[00:00:00] Rita Black: Hey there. Welcome to Traveling Lite part two of our special series on traveling healthfully straight from my recent adventure from Spain. Adventure a couple of months ago really in part one. Last week we talked all about getting into a healthy travel light mindset before takeoff, planning ahead, packing smart, and getting yourself set up for success.

[00:00:25] And if you miss that episode, go find it and definitely give it a listen. Now today in part two, we are picking up on the journey as I hit the road traveling through the gorgeous coastal towns of costa Brava. It was a little rainy, but gorgeous. Anyway, and wrapping things up in the amazing Valencia I’m diving into realtime mindset shifts, practical strategies that help me stay focused, present healthy, even while surrounded by incredible food and plenty of temptation.

[00:01:00] I will walk you through how I approached eating out, how I stayed connected to my goals without feeling restricted, and how to enjoy the richness of travel while still honoring your self and your wellbeing. So if you ever wondered how to strike that balance between indulgence and intention while exploring new places, this episode for you. So let’s jump in and keep the momentum going because healthy travel isn’t just possible. It can be joyful. Let’s dive in.

[00:01:42] Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight’s struggle is mental. That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist, weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process.

[00:02:10] And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years. Achieve long-term weight mastery. I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater, and after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds With the help of hypnosis, I. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years.

[00:02:35] Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need. Not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long-term and live your best life. Sound good? Let’s get started.

[00:02:59] Hello, you amazing person. May is that busy month, everybody is traveling. I am happy though personally. To be doing nothing going nowhere. No, no nothing for me. I am staying at home, watching my tomatoes ripen, my cucumbers grow, my dahlias start to bloom, and I couldn’t be happier.

[00:03:25] I, i’ve been, traveled enough. I was sick all winter traveled. I’m just like, oh, let me just stay home and that’s what I’m gonna do. But I am gonna take you the, a blow by blow through my trip through Spain, Catalonia, to be exact which was wonderful. Rainy but wonderful. And there you go. I did do a podcast last week. If you did miss it, you might wanna check that one out first. ’cause that’s about how to get started on your travels. Get your mindset going and get on the plane and get to where you’re going.

[00:03:57] And now we’re gonna dive in deeper because, as I have noticed myself over time, and I am, and I, have been helping people with weight management for 20 years, I know that in the beginning of a holiday, you got good intentions and you got a lot of focus, but as time wears on, the focus can wane a little bit and it’s easier with a lit, even just a little bit of nibbling here and nibbling there, we can get our carb zombie going and things can fall apart rather quickly.

[00:04:32] So I I noticed within myself on my trip. Yeah. And I’m just gonna let listen. And then I’ll recap, but I stayed. I stayed within my goals and my my, I talked about last week, I talked about my pillars, my pillar of moving every day, keeping my carbs to a minimum and protein high, and then having a really working on the feeling I wanted to feel when I went to bed at night. So those were my three pillars, and I always bring those pillars with me every time I travel. And they served me very well. And they served me very well on this trip that I did come home, the same weight.

[00:05:09] But another thing that is really important for me is to keep my brain like, to keep my mind, because when I struggled with my weight, I get into this in the recording, but it’s just I ruined holidays by overeating and then going on these binges because my brain just got hooked. My carb zombie took over, and then I wasn’t even present to a lot of my holidays. So for me, it’s my personal joy to stay present and be really grateful about travel. ’cause it’s such a privilege to be able to, move around the world and and, and see beautiful places and experience history and be with the people you love.

[00:05:52] That’s, that is a real privilege. I don’t, and I don’t take it lightly and I try to be really grateful for that. I’m gonna hop in to you, give you a taste of our next leg of our journey where we were still in Barcelona but getting ready to head up to north of Barcelona to Gerona, but also mostly where I talk about TASA Milk Delmar.

[00:06:15] But first we’re gonna hit Barcelona one last time and really, you just notice how I’m staying focused on making the healthy choices. And there’s, the good news is when you travel, there’s, if you’re, if you think outside the box, there’s always a great way to stay healthy.

[00:06:31] Hey, it’s me again from Spain. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and just say how beautiful Barcelona is. When we first arrived here, it was raining and it’s rained a good amount of the time that we’ve been here, but today it’s sunny and i’m just loving, like all the parks in the city are just so amazing. The hotel we’re at today, we just went and we didn’t eat breakfast.

[00:06:58] We had a coffee and then just walked around the neighborhoods. There’s just so amazing and alive with people. I, live in Los Angeles, so there’s, I remember when I lived in New York, the aliveness of the city because you were just out on the street with everybody all day. Which can, you can get tired of but with European cities and even the same when I lived in London I loved that aspect of just being out and about with people during the day and being able to go and just sit and eat lunch in a park.

[00:07:30] And that’s what we did. We went and grabbed, we went to a healthy, like a, the whole Foods version of Barcelona. I very much like Whole Foods and grabbed I went through their salad bar and made a salad and went and sat in the park and had a beautiful salad. And just enjoyed watching the pigeons and there was these beautiful green parrots.

[00:07:50] And all the other Spanish people, it’s really great because because we are here in March and we are getting rained, which is the downside. But the upside is the beautiful little flowers, the pansies, the peach trees are full of blossoms. And the, it’s just a, it’s maybe not the most beautiful time to be here, but it’s certainly charming.

[00:08:12] And it, one of the things I would say is about eating light here is on Saturday we went to a market the book Hadera and it’s this big open market. Probably like you have a farmer’s market with vegetables and a lot of pork. It actually bocara for those of you I didn’t know this in Spanish is pork and this used to be the original market, I think in 600. And it used to be on a dry river bed. And right now La Ramala, which is the big road that is not, has no cars on it, and a market road where you walk down and there’s vendors and they sell postcards and everything like that. And lots of shops and places to eat a tapas and stuff to eat along the way, is this sort of brown tiled road that was supposed to resemble a dry river bed. And LA Bora is this beautiful market very bustling, very busy, full of wonderful, places to eat and get lots of fried little tappas and stuff like that, which we avoided. We actually did a cooking class and it paella it wasn’t my favorite.

[00:09:23] I, I it because it was a lot of rice. I ate a lot of the seafood out of it, but I think I like a spicier paella, but it was fun to go to a cooking class, meet other people. We certainly didn’t overeat, but it was nice to go and have little samples of things. That was certainly fun.

[00:09:41] Last night we went out, we took our daughter back to the train station. She just came up to Barcelona for the weekend and she is heading back.. And then we will meet her again next weekend. But she’s going back to her teaching job for the week and we took her to the train station and went to this tiny little hole in the wall Chinese food restaurant that my daughter found.

[00:10:02] And my daughter’s so funny ’cause she’s on a teacher’s salary and she makes very little a month, but she’s very proud of herself for paying her own rent and paying her own way. We’re letting her adult fully. And, but while she was with us, she was like, you’re buying every single meal for me, and we’re eating out a lot.

[00:10:19] And I was like, okay. She was like, okay. And we had eaten a picnic. Not much, a few hours ago. Before we went out to dinner, she’s I wanna eat dinner out too. Okay. Okay. So we went, we ate some Chinese food and but we, it was a beautiful little hole in the wall where they made the most authentic and just light chinese food. So we ordered soup, like a tofu soup and I ordered a bok choy with shiitake mushrooms, like we just ordered vegetable dishes. Basically, we were gonna have a light dinner.

[00:10:52] And something that we do is we never order rice, we just order the dishes and eat them without rice. Or sometimes I’ll order a, like a Buddhist vegetables, steamed vegetables to eat as a sort of the base for the meal, and then I’ll put the little, if I’m getting something with a sauce on it, like a black bean sauce or a, a spicy or sauce I will put like chicken with, whatever on it. A spicy curry or whatever. Even Indian restaurant, this is what I do at all places, or I’ll get a shredded cabbage or something that isn’t all that carby rice. So we ate a pretty light meal. It, I have to stay at a Chinese food restaurant and it was very cheap. I loved it. It was like win, win. And we really wanted the vegetables ’cause we were like it’s actually the Spanish food.

[00:11:43] One thing I will say is it’s hard other than a salad to get just vegetables here. They’re chopped up in things, but it’s harder to do. So we’ve been trying to, like I say, we’ve got our salad today. And we’ve been leaning in a little on Asian food here to I’m not the biggest fan of Spanish food, I have to say.

