Well , I’ve been in Paris now for 2 weeks, and it's been amazing so far. It has not, however, been without some changes and challenges to my eating and exercising! But one thing that has not changed has been my #moderation365 approach.
 
I am fascinated by the unique mental constructs each of us have around food. Of course, I talk a lot about this at JillFit—abundance mindset, Food FOMO, exposure to foods, why allowing yourself to get hungry can be instructive, etc. We each interact with food so differently, and one place you see these differences pop up is when we go on vacation or when traveling.
 
For example, say two people are traveling and they know that it will be difficult or even impossible to exercise much. Or, they just don’t want to. Person #1 might take that in, and because of it, say “Screw it! If I can’t exercise, I might as well eat whatever I want, too.” And throw the baby out with the bathwater. Person #2 might take it in, and say, “Well, if I am not going to be exercising, then I’d best adjust my food intake accordingly because what goes in my mouth with matter even more.”
 
I think you know that I am the latter.
 
Haven’t always been though. I used to be an all-or-nothing person. If an injury put me on the sidelines, I’d use it as an excuse to eat whatever I wanted because what’s the point in even trying? And if I was home and in my own space and killing it at the gym, then I had to be perfect on my eating—I had no excuse for any dietary slip-ups!
 
Of course, you know what these mental cycles perpetuated: a black-and-white approach to eating and exercising where I was yo-yo’ing up and down 20 lbs every year. You might be familiar with the mentality ;)
 
It’s taken a lot of courage and time and patience and self-trust to move from an all-or-nothing dieter to more of an automated eater. But in the face of all the years of doing it the old way and seeing that IT WAS NOT WORKING, trying a new way, a slower, more moderate way, was a chance I was willing to take.
 
Well, it’s been 4 years of maintaining my same weight (and perhaps even slowly losing a few pounds) because I work in the gray now. I live in the nuance. I live #moderation365, whether I am in Paris, France or Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Whether I am on vacation, traveling, at someone else’s house, staying in a hotel, on a plane, at home for an extended period of time, wherever. I work to find satisfying and satiating foods that never make me feel deprived and never put me over the edge into feeling stuffed and bloated.
 
It’s a practice in balance. Admittedly a hard one, an unsexy one.
 
But once you begin practicing #moderation365, it becomes a habit—a way of eating that liberates you from a mental nutrition prison, ease and satisfaction and maintenance 365 days of the year. And there’s no going back.
 
So here’s what I’ve been up to.
 
Day 1 in Paris, Neghar and I got to our AirBnB apartment and immediately hit the grocery store for provisions. Liter bottles of water, pods for our coffee maker, crème fraiche (hopefully you remember the last coffee story from Paris, ha ;)), some assorted cheeses, eggs, items for a #BAS which Neg made, and well, a couple bottles of wine.
 
Being that last time I was speaking any foreign language, it was in Italy last Fall, I spent a solid day saying, “Si!” instead of “Oui.” And you’d think after spending SIX YEARS in school studying French that I might remember some of it. Welp, I had to relearn quite a bit, but in my defense, they also didn’t teach me how to say, “A glass of white wine, please” in high school French class (it’s “une verre de vin blanc, sil vous plait.” FYI).
 
Anyway, after a couple days, we’d settled into a rhythm. Neither one of us is a huge breakfast eater, but we cooked eggs at the flat a couple times, but mostly we’d wake up later, like 10am (still on US time) and fast until around 2pm—minus about a million cups of coffee—seriously, we went through 10 pods the first day, oops. Finally moved to getting coffee down the street toward the latter half of the trip, a much better choice!

A beautiful breaky made by Neghar: