Pardon me for a moment while I do a mini-rant.

I wish, I wish, I wish that healthy eating were the norm here so that it would be possible to find healthful prepared foods easily at grocery stores everywhere.

I wish, I wish, I wish that I didn’t have to plan ahead to eat healthfully when I travel because there are so few options available.

And I wish, I wish, I wish that the stores near my current common travel destination actually listed ingredients on their prepared foods so that I could confidently order them from time to time when I’m in a pinch and am willing to make certain compromises to my diet (salt/oil).

In a perfect world … :)

OK, I’ll stop complaining in a minute because it’s not my style, for the most part. I just needed to vent and thought you might share my sentiment.

But first, one more thing:

Portion control is the pits on a good day (it is always very difficult to ration out food for yourself in small amounts), and frankly, it makes it harder for us healthy eaters to eat well without spending a fortune or looking rather, hmmm, gluttonous. I’ll explain the latter comment, and then the former will also make sense.

Last night, on my way back from an overnight trip to where my husband is currently working on site (too far to commute every day, but not far enough away to keep me from driving there every few weeks to make our time apart shorter), we decided to stop at a Mexican place that has decent healthy fare (though always with the excess salt and oil that you can’t seem to avoid, but those are compromises I’m willing to make on occasion).

The last time we went there prior, I left still hungry after eating a normal portion of a bare burrito (beans, lots of lettuce, tomato, pico de gallo, guacamole and veggies), with hours before we would arrive home. So this time, I bit the bullet. I did something I’ve never done. I ordered not one, but TWO of the same meal, and I ate every last bite before we left the building.

Yes, I’m aware that it sounds a bit indulgent to eat 2 plates full of food, but seriously, the whole meal — my double portion — had under 700 calories in it and was packed with nutrition. Mainstream restaurants just gear their portions to large numbers of calories from meat, cheese and sour cream, and my healthy dinner made up of just some of the component parts of that assembly line looked, I’m sure, to be about the right size if the calories (and therefore macronutrients) in what I ate were the same as what the other folks ordered. But they weren’t, so I had 2 of them and left happy and satisfied. It might have looked weird, but I didn’t overeat by any stretch.

Secondly, mind you, I’m not on a strict budget for food purchases in my household (we eat out only occasionally anyhow, and this was a casual place to begin with), but many are, and I mention the expense of ordering 2 entrees in order to get enough calories because I know it affects many people.

What was the point of all this? It’s occasionally inconvenient to eat healthfully (but it’s always worth it! always! every single day!). It’s strange to order 2 entrees (and I wouldn’t have done it in a formal setting). And yet I wouldn’t trade my life in which I occasionally have to jump through a few hoops to get healthy food for a more convenient one for anything.

And on that note, rant over. I’m grateful to know that eating healthy food makes me thin, strong and (yes, I’ll say it even though it might sound a little cheesy) empowered. And I’ll take the occasional frustrations to feel this way every day. What about you?