What is it about being around my kids that makes me mainline cookies?

So we got back from our trip this morning. As is 3:45 am this morning, and neither of us could fall asleep until after 5, and then we were up at 6:30 to get the kids off to school. Me = tired.

But anyway, I did really well on the trip. I ate a lot of fruit and as many veggies as I could get. I also made a little rule for myself that unless the food was amazing, I didn't finish all of it. And perhaps my biggest victory foodwise was not spending all seven days gorging myself on pastries. Egypt, you see, does not have a single good pastry in the whole of its borders. The "donuts" taste like stale hamburger buns with disgusting frosting on them, and anything else they call a dessert is soaked in so much honey its inedible. I've told Holly several times that if we lived in France I'd surely be up to 500 pounds by now. Well, this trip I took was to Tunisia. A country that used to be occupied by France. Tunisia has good pastries. Lots of good pastries. Every hotel we stayed in that offered breakfast (which was all but one, because one of the nights we stayed at Luke Skywalker's house)(my husband is a nerd, and I am nice; what can I say?) had pastries at breakfast, but I made sure to eat fruit and eggs (hard-boiled, since that's the least grease-soaked option they had) before I had any baked goods, and even then I had very few. I didn't fell deprived though, because I was just choosing not to eat them all. I had some--and sometimes more than some--but I didn't have all, and for me, that's big. Plus--and this is another biggie for me--I wrote down everything I ate. Everything. (I didn't worry about amounts or calories; I just wrote down the food.) We also did a lot of walking, a little running (well, me; dh did a little more than a little), and quite a bit of Ancient Roman Ruin Climbing (I like to call it ARRC, you may have heard of it at your gym; it's all the rage these days)(seriously though, they let you roam practically willy-nilly wherever you want to go; it was so cool!). I drank as much water as I could, but the bathroom choices were usually, um, not so great. Usually I would just get in as much as I could at night. Except that night in Matmata. That bathroom was awful.

But today? Now that I'm home, surrounded by healthy food, a gym, and clean bathrooms? I think I've eaten my weight in Oreos. I guess re-entry into real life is harder than I expected it to be. Plus, me = tired.

So I'm giving myself one more day to stabilize a little. I'm still writing down everything I eat, even though today every other entry says "oreo." Saturday I'll be back to controlling my intake more, tracking my food beyond just its name, and real gym exercising. Also, the oreos have to go. And not by way of my digestive tract.

Please don't hate me...

...but I'm going on a trip with my husband. For a week. With no children. And we're going far enough away that we have to fly there. This is the first time I will have ever been on a plane with him with no kids. This is also the longest we've ever gone away together (breaking our previous record of 4 days, which broke our previous record of 24 hours. What can I say? We don't get out much).

I am really excited about this trip, but there's something about traveling that I really hate: the unknown. I mean, I just don't know what I'm going to do with myself when I have a whole week without having to break up any Polly Pocket-related fights or get excited about anybody's excrement (did I mention that Sam is potty training?), and I'm really afraid that I'm going to sleep all morning every day. Oh, I'm just kidding (mostly), the unknown that I hate is all the stuff that goes with trying to lose weight. I don't know what kind of food I'm going to have access to, don't know when or where I'm going to exercise, don't know how much water I can drink and when (since I don't know when I'll find a bathroom)(or what condition it will be in, for that matter).

So all I can do is plan the best I can. I'm bringing along some portable snacks, exercise clothes, running shoes, and an exercise tube. In my favor is the fact that I never have to talk my husband into exercising (in fact, usually I have to talk him into leaving me alone about exercising already), and with the shoes and the tubing, I'll be able to get walks and modified strength training in, with bodyweight cardio moves to use in case other forms of exercise aren't feasible. I'm also going to try to get some fruit and water to keep in the rental car so that along with the snack I bring, we'll have healthy options available. As for the bathroom thing, I'm thinking I'm just going to have to hope for the best :)

What about you? What do you do when you're traveling? How do you make sure you get your exercise in and have access to healthy food you can eat? Is anybody traveling for the holidays and needs some help formulating a plan to get you through it with your goals in tact? Give me your best healthy-living-whilst-not-at-home tip! Also, do me a favor and try to work the word "whilst" into conversation today.