During the recent conference I was eating at restaurants in the hotel for 5 days. How did I keep up with healthy eating choices?
Healthy eating at the hotel this week has been a challenge! This past week Jill and I attended a giant podcasters’ conference in Denver where we learned from the best in the industry.
The conference was held at the Gaylord Rockies, a HUGE hotel with 7 different restaurants & bars with hundreds of hotel rooms.Located in the prairie outside of Aurora, it is a ten minute Uber ride from the Denver Airport and far away from any other restaurants. We were pretty much limited to the food that we could buy in the hotel and a few excursions off the hotel grounds.
I realized how much effort we’ve been making over the past years to focus on food program. This focus has helped, because it seemed to come naturally as we would made our meal selections.
Some of my conscious healthy eating decisions:
- Try to stay away from fried – although I did have a crispy chicken sandwich for lunch one day. I paired it with fruit, not fries
- Get your greens – I had a delicious apple and feta salad of spinach and walnuts, as well as the pictured quinoa and friess (curled endive) salad. Also a Greek salad from the Rockies MarketPlace convenience store inside the hotel.
- Greek yogurt – at least 3 of these during the week.
- Almonds – grabbed a bag of almonds for snacking. This was helpful when it wasn’t convenient to eat when I was hungry due to breakout sessions or while traveling.
24 nuts for 160 calories: 14 gm fat, 8 gm carbs, and 6 gm protein.
- Alcohol – I went light on all the available free alcohol at the conference. It was a higher elevation and different time zone for me, so I was a very light drinker.
- WATER – because it was a higher elevation than I’m used to, I was drinking about one and a half times as much water as usual. Still felt a quart low most of the time!
- Timing – didn’t do well with this. I often was eating right before bed. Not my favorite way to “rest & digest.” I usually give it 2-3 hours before bed, but was impossible because I was tired due to the time zone change and being very busy with conference activities later into the evening.
After returning home, I stepped on the scale in the morning, expecting a gain. Nope, same weight as when I left. That is a win!