[00:12:04] Anyway but there’s a lot of different types of, restaurants here, so you can eat anything Italian what have you but I just thought I’d say that and walking everywhere. It has really helped as well with just, I think I talked about that earlier, is everywhere we’ve gone, it is easy to get a cab here, but my daughter, again, she’s a very frugal and she’s we’re taking the bus and, or we’re walking. And we had planned to walk, but she showed us how to use Google to, if you need to get somewhere really far away. You can put on Google mark public transport and it’ll show you the bus and the time.

[00:12:45] That’s something I didn’t know I could do. It was so cool. So we were walking either to bus stops that are, 20 minutes away to take a bus somewhere. Or we’re walking 40 minutes to an hour to get somewhere to a shop or to something or other. So we’ve been getting about 20,000 steps a day in, which has been great. And yesterday we went on a crazy bike ride up a hill a mountain in this big park at that is in the middle of Barcelona. Saw a lot of beautiful the botanical Bard Gardens, even though it was in the rain. And, some other beautiful buildings. I forget what they were, like the colos like their version of the Colosseum. I think that’s what it was. But some beautiful historical buildings we saw along the way. But it was just great to get out and move our bodies and exercise.

[00:13:31] Alright more soon. Okay, great. So hopefully that was helpful for you. And now we’re going to move on to our trip up the coast. We went to Gerona first, and I didn’t do a recording there, which I was really sad.

[00:13:49] I didn’t, I thought I had, I, maybe I missed it. But we were in that city of Gerona where they filmed I don’t know if you watched game of Thrones. Game of Thrones in the scene where the woman walks down the church steps naked through the city as they’re throwing tomatoes and stuff at her.

[00:14:08] Gerona is was filmed I, the Game of Thrones was filmed in Gerona, that scene, that particular scene was. And so it’s a beautiful cathedral and beautiful old Roman built city with amazing bridges and just. Gorgeous. And we, I didn’t record anything there, but we did go to a market one day and we had bought beautiful food and brought it back to, we had an Airbnb there and we made an amazing dinner and we walked everywhere.

[00:14:39] It was just a wonderful city to take advantage of making our own food because everything was so fresh and blueberries and you go into this super market they call it, and it was this open air market with a roof, but it was fish mongers and pork mongers and all of these beautiful vegetables and the stands just were very sumptuously, displayed and you just wanted to give them your money and there was so much.

[00:15:13] But even when you’re picking out all this food and you’re bringing it back to your place, you realize everything is so fresh and for the most part, really light. There wasn’t anything that felt heavy or greasy. It was really such a joy to cook and make food away from home in that way. So that was Gerona. We really enjoyed it. It did rain there quite a bit, but we just made the most of it was super fun.

[00:15:39] Now this next recording is Tassa del Mar, where we pick up my daughter and we head to the Mediterranean. So enjoy.

[00:15:48] Hey there. I’m just checking in with you. We have been spending the last few days here in not this town of Tasa Del Mar, but outside, right on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. We were able to rent a little Airbnb in this kind of I don’t know, condo complex that, the, it’s very rustic. I will say. In fact, the electricity is off right now. It’s been dodgy. Like we had to, if we wanna have the heaters on, which is like plug in the wall heaters and if, I don’t think that these places are equipped for March, because March is cold here and I don’t think anybody’s stupid enough to come to the coast of Spain where it rains. It’s been raining off and on, but it’s also gorgeous. It’s wild. A coast of Brava means wild coast or the brave coast because it is a very wild driving and we were driving, literally in zero visibility in the rain, in the fog, on these hairpin turn roads that would’ve made your toes curl. I was like literally hanging onto the edge of my seat.

[00:17:05] Now, yesterday the sun came out and it was nice. But and we could see that the roads were really amazing and gorgeous and beautiful and, just driving along the Mediterranean it seemed like those, movies that you would see Carrie Grant in in Italy.

[00:17:21] But because the great thing about this place is it’s not overrun with American tourists. It’s a pretty, any tourist we’ve seen have been European and there haven’t even been that many tourists here. ’cause I, like I said, it’s not tourist season right now. We walked into town we hiked into town, I should say. We went on the Camp Camino Deronda, which is this amazing trail that goes from. Barcelona all the way up to France and it’s, it, I think it’s over a thousand years old, this trail, and it’s really well marked because they’ve, they’re very proud of this trail and it’s literally climbing over rocks and through trees. And you see these, the Mediterranean we saw the Mediterranean on our left going into town and then on our right, coming back in. But you see all these little cals, which are these inlets where you, in, in the summertime you would go down and in people would be sun themselves or swimming in the Mediterranean.

