We were gone for 5 days and the last day was probably the hardest. I ended up vomiting last night and I am not sure, but I suspect it was because of what I had eaten. After my meal I had eaten a slice of jelly orange. I think the acidity did not sit well in my stomach after the meal. I had made sure that I did not overeat and this was also a later meal of the evening for me, so it was a couple of hours after our team dinner. Traveling always disrupts my bowel movements and I think that it contributed to me losing weight over the last 5 days. For each bad day of eating, it results in a 1lb decrease in weight. A bad day can be as small as eating 25% less since I do not eat as much as it is. I think that I struggle with eating calorie dense food and I do not drink as much. I decreased a couple of pounds but it was enough when I am trying to gain weight. Going away for hockey tournaments also results in increased activity for me and looking at my step counts and other metrics I increased activity by approximately 30 to 40% while not increasing my calories in.
I think that I am going to need to start taking shots of the protein drinks several times a day as they tend to be rather dense in protein and calories. I can not stomach a whole bottle at once but I can handle shots at a time. The key is to take one shot every 15 or 30 minutes throughout a couple of hours. Full travel days impact my food intake as Mel’s driving creates some nausea with the condition of our roads. I tend to not want to eat too much while we are driving. Today was especially not comfortable for me for some reason. I also think I need to stop eating spicy food. We have the sweet and hot pickles from Costco and Korean kimchi that I enjoy eating as quick snacks. The kimchi sits well, but with the pickles and the acidity I need to watch how many I eat. Whenever I eat and I think that I may be at risk of overeating I give the last couple of bites to Xavier, or to Mel if Xavier is not available. At home it is easy to take quick bites of things. In the hotel it is not the same and the amount of food is not the same.
We do enjoy going to the Asian supermarkets though and tend to spend a lot of money there. Every visit costs us a couple of hundred dollars. The kids love the jelly oranges and we bought some for our parents. These oranges are 4 times the cost of regular oranges and I think we ended up spending $25 or so on oranges for this trip. Totally worth it. Mel loves finding small cafes or areas with pastries or things and I found a Portuguese bakery and bought all sorts of treats. Two boxes worth of it. This is on top of all the food we bought from Uncle Tetsu. Between the 4 of us, we can not eat all of this in a short amount of time with the amount of food we purchased. We should freeze some of it to maintain freshness so the hundreds of dollars we spent do not go to waste. I snacked on a bunch of this while we drove and they were delicious. Even adding up everything that I ate, I do not think it was enough for my usual intake, but now that we are home I can make up for it.
Safe to say, our trips to bigger cities always results in us spending approximately the same amount of money on food to take home then the cost of a hotel. We tend to see things and stock up. This trip we have Lebanese, Portuguese, Chinese and Italian desserts. Both of our kids are foodies so they enjoy trying out all of the food. It makes me a bit sad that I can not eat much of it all at the moment. I did not get a chance to eat any Ottawa pizza nor an authentic Ottawa shawarma. I did search for some Portuguese bakeries in Toronto for our next visit there in a month.
Q