The last week of June found me in Orlando with children and grandchildren; it was a wonderful opportunity to gather together and just have fun. The fun included most meals being eaten at Disney World, Animal Kingdom, Universal Studios and so on. Frankly, it’s challenging for me to eat restaurant and snack food preferred by children for so many meals for eight days, without putting on some pounds.

Is summer challenging your normal calorie intake? Pool parties, family reunions, barbecues, county fairs, and homemade ice cream are just a few that come to mind. What about your neighbor’s generous steak, cheeseburger, or ribs barbecued to provide an extra thousand calories to your day; let’s not even think about the mayonnaise-based potato or pasta salad. The ‘boys of summer’ afford an opportunity to eat giant bratwursts, kielbasa or an ordinary 300-calorie stadium dog, if you can avoid the foot-long 580-calorie dog without toppings. ‘Cooling down’ with friends has a calorie cost – a beer, piña colada, daiquiri, smoothie, shake, Hawaiian ice, ice cream, or frozen treats. What about a pizza party, or a snack of nachos or fries? Fried chicken is almost synonymous with summer – thick crispy fat-filled crust. But have you seen the giant roasted turkey legs? Probably you haven’t bought a ready-to-eat one like these too often, but more evidence of meat-eating excess made convenient is the gigantic roasted turkey legs now available at the Jurassic section of a theme park. You and the kids can pretend to be a gigantic predator while tearing into 1,136 calories and 54 g fat from a large, dismembered body part of a prey known to be descended from the dinos.

One good thing is that we’re often more active in the summer; gardening, tennis, walking at the theme parks, hiking in the woods, biking, running in nature, but it’s very difficult to manage an increased calorie intake solely with exercise. It’s hard to make up for a 1200 calorie, 12-ounce steak by exercising. To convince yourself of this, do a little calculating on the walking calories calculator. Suppose you are a 150-pound person who can walk 4 miles per hour (very fast) for an hour – that’s 341 calories per hour – So that’s over 3 ½ hours to burn off a 12-ounce steak. The point is that it’s difficult to manage large eating digressions by just exercising. Many people don’t have enough time to exercise sufficiently for frequent splurges – therefore, the resulting overweight/obesity epidemic.

Most of us are not perfect in our dedication to eating a healthy diet. We sometimes give ourselves permission to enjoy some food that is not in our normal eating-style. The key to managing these “imperfect-eating habits” is quickly to get back to our normal healthy eating. The most deadly decision is to get in a ‘thinking slump’ – telling ourselves ‘all is lost’. We’ve made a mistake too big to recover from. At all costs avoid the infamous thought, ‘I’m just giving up for now and I’ll start again some time (usually in the distant future).’

I was sitting on our back deck sharing lunch with my husband and my fellow blogger, Mary Ireland, and mentioned that I was in recovery mode from our family reunion in Orlando. Mary is dedicated to a healthy lifestyle. She does not have children and hikes about a lot on the steep mountainside where she lives; I mused, there would not be so many challenges to her eating-dedication. But then she told us that the past weekend she was at a barbecue and later in the evening found herself sharing a conversation. On the table in front of her, it just happened that a plate of brownies was positioned within easy reach. She ate more brownies than she ‘wished she had’. I thought, “If it can happen to her, it can happen to any of us. Events can always damage our very best intentions to eat a certain way.”

After that lunch I began thinking that there’s a parallel with the weeds that seem to sip Miracle Grow while I’m on a short trip and the pounds that appear so rapidly during the same short trip – they both need my immediate attention. If I don’t stay on top of it, I will lose the battle.

Quickly regrouping – resuming my healthy eating habits is critical to maintaining a healthy weight and ultimately, my health. Below I’ll share some of the things that I do to get the weight turned around. (Regarding the weeds – I just get out there, dig, pull, dig, pull…… a battle that will never be won.)

Rescuing Your Eating Plan

The idea is to create eating and recovery-eating styles that work for you as an individual. These habits can serve you for your entire lifetime. The more times that you recover your healthy weight, even if it takes a week or two, the more that you realize that there is no reason to throw in the towel and start binging or ignoring your previously laid plans. Creating the skills that help you maintain a healthy weight are skills that are honed over years – they’re not a one-time event. It’s a process. If you recognize that it is a process, the less likely it will be for you to throw your hands up in defeat.