[00:18:25] But the Mediterranean right now, it’s very rough but beautiful blue and just all the pictures. I’m sure if you’ve been to the Mediterranean, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t, you’ve seen pictures. It was that beautiful blue just walking along this trail and it was up and downhill.

[00:18:42] So we got a really great workout. We went into town and so something that I would definitely say that I have tried to be mindful of every day, and I said this in the beginning, is moving my body. We’ve been tracking up 20,000 steps, 25,000 steps a day. And I think that really helps offset any sort of tourist eating, although we’ve been eating very healthfully, we’ve like I said, we’re in a very rustic area and for the most part, we just bought groceries and have been cooking here. But this is the joke. So if we’re gonna cook. Because it’s an electric stove, we have to turn off all the heaters or else the electricity goes out.

[00:19:22] It’s out right now. And I think it’s out in the area. So I’m just sitting here cracking up. So I had a few minutes to record something since there’s nothing else that you know I can do. It’s raining outside, i’m talking to you about my adventures here. But we did, so we got into town. We hiked into town and it was like there was a, the pandemic, it just reminded me so much of it because it is off season. All the places are shuttered. There are a few restaurants open and we did go to the man who rented us this place recommended this restaurant in town and obviously it’s a locals only place, so we were the only sort of tourists there.

[00:20:04] And it was a seafood restaurant and has amazing. It’s called XI xe. I forget the last part of it, but it’s a little hole in the wall and it just pictures of fishermen and seafood catches and we had the most amazing seafood do. And something I was gonna say is about eating out. No matter where you go, if you’ve got more than.

[00:20:31] Even if you have only a couple of people, I think one of the best ways to eat out, especially when you’re traveling, so you get to have all the tastes, is to order, like if there’s three of you, which there or four, two order, one dish less than the number you have. So we ordered two fish dishes and then we ordered a salad.

[00:20:56] Then we ordered a pizza. So we, the pizza was like our hor d’oeuvre that we could each get a little taste and peace and, ’cause they were known for their pizza as well. It’s very thin crust. It’s like almost a cracker. With a little cheese and vegetables on top. And then the most amazing, like they took a long time to cook the fish dishes because they literally were going back in there.

[00:21:21] I swear to God, catching the fish. It was so fresh and very simply prepared. It was so good. But we split those, so we just had our plates and split those. So that’s something is like ordering one main dish less, and then maybe ordering appetizers so that you get a little taste of everything without, feeling bloated.

[00:21:42] And then we all split a dessert, which was, eh, not so good. I just had a couple of bites, which is usually as, my three bite rule.

[00:21:51] Something else that I just wanted to confirm. ’cause one of the members of my community also said this she was traveling at the same time as me and she was having problems getting too hungry and I had to remind her like, get some protein from somewhere, go to a grocery store, get some protein.

[00:22:07] I’ve been going to little, the supermarket and getting turkey slices and a little cheese and almonds and things just to have and protein bars. They don’t really have a lot of them here, I swear. But we had brought protein bars, so we were good. Having, like last night I made we had vegetables that we had bought at the supermarket and I made a really great dish of just sauteed onions and garlic with fresh tomatoes.

[00:22:36] Cor jetts or zucchini. And and then I made a fried egg for each of us to put on top. So it was a really light dinner after, having our big lunch, but then we literally hiked. So far it was we burned a lot of calories. But one other thing I wanted to say other than make sure you have protein is that you don’t have to eat it to experience it. There are a lot of things here that I’m just walked by, I, that are what you would call touristy things. A lot of, we’ve walked by a lot of gelato. We’ve tried gelato, but it’s just and I don’t think you need to, eat things like pastries in order to experience like the enjoy the visual and enjoy the the, the, just the array of the variety and the way they’ve prepared it.

