The Beefeater Challenge

For many people the big enemy of losing weight (or keeping it level once target weight is reached) seems to be emotional eating. This is not a problem for me because, whatever I am going though in my life, it doesn't seem to make me eat any differently. But I have my own problem – going away.

In the last 90 days I have spent 27 nights away from home. Four of those were self-catering, where I can roughly duplicate the careful eating habits we have at home. But that leaves 23 days when we were eating differently – that's a quarter of my eating, so it's important. Our usual routine is to stay in a Premier Inn; they are not very characterful, but the beds are comfortable and we usually get a reasonable night's sleep. And as we are not at all keen on big towns and cities, we almost always pick a Premier Inn that is fairly remote. And fairly remote means that we are almost always going to eat in the on-site restaurant, typically a Brewers Fayre, a Table Table, a Harvester or – and most often of all – a Beefeater.

Restaurants like that are OK, but not known for their low-calorie meals. And this is the reason that I usually (not always, but usually) come back from a trip heavier than when I went away. You would think that after more than two years of becoming reasonably expert about watching what I eat, I could rise to the Beefeater Challenge - to eat only a moderately-calorific evening meal. But, basically I haven't managed it yet. Getting a big, fatty and almost fruit-and-vegetable-free meal is as easy as asking for it; I don't have to buy the ingredients, and I don't have to cook it. If I did have to cook it, I would alter the recipe to include all sorts of bulky but low-calorie ingredients, but the Beefeater chef is not going to shred a lettuce into the chilli for me, to bulk it out!

So my solution so far is to be as careful as I can be – and that's not very careful, to be honest. It's especially hard to be careful, because the only Premier Inn restaurants I have seen with calories on the menu are Harvesters. So I'm not careful, and have to lose the gained weight when I get home. So far that has worked OK, but I would really like to feel more in control, and measure up to the Beefeater Challenge.