By the way, I'm about to confront another couple of milestones in my weight loss saga: first major trip out of town, and first airline travel.
Many of you reading this know all too well what a hell-on-earth of discomfort and humiliation an airline trip can be for a person of size. Remember the huge flap a few years ago when it became public knowledge that Southwest Airlines had a protocol for charging passengers who could not fit into their even-narrower-than-industry-standard coach seat a double fare for a second seat? And that said protocol involved informing the unlucky passenger that they were fat enough to require an extra seat right there in public in front of all the other passengers? Well, at my top weight I happened to be just borderline on their humiliate-the-fat-person double-seat protocol--I could just fit between the armrests of their preternaturally tiny seats, but had to request a seatbelt extender. So, fortunately, I never had the pleasure of the buy-a-second-seat humiliation, but I did experience the joy of having to ask the flight attendants--and sometime remind them multiple times--to please bring me the goddamned seatbelt extender already.
Not to mention enduring the baleful glare of whoever wound up sitting next to "the fat slob." Never mind that those super-narrow coach seats are also too narrow for strapping healthy young men, whose little butts might fit perfectly in the seats, but whose manly broad shoulders and gun-type biceps might still infringe on their neighbors' space in all directions. Naw, nobody whines and snivels about having to sit next to passengers with huge shoulders poking them, but you should hear some of the crap airline passengers spew about sitting next to people with big bellies or hips. And hardly anybody remembers this is all an artificial problem created by the airlines, intent on packing as many sardines into the tin can as they can get away with.
Oh, and don't even get me started on airplane lavatories. How the hell anyone bigger than a twelve-year-old uses those little coffins in anything resembling comfort, I do not know.
Well, for better or worse, I will now by virtue of my smaller bod be spared the majority of that insanity ... but that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods. For on my e-ticket are the fatal words: "food for purchase."
Yep. Airlines make you pay for your meals now. And they no longer seem to have any way to request special meals for various health reasons. Further, I haven't flown since they instituted all those new airport security restrictions on what you can bring on the plane. And I'm sorry, I've read the TSA website a bazillion times now, and can still find no definitive answers on what foods it is safe to take through security. And if you guess wrong, guess what? You're automatically in trouble with the law. I'm sorry, but that's fucked up.
Okay, yeah, I can buy food and drink inside the security perimeter. But just think of the quality--and price!--of the typical fast-food crap you find in airports. If I'm lucky, I might be able to score one of those awful salads that Mickey D's put on their menu so they can pretend they serve "healthy" food, with the boring mass of iceberg lettuce and the disgusting low-fat dressing. If I'm unlucky ... guess I'll be eating my very first fast-food burger since I went on my regimen, huh? Bleah. A food item I have not missed one whit, and now it's looking like my best chance at an even slightly palatable meal.
Anyway, enough of my whining about that. Once I do touch down in Charlotte NC, where I'll be visiting family, things should get a bit more pleasant ... and also a bit more challenging. This is a pleasure trip, after all, and so I have to figure out how I will navigate the food aspect, balancing legitimate enjoyment of the area's local cuisine against the desire to stay healthy and not go overboard. Considering Charlotte's local-cuisine claims to fame are apparently soul food and North Carolina-style barbeque, this might look a little dicey.
But I have decided two things: 1) this trip will not be an excuse to just randomly blow away the whole regimen with indiscriminate eating; and 2) neither will this trip be about puritanical self-denial. There is always a middle path, and I intend to find it.
Once I get off the damn plane anyway. Gah. I never liked flying. And I still don't. I may have made a lot of changes in the past fourteen months, but some things never change.
P.S. I will have Internet access while I'm traveling. I'm not sure how much time I'll have available to post, given that I'm supposed to be doing a lot of family stuff. So we'll see if I can make some progress reports while I'm out there. I'll be for sure posting a summary report when I return.
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