[00:23:30] The, like I said, the bread here is amazing, we don’t have to eat it every day. You taste it, you enjoy it. You move on. Something I really have been focusing on, and I hope, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I will just say that this is something I really do believe in and live by is how do I wanna feel tonight when I go to bed?

[00:23:53] I don’t wanna feel bloated full. I spent, when I struggled with my weight, way too many vacations, just feeling uneven, like even, like blood sugar off hungry all the time thinking about food, wanting food all the time. Bloated, going to bed, feeling full. Ugh, why did I eat all the bread?

[00:24:12] Why did I eat that big dessert? Why did I do that? So for me, just going to bed feeling like I had a nice. I like, I tasted the beautiful, fresh foods and tasted stuff, but I didn’t have to overdo it. And I focus on other things, moving my body, being with my family and being in this beautiful place, which and the electricity has been out.

[00:24:34] There’s have been some times where it’s been really frustrating, but not eating over it. But just, going with the flow, okay, we’re in Europe, the electricity is out. That’s what happens, and just making the best of it. So thank you for letting me share this with you. I hope this is helpful.

[00:24:52] And more, more soon. So just wrapping that up, I think the key obviously was move move. You’ve gotten that theme pretty hard, right? Keeping the protein. Something that I didn’t get into in that particular recording that I wanted to mention to you guys was that it was really easy, and I’m just saying this because.

[00:25:17] I know that if you’re going out traveling, especially for a couple of weeks, even if you’re keeping your protein high and your carbs low, if you’re eating refined carbs every single day, you can start to feel the pull of wanting to eat more carbs. That happened to me for sure during the trip. I don’t want me, I don’t want you to think I, like I was like this pristine the bread was amazing. We, I ate three bites of this and that gelato and sugary stuff and because I don’t usually eat refined carbohydrates is a general rule. Just I just don’t, because I was eating, a little something every day. There would be days where I was like, oh I’m feeling a little more pulled towards it.

[00:26:01] My brain got a little more fuzzy where I was like, thinking about food a little more, the food noise started to percolate. And so on those days it really took me noticing that and being in tune with my body. That was the good news is that I think when you are. Really staying grounded with yourself and showing up for yourself every day.

[00:26:24] You notice that you’re like, oh, yeah, I’m starting to feel a little off. I’m starting to feel a little I’d, like to go and get some extra stuff. And again, hey, if you want to, that’s not a problem. I just know for me when I, my brain starts to get that way, it’s an indicator that. Overeating is about to happen, or I’m gonna start eating two or three pieces of bread.

[00:26:48] And again, is that the end of the world? No, but what it does is it gets my brain activated and now I’m thinking about food more and I’m not being present to myself and present to what’s going on. And I can’t tell you like so much of my long-term permanent weight mastery is about being present and about not.

[00:27:09] My mental freedom, that is just so important to me. So travel as well, even though there’s all these offerings, I was like, yeah, those are great. They look amazing, they smell amazing. But my mental freedom is more important than me tasting all of that stuff. I’d rather be present to see the beautiful historical sight or, be here with my daughter who you know.

[00:27:31] Is, a young adult and will be off living her life soon. So those things, you gotta weigh that. I guess if you know your, your how hijacked you can get from eating those foods, then you maybe you understand what I’m, where I’m coming from. So there were days where I was like, I’m getting a little hijacked here, let me not eat carbs. Let me, not eat refined carbs. Obviously I was eating fruit and stuff like that, but I was just staying more present and more. Okay. Mindful. Let’s not eat the bread today. We can pass on that. We can pass on having a drink. It’s just let’s have a clean day and just get back to center and then, I could progress and have a ride again.

[00:28:14] But it’s just I could just feel like having something every single day in the row is oh, okay. It’s starting to catch up with me. So thought I’d let you know that. Also, I wanted to let you know that when I said we were doing these hairpin to turns in with zero visibility, the side of the road wasn’t just like trees. It was a sheer cliff down to the Mediterranean. It was a long way down, so my fingers were like literally digging into the car seat. My thank God, my husband, grew up in Buffalo, New York and he, his later years he grew up in, he learned to drive in Buffalo, New York in zero visibility, snow, like hair, like he’s a good driver.

