Alligator in Gaylord Palms Hotel (Photo credit: blacknight)
Last week I was in Florida for a work related event. I had been worried about eating while “on the road” and unfortunately my fears were more than justified.
I weighed in this morning and I’ve gained over 1kg, which is NOT good. Whether that is due to alcohol or food, or simply the combination, is not clear. I’m not happy about it.
So what went wrong?
And what can I do to fix it next time?
It started pretty badly with the Hilton Dublin Airport. There are no salads or light options on their menu. Nothing. There are a couple of “healthy” options, but I’d have been perfectly happy with a salad. So I opted for a side salad with a steak. Total disaster. The salad was pretty “sad” looking and the dressing was horrible. It tasted of cheap vegetable oil! For a hotel like that you’d expect them to either have a proper dressing or to serve you the oil and balsamic vinegar and let you do it yourself. As I stay there a lot this is a real problem. Do I need to find somewhere else to eat before heading to the hotel or should I make myself a packed dinner?
Days when you spend up to 20 hours in airports are always going to be a bit of a mess. I avoided milky coffee and stuck to plain. Foodwise I just ate the inflight meals.
When I finally got to the Gaylord Palms hotel in Florida problems began.
Breakfast, as I’d suspected, wasn’t an issue. They had a very good breakfast buffet and you could eat plenty of healthy stuff in the morning and get a good start to the day
Unfortunately a lot of the restaurants in the hotel didn’t really “get” the concept of “healthy” at all. Pretty much none of them had anything flagged as “light” or “healthy”, which is odd, as it’s not as if Americans don’t have obesity issues ..
The first evening’s dinner was typical of the problems I encountered. I ordered a steak salad thinking I’d get salad with a bit of meat. Instead I got salads drowned in dressing, cheese and topped with some kind of battered onion thing! (I was able to move some of this to one side and avoid it)
For the rest of the week I tried to get “lighter” options whenever I could, but to be honest I found it really hard. It’s as if nobody in Florida ever eats light food..
The alcohol consumed during the week is a different matter entirely and is linked in part to the type of event I was attending. With a lot of other events I’d probably have been overdosing on coffee, but I need to keep an eye on the alcohol consumption in the future.
