Traveling with Diabetes

Breakfast at our motel was free. Again, it was mostly carbs, with cereal, waffles, fruit juice, and Danish pastries. But they also had little round scrambled eggs and sausage that you were supposed to put on buns to make Eggs McMuffin knockoffs. Another guest referred to the sausage as "little greaseburgers" and I agreed, so after the first morning I brought my own breakfast.

I had brought a baggie containing my low-carb cereal: equal parts ground flax seed and wheat bran, with some stevia mixed in. The coffee the motel provided was hotter than the hot water they offered in their breakfast room, so after the first try, I mixed the cereal with hot coffee.

I have a plastic food container with three compartments in it, and it just fits in a little cloth bag that I can carry like a purse. When I take it to a restaurant, I can unobtrusively put some of the dinner into the "doggy box" and take it home. I find it much nicer than those little paper containers with the metal handles that used to be used only by Chinese restaurants, or those HUGE plastic containers that aren't very tight so you have to carry them upright.

One problem I have when traveling is the size of the portions at restaurants, even when one spurns the rolls and the rice and the dessert. An occasional restaurant meal is OK, but after eating at them two or three times a day, I begin to feel stuffed all the time. Ordering two appetizers instead of one meal sometimes gives me just about the right amount of food, and it's usually more interesting food that the meat and vegetables and starch on the entrée section of the menu.

If it's still too much, there's the doggy box option. Our motel provided both a fridge and a microwave, so reserving part of the lunch or dinner for breakfast the next day solved two problems at once.

I hate wasting things, and it used to bother me not to clean my plate if they served potatoes or rice or something else I couldn't eat. But I've learned to simply ask them not to bring those things, and sometimes they'll even substitute a salad or some broccoli for the starches, especially when the plate looks bare without them. Even then, it's often too much, so into the doggy box it goes.

Of course, with my failing brain, I often leave the doggy box in the motel. Or I remember to bring it to the car and then leave it there while we go for a walk, planning to get it when we come back to drive to a restaurant. Then we come across a nice restaurant on our walk and I don't have the box. Some day I'll get really, really organized, I promise.

Gaining weight. Most people gain weight on vacations, because of all the restaurant meals and snacks, plus feeling that they're on vacation and don't need to follow rules. I weighed myself when I got home and found that I'd lost 2 pounds.

One reason is that I'm more active on vacation. No long hours spent in front of the computer. Even when you're driving around admiring the scenery, you tend to get out and take a walk. Other days you're on your feet most of the day.