[00:28:56] So I was like, oh, thank God you were driving. But, oh my gosh, that was just crazy. When it was sunny, it was a beautiful drive, but still I don’t do that well. And was there anything else I wanted you to know? Oh, one more thing that I was like, oh, I wanted tell everybody this. So I, we were driving to Delmar and there were all these little beach B-side towns on the way. When we decided, from Barcelona up to France, we could have chosen any of the towns, but we said tasa. That’s, close enough to Barcelona. There’s a historical place there. It’s a great beach. And it’s on this cammi deronda and the hiking trail that we, that goes along the beach, although, all the way up to France.

[00:29:44] And so I texted my friend Susan, who is, I traveled with me in Europe when we were 21 and I had a picture on the beach there maybe you’ve seen it. It’s like me overweight, 40 pounds overweight. And I was like, Susan where were we in? Did we go to Costa Bravo? She said, yes.

[00:30:05] We went to Costa Bravo, and I was like, what town did we. Like what Beachside town she was. She went Tossa Delmar. I was like, you are kidding me. So anyway, when we hiked in that day to Tassa Del Mar, I had my daughter take a picture of, of me on the beach, and maybe I said this in a past podcast, so I might be delirious.

[00:30:30] But anyway it was so poignant for me to be able to, take a healthy picture, just to compare it because I was so miserable when I was standing on the beach and she was taking, my friend Susan was taking that picture. I was just like, don’t take a picture of me. It was, dressed in my black, black shorts. And it was the summer and we were there in March and it was freezing, but I was like in my little sweatsuit and took my sweatsuit top off and had my little tank top on and I was like, what a nut. But anyway, I was freezing cold, but I was like, it was just. So I was like, oh, I just feel so different and so much happier just being in my body and being in myself and being in my brain.

[00:31:10] That was free compared to the My misery back then, so many years ago. Anyway, 40 years ago to be exact. But I’d throw that in there with you. Hello, once again. We are on our last day here in Spain and I just wanted to follow up with some final thoughts. We’ve been spending the last few days here in Valencia with where my daughter lives, which is a wonderful town.

[00:31:38] It’s the first time we’ve had sun pretty much the entire time, or most of the days have been sunny with a little bit of rain, but not too bad. I’m finally feeling better. I finally got a doctor’s prescription and I. I think my cold is finally going away. But what I love so much about Valencia is that bike you can bike anywhere here, that they have amazing bike trails through the city where you feel safe.

[00:32:10] Even though you’re going across streets and everything, they have green and red lights for your biking lanes. People are really respectful of bikers here and it is actually faster to bike somewhere in the city than it is to take the car ’cause the traffic’s really bad. I. We have been biking everywhere and it’s such a great, beautiful city to see by bike and it just makes it so easy to get your daily exercise as well.

[00:32:35] We bike down by the beach, we bike down through the big park that goes all the way through town. We biked through into the central park. We were biking around at 11 o’clock at night. It’s really safe here. Just loved it so much. So it was great as far as just natural built in exercise. And and it’s a much healthier seeming city.

[00:32:58] Maybe it’s because it’s a beach city than Barcelona, which is a town I loved. But I. I didn’t see really any smokers here. I had a lot of smokers in Barcelona but, and really healthy restaurants. We had lunch down by the beach yesterday and we had grilled vegetables that were just grilled to perfection and a salad, and there was a lot of fried stuff on the menu, but it was also, I think with most travel, they’re gonna offer you fried food at every turn because it’s the cheapest thing to offer. And tourists, are renowned for. Going for the fried, nibbly bits.

[00:33:37] But there’s always usually the lighter option on a menu if you scour it enough. And I think enough places are savvy now too. Offer. So we were, we went to a lot of restaurants in Spain, and there was always a healthy choice, or two or three on the menu. Or you could ask for, like once there was this menu with just fish, with all these heavy sauces and I just said, please no sauces on the fish and it was perfectly made. It was delicious. Asking for sauces on the side, the great thing about Europe is they’ll just bring you oil and vinegar on the side for your salad and, there was this great restaurant I wanted to tell you about, called Honest Greens. If Sweet Greens, like la, there’s a place called Sweet Greens.

[00:34:23] But Honest Greens was like sweet greens on steroids. It was this amazing salad restaurant where you could go in and it’s just like all these amazing salads or you could build your own. And then they had these desserts, which cracked me up because they were. And healthy. