Hey, all! I've been on travel for the past ten days or so, but now am back at home. Glad to be home, but tired.

I was thinking that I am probably going to hang here and not record my weight for a couple of days - between eating restaurant food, long hours, and many many flight miles, I am pretty swollen and bloated.

Sometimes I made good food choices (avoiding airport food and conference junk food), sometimes I made good non-plan choices (e.g. where I live, we don't have Indian food - so I made a point of finding a good Indian restaurant), and a sometimes I made really bad choices (ordered pizza delivery on last night in Chicago), so we'll see where it all shakes out.

I worked out in the hotel fitness centers and pools.

Welcome back, good to see you again! Travel is tough on weight loss, but you'll get back on top of it shortly, it sounds like.

Welcome back and good job on working out while you were gone!

It's always good to get back to your 'food comfort zone'. So glad you took advantage of the gym at the hotel.

Take a deep breath and regroup! Any extra eating on vacation is OVER. Hop back on your plan. Then, Plan, plan and plan some more for a healthy week.

It will be fine.

I hope that you had a great trip! I definitely know how you feel I went on a cruise about a month ago for a week and ate horribly and when I got home I dreaded getting back on the scale but eventually I did and it wasn't THAT bad and all the weight came off pretty quickly after that. I just tried to think about how a week of bad eating isn't going to make me gain back a ton of weight, its eating bad consistently!

But yay for you for working out and trying to make good choices
You should be really proud of yourself

Copy that ... by that I mean, I could have written some of your post. I'm just back now from about a week traveling. But instead of flying, I was stuck in a car for hours on end. Pennsylvania is green & lovely but somewhat tedious on Routes 99 and 80. Like you, I was coping with restaurant food; also like you, I was using the pools & equipment in the hotel fitness centers. (The equipment didn't impress me. What, has Life Fitness got a monopoly on these places?) My equivalent of your takeout pizza was blackened catfish with shrimp etouffee (I thinK I am spelling that wrong) at a seafood place in Scranton. And on the side, peas swimming in butter.

I think I may actually get on the scale tomorrow though. Out of a fascinated disgust. Because I have to know the worst. I am getting all kinds of mixed signals. I don't like the looks of my arms, or the feel of my bra band. But my feet don't seem too puffy & the waist of my jeans feels somewhat roomier. I think an actual number would keep me from going insane with polarized speculations.

But I relate to your decision to skip it for a couple days.

Thing is, we're not gonna inflate up to twice our size, as if we sucked on an air hose, just from travel life. It will all be a distant pleasant memory by this same time next week. That is, if we resume our good healthy habits again.

Thanks for the notes.

Saef, I think Life Fitness DOES have a monopoly. I got on the scale this morning and it shows me at 210. I don't think I gained 6 lbs in 10 days, so I'm assuming that the bloat is still coming off. Blah.

I'm reeling from shock, because the scale claims that I lost 2 pounds while traveling.

Yes, I was hungry a lot of the time. I never left the dinner table feeling satisfied. I'm used to filling up my plate at dinner with vegetables. Restaurants just call cooked vegetables "sides" & you're lucky if you can find any. Restaurants are designed for "food as pleasure" and "food as entertainment" mode & most people don't consider vegetables pleasurable unless they've been exposed to innovative cooking or they pay attention to nutrition or they grew up in a family that taught that vegetables can be delicious.

So I think most of the weight loss really must be due partly to incidental movement. My job is quite sedentary. I'm at a laptop rewriting people's sentences all day long. I have to remind myself to get up & move periodically. While traveling, I was on my feet, walking, looking at things. It's sad to think I'd have an easier time maintaining a healthy weight if I left my job. (Can't do that. Just bought an apartment last summer. There's a mortgage involved.)

Congratulations, saef!!!!! That's great news!

My job is also sedentary, and I also did a fair amount of incidental movement while traveling. You'll forgive me if I feel a little envy while my travel shakes itself out of my system! Are you, then, an editor?

Last month I went on a 10 day vacation. Of course the instant I got back, I weighed myself. It showed an 11 pound gain...yikes! Three days later the 11 pounds was gone. Most likely I was a victim of major sodium bloat! Get back to your plan, don't worry...vacation weight goes away quickly.

