub also had bacon on it.  Bacon! Did someone call ahead and let them know all of my old favorite foods?  Now the best choice would have been to strip my sandwich down to the turkey, lettuce and tomatoes, but I didn’t.  I ate all of it, and didn’t even enjoy it. I did skip the chips again, and ate my apple while everyone else filled up on cookies.

When the training was over, I walked to the train station (and three native Bostonians in my training did not know how to get to South Station which was only about a half mile away,  See, it wasn’t just  me who was constantly lost when I lived there; nobody knows how to get anywhere).  I searched for a place to get dinner for my ride home, and bypassed the McDonald’s and Regina’s Pizzeria (with the smell of  their sausage pizza transporting me back to fatter times) to settle on a salad that was actually salad.  But then I saw Rosie.

Rosie’s is a bakery in Cambridge with a small kiosk at South Station.  Anyone living in the greater Boston area will tell you that when you die, you hope that heaven is located inside Rosie’s bakery.  When I lived in Massachusetts, I practically lived at Rosie’s.  Rosie’s chocolate chip cookies are the only ones on this planet that I will say are better than mine (again, something my Boston friends can attest to).

I wandered over to the kiosk, and stood next to a man who ordered 3 cookies: chocolate chip, peanut butter and oatmeal raisin.  For a brief second I considered asking him if he’d split them and give me a bite of each, but I knew that was just too weird (and no normal person would ever give up a bite of Rosie’s chocolate chip cookies). I did lean over to him, though, and ask him which one was the best.  When he responded “definitely the chocolate chip,” I knew I had just spoken to one of the most brilliant people in the world and ordered one for myself.  Somewhere during my train ride I ate my salad and washed it down with that cookie that I admit was worth every bite. 

So, I’d say I did OK last week.  I kept up with my workouts but I didn’t make every great choice.  Once I got home I followed another Weight Watchers tip: when you fall down, just pick yourself off, dust yourself off and keep going.   And I did just that.  Will I falter again on my next trip?  Maybe (and absolutely if I bump into Rosie’s again).   But as long as I generally make good choices and dust myself off a lot, I’ll be fine.