vacation eating – The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal

Eating in restaurants when you’re on a restricted diet can be maddeningly difficult if not impossible. Every restaurant dish is loaded with salt and/or fat and/or sugar or other sweeteners.

You could become a hermit, eating every meal at home, the same boring things over and over again, cutting yourself off from the larger world around you. But who wants to do that with their lives?

A recent steakhouse order for me, no sauces, no butter, no sour cream but a great filet mignon.

Not me, so I’ve been looking through menu nutrition information and talking to chefs and restaurant manager’s trying to find dishes I can still enjoy away from home. I still want to socialize and eating out is a major part of that. Continue reading “Low-salt, low-fat eating out — very diffcult, not impossible, we can help” →

You are planning a dream vacation and wondering how you’ll be able to try adventurous new dishes while staying on the restricted diet you’re now on because of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, gout or any of a number of other ailments.

The simple answer is that you’re going to go off your diet while on the road. I just completed 10 days in Italy, a trip to find my family’s roots that I had been hoping to make most of my life. And while I passed up many dishes I would have liked to eat, I still went off my restricted diet. I ate pasta almost every day. I ate gelato every other day. And I ate desserts like wonderful chocolate cakes, something I largely have not eaten since my angioplasty in August 2012.

One of the many wonderful pasta dishes I ate in Italy, none of which is allowed on my restricted diet.

The result: I gained six pounds in 10 days. I consider that a triumph of sorts, however. In my pre-heart-problem days, I would routinely gain a pound a day on a vacation. A trip like I just took, which featured so much wonderful offerings, likely would have cost me more than a pound a day. So six pounds in 10 days showed the level of restraint I was exercising, I think. Continue reading “Vacations and restrictive diets: you will go off your diet while on the road” →

I’ve been doing my best since I arrived in southern Italy to eat the way I’m supposed to on my restricted diet but doing that is proving impossible. I cannot avoid pasta here and I can’t find whole wheat pasta which is the only type I am supposed to eat these days.

What I am doing is eating smaller portions of pasta than would be served in American restaurants. Portions are smaller here because places serve the traditional Italian multi-course dinners. In those the pasta course is just a prelude to the fish or meat course and so not massive in size.

My first course, pasta with tomatoes and eggplants

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Tag: vacation eating

Low-salt, low-fat eating out — very diffcult, not impossible, we can help

Vacations and restrictive diets: you will go off your diet while on the road

Can you stay on a restricted diet in the land of pasta and seafood?

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