If the statistics are right, one of your New Year's resolutions had something to do with diet; the same stats say you've probably abandoned it already. But here's something you may want to consider: Any diet, whether it's to lose weight or just stay healthy, is based on rules and exceptions. For travellers, though, it's easy for the exception to become the rule. Coffee-and-bagel breakfasts, fast-food lunches and suppers with double-sized portions can add up, not only to bigger waist sizes but to lower energy levels just when you need to be on your game.
You can combat that with one simple piece of advice: Treat restaurant kitchens like your own. Get them to make you what you'd make yourself, in the same portions, and in the same way. Treat the menus as road maps, rather than destinations.
"Something that I like to [suggest]to my clients, when they're at a restaurant," says Calgary dietitian Andrea Holwegner, "is to open up the menu, look at all the different choices that are there – and then close it and customize it. Tell the waiter or waitress, 'I'm on the road a lot. I know you have fish on the menu. Can you grill it for me?'"
Look at the menu as a cupboard. If, for instance, the Caribou Restaurant and Wine Bar in Thunder Bay has a chicken-pesto-and-artichoke pizza, an apple endive salad and a Cobb salad (which they do), they can also make an endive, artichoke and avocado salad, or strips of grilled chicken breast with oil and vinegar dressing.
Chester Jankowski is a London, Ont., native living in New York. As a partner at a consulting firm, he spends an average of five days a week on the road. A former marathoner, he began gaining weight when his job started taking him on the road, adding 30 pounds over five years. He says, by text message between meetings, that he's "dropped 10 of them over the last six months, which is when I really started focusing on diet versus exercise."
A self-described foodie, Jankowski has always paid more than an average amount of attention to his meals, and he had even been in the habit of taking an omakase approach to dining, asking chefs and waiters what they'd recommend, rather than looking at menus.
It was only recently, though, that he decided to direct these techniques toward fitness.
At the Renaissance Hotel in Dallas, he combined their big green salad with a grilled version of one of their salmon dishes to make a veggie-friendly protein salad. "In terms of completely making stuff up, pasta is [an ideal] example of that," he says. "Hotel restaurants in the U.S., their pasta dishes tend to be… loaded with fat and cheese and all sorts of stuff. So just ask them to make you a simple pasta with some grilled rapini or spinach."
Though he says he's never experienced much resistance to his mix-and-match dining from wait staff, the issue of price can sometimes be a puzzle. In Dallas, the restaurant staff didn't know what to charge him for his fish salad, so they decided it should be the cost of the salad plus about half of what the full fish dish on the menu costs. He finds that simple pasta dishes are usually charged at the rate of the least expensive listed pasta.
Jankowski also suggests extending to sauces the relatively common practice of ordering dressing on the side. If you order a fish in picatta, he says as an example, referring to the butter- or oil-heavy Italian sauce, you can just drizzle it, and avoid the usual restaurant slather.
Like many aspects of frequent travel, success in off-the-menu eating demands making it a strict routine. Otherwise, Holwegner says, the sheer rigour of the road can overcome the best of intentions. "With many of our corporate clients, travel hits their energy so much, people are looking to pick their energy up and go for comfort food [before]they get on a long flight," she says.
"Restaurants don't make it easy…. It takes conscious effort to realize what happens to your decision-making abilities when you're tired."
The trick is to prevent temporarily tired minds from creating permanently tired bodies.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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