New Orleans Trip Report

So I’m back home after my trip last week to New Orleans. Overall it was a really good week. I learned a lot at the conference, and I had enough free time at night to explore around New Orleans a bit and enjoy myself.

But the big question is – how did I do with eating and exercise? This was my first trip away from home since I began this journey at the start of this year. I’ve found a nice groove at home with eating and exercise, but I knew it was going to be a struggle once I got out of my regular daily routine.

Breakfasts and lunches were provided at the conference, so I didn’t have a huge amount of control over what I ate for those meals. The lunches were actually pretty good, and as long as I stayed away from the dessert table, they were reasonably healthy. The breakfasts, on the other hand, were pitiful. Bagels and muffins, that was it. The first day, I was able to go over to the “special meals” table to get some fruit. I thought it was pretty sad that fruit was considered a “special meal”. Unfortunately, after the first day, they were checking names against a list of those that had pre-registered for the special meals, so my source of fruit had been cut off.

In Junk Food as Far as the Eye Can See, I talked about the huge amount of junk food that has been provided at this conference in the past. Much to my surprise (and delight), this was massively scaled back this year. They only put out snacks during one of the afternoon breaks, and I managed to stay away from all the sweets, and just grab a couple pieces of fruit instead. I skipped the vendor reception altogether, and I did hear from others that there were still massive amounts of food and alcohol there, so I’m glad I didn’t go and tempt myself.

Dinners were mostly good, considering I was eating out every night. I had some really great food, delicious seafood, an awesome steak one night, and what I think were the best ribs I’ve ever had another night. These meals definitely weren’t some of the best that I’ve had health-wise, but I didn’t go totally nuts, and never walked out of a restaurant feeling overly full (which is something that happened pretty often in my former life), so I’ll chalk that up as a win.

I missed my regular weigh-in post on Friday since I was still in New Orleans and didn’t have access to a scale. I got home about 4am Saturday morning, and weighed myself when I got up. I was up a couple pounds, but I think my body was still recovering from all the travel and extra carbs I had been eating all week due to the all-carb breakfasts at the conference. Just 2 days later, and I’m already down 3 pounds from Saturday, putting me back right about where I was before I left. Since my body seems to still be equalizing from the trip, I’ll just wait until Friday to do another “official” weigh-in post.

How about my exercise? Well, I’m sad to say that I didn’t even step foot into the hotel’s exercise room, but I did go on three runs outside while I was there, so overall I’m pretty happy with that. I’m not used to the heat and humidity, so even getting up and running before 6am was difficult. Just outside our hotel, there was this great place to run right along the Mississippi River.

The other great thing was that I had a running partner all week! On the trip down to New Orleans, I was talking with my coworker, and somehow it came up that we are both runners. I’ve still been pretty shy to talk about my new healthy lifestyle with anyone but family and close friends, so it’s really not something I’ve talked about to anyone at work before, but now I’m really glad I did – all three of those runs we did together, which was a really nice change of pace from running alone.

As far as New Orleans goes, well it’s definitely a party town! It was actually kind of disappointing. Walking down Bourbon Street, it was literally just bars and strip clubs. It was neat to see a lot of the old architecture there, but there really wasn’t much for us to “do” there. On Friday, the conference was over and we didn’t have to be to the airport until 4pm, so we had most of the day to explore a bit more. They have these streetcars there that you can take all over the city. We spent most of the day riding those around, seeing different parts of town. Again, we didn’t really “do” much, mostly just went sightseeing.