• Start by doing yourself a favor and make a rule not to skip meals. Skipped meals frequently lead to being overly hungry and that puts you at risk of eating far more calories than you would have eaten at the two meals. To protect yourself, try not to make your meals longer than 4 hours apart.
• The very first day, that you’re facing the ‘damage’ may be difficult. It is for me. But I’ve been there thousands of times, so I just say ‘Rats!’ I’ve got to get myself back on my regular commitment to healthy eating. That first step is really critical. Don’t be tempted to eat every goodie that passes your way for the rest of the summer or for the rest of the holiday season, or whatever time period. Just get back to what you can do – and NOW.
• After you done the “regrouping, resuming or rescuing” of your eating plan enough times, some of the anxiety will be lessened. You will know from your past experience that it will come off. You will know, that sometimes it just takes a couple of days to get back to where you were.
• Find as many ways as possible to fit in fiber-rich, low calorie non-starchy vegetables. They will help you stay full, on fewer calories.
• Realize that some of the immediate weight gain is ‘water weight’. If your body is not used to the great increase in salt found in restaurant foods, you may notice your weight bounce down within a day or two. But the good news is that you can shed those pounds very rapidly – just return to a lower sodium-eating plan.
• Get right back to your carefully chosen portions. The restaurant portions, as well as salt content, are part of the challenges of weight management, when you’re away from home.
• Schedule snacks, if you need a snack; portion it, plan for it, but don’t allow yourself to graze all day long. Healthy portion-controlled snacks can save you from excessive hunger, which may lead to overeating.
• Look at the numbers. If the scale pops up a couple of pounds and you know that you did not consume 7,000 extra calories; then you know it is not all fat. Those scale pounds will retreat more quickly than true weight gain.
• Realize too, that the big goal of maintaining a healthy weight is accomplished by achieving dozens of small mini-goals. You can do it. Keep your focus on behaviors. Note: some people make the mistake to make a goal to lose some unrealistic number of pounds in a short length of time and when they are not able to achieve that goal – they feel bad and give up. Eating fewer calories and getting physical activity will yield the long-term goal: healthy weight management.
• If you get stuck behind a plate of brownies, it’s an opportunity, to make a plan for the next party. Adapt; make adjustments to your situation and your history. A little humor and a request to relocate the brownies, or to relocate yourself can make your next challenging brownie encounter less of a problem. In my life, I’ve never run out of situations, challenges to learn from. Situations to conquer. Learning how to pay closer attention to what’s going into my mouth. Simultaneously, consider what’s NOT going in. If I fill up on lower calorie foods, then I discover I have much more ‘willpower’ to resist extra foods that I don’t need – of course, it’s not really willpower, it’s good military tactics for the battle against excess weight, and that requires not being hungry. It has been wisely said that an army travels on it belly.
• Cutting back. Select the same good foods, just less of them.  I personally cut back on the starchy foods, and am really careful with protein portions. Be conscious of everything going into your mouth.
• A big salad lunch is a jewel of a weight loss tool for Vic and me – lots of greens topped with cucumber, celery, tomatoes, red peppers; crowned with some egg, tuna, salmon or fresh mozzarella cheese chunks; and served with hummus or a light vinaigrette.
• Summer is a great time to consider notching up the exercise. Easy for me to do, as the garden is an endless source of weeds. In the third paragraph of this post, I discussed how difficult it is to manage large superfluous calorie intake with exercise. Nevertheless, it can make a significant difference. Exercise benefits two ways. One way is through the actual calories burned. The other way is through the inched-up metabolic effects from a little extra muscle mass.

Just as the final battle will never be won in weeding, so it is with weigh management – there will be on going challenges. The battles will go on, but with some effort in regrouping and recovering your healthy eating-style, the weight management war will not be lost – you can become a successful manager of your sometimes perversely disobedient habits. Weight management is indeed like weeding – you have to stay on top of it, to win the on going battles.