DaedTech Digest: How Does All of the Travel Affect Your Diet?
Another week, another slow travel question. This one is pretty straightforward.
How does all of the slow travel affect your diet compared to leading a normal life?
First of all, let me say that you’ll probably get a slightly different answer to this question if you ask Amanda than if you ask me, even though we share a lifestyle.
The reason is that she puts a lot more effort into considering food from a number of angles, from more concern with macro nutrients to being a person prone to “hangriness.” I, on the other hand, can forget to eat all day without really noticing hunger, and then wash down a giant steak with red wine and tortes or something.
I pay attention to calorie intake, but for the most part food isn’t a huge priority in my decision making about anything. In a sense, I kind of grow where I’m planted.
It’s important to understand this in order to understand how travel, in general, affects my diet. If I had to sum up the effect briefly, I’d say “not the best.”
I gained weight some years back when i went into 100% travel management consulting. It’s hard not to. You go from leading a normal life to eating all of your meals expensed, at places like Outback Steakhouse.
I eventually managed to shed some of those pounds, but then we left that life in favor of slow traveling. Not all of the pounds returned, but some of them did.
When we slow travel, we do stock our AirBNB with groceries, the way anyone might. But there are three healthy eating hitches with that:
- We’ll disproportionately stock up on local “can’t miss” things, and those usually aren’t healthy. “What’s a King Cake? Welp, when in New Orleans, do as the New Orleanans do.”
- When our time in an AirBNB is winding down, we don’t want to throw out a bunch of food, so the last week or so starts to involve a LOT of dining out.
- Even when we’re not winding down, there’s natural pressure to try all of the local restaurants and carry out places.
So, in the end, slow travel is sort of like a junior version of traveling consulting life when it comes to (poor) diet decisions. You have an option other than dining out every night, but there’s a lot of pressure to go sample local stuff so you don’t miss out, like this shot from my birthday, where Amanda found us a gourmet gelato place in Atlanta. They made you gelato flowers, which, as you might imagine is hard for an experience collector to pass up.
Picks
- With all of the Youtube videos I’ve been doing these days, I’ve looked for ways to add interesting features to the videos. This includes little movie clips under fair use. And I’ve found this service, Streamable, that’s free and lets you grab and download little snippets of Youtube videos.
- I’m going to throw some love to Leanpub. It’s a platform for self-publishing books in a lean fashion, letting you get beta readers and feedback as you write the book. They also handle all of the eBook formatting concerns and do some marketing/promotion for you. It’s great for self-publishers.
The Digest
- We did a Facebook Live a few weeks ago that covered basic SEO topics. What is SEO, what does it stand for, why does it matter — that kind of thing.
- On the Freelancers Show, we discussed different billing models and ways of invoicing and getting paid.
- We did some live blogging recently for Sonatype’s Nexus Users Conference. Here is one of the sessions I did, a presentation about how “containers are just another piece of the puzzle.”
- Finally, I wrote another blog post for the MakeMeAProgrammer blog, about why there are so many programming languages.
And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.