For me, Calluna, it's unprecedented. But, as I said, one of my memories of this trip is feeling hungry more than I usually do & that's a feeling that I really hate. So I'm going to say hunger & incidental movement were the causes. Also I'll bet because I was not on a plane.

(I am what my company calls a business technology writer. I'm working on consultants' & analysts' reports. Yeah, a lot of it is editing but sometimes I'm interviewing them & then writing, or writing from bullet points & based on my own research, so then I'm originating text, and that's where they draw the dividing line in my particular workplace.)

Let me think what else I did. Okay, I had complete control over breakfast. I didn't go near the hotel continental breakfast. I had Ezekiel bread & unsalted almond butter in my suitcase. I got yogurt & some blueberries from a grocery store & kept that in a fridge in my hotel. That's what I had every morning.

Also, I didn't have the conference food. I remember that from other meetings. They put out bowls of candy bars & mints & granola bars & etc. I saw none of that stuff. I would go to the hotel continental buffet for coffee & take a piece or fruit (well, more than one) & that helped.

Dinner wasn't as difficult as I'd thought. I kept getting plain grilled salmon. Once, grilled halibut. The restaurant kept wanting to glaze it. I kept asking them not to. I am sure that I am loaded with mercury from all the grilled salmon that I ate. No bread. I watched people eating the most delicious focaccia, breadsticks, cheese bread, raisin bread, corn bread, rolls & etc. Difficult, difficult.

Drank a ton of brewed iced tea. No soda.

Lunch was the hardest meal out. I kept going for plainest possible veggie salads with protein on top. Tried not to get the chicken Caesar, though.

And thank goodness for Panera Bread while on the road. What a relief to see its sign in the sea of McDonald's & Burger King & KFC. Excellent for road food. Veggie soup, salad with chicken on the top & then back on the road again. I'm no vegetarian, obviously, but thank goodness for vegetarians & their needs speaking up & putting their $$ to work & forcing restaurants to offer vegetarian options aside from the American burger & fried chicken.

Calluna, you will be fine. That sodium-related weight can be stubborn, but it will all come off, and I'll bet you'll even have a slight loss.

How were the fitness centers in your gyms on the road? Mine left a lot to be desired. One had set out plastic buckets around the stepper; I guess the ceiling leaked. Also I saw a lot of Weider exercise benches, missing parts or with sections frozen in place. Lots of Life Fitness treadmills, too.

Were you able to swim without children getting into your lane while playing in the pool? Did you work out in the morning or at night?

One of the fitness centers was pretty amazing - but then, the conference center was in one of the big vegas hotels. All Life Fitness machines, but enough that you could use them without standing in line - somewhere from 24-30 pieces of equipment. They all worked, too. The pool there is huge but not linear, so for the most part I was able to swim pretty decently without swimming over children.

The other one in Chicago left a lot to be desired. It had ONE EACH treadmill, stationary bike, and elliptical machine, as well as a non-functional weight bench. The pool was quite small, but I swam anyway. I tended to work out at night, as the conferences started early. I couple of days went long, and I worked out at midday.

I walked quite a lot in both places. We went to Red Rocks, walked the strip, etc.

One conference had terrible food, and I avoided it like the plague (where possible - one time I got stuck). The other conference was quite a bit better, having fruit, nuts, and various drinks including water.

I agree, nearly the best notel fitness centers I've ever used were in the gigantic Las Vegas hotels. (Often adjacent to their spas.)

(As an aside, don't you wonder where all the very fit Las Vegas showgirls do their workouts? Because you know they have to be putting in some serious gym time. Obviously not at the hotel, but they have to be training somewhere.)

(The best one EVER was at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA. Because it's not in the hotel. There's a really nice gym adjacent to the hotel that you can use. This gets the saef*** of approval.)

You need to give yourself many, many stars for your diligence in working out. At conferences, I find, there's an awful lot of feasting (because of the expense account thing) & major booze consumption. It's hard to get out of the I-deserve-this mode. Vegas in particular pretty much lives on the oh-just-this-once-indulge-yourself attitude. Problem is, weight gained in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas; it comes home with you.

But yours will go. Soon. And we will rejoice with you when it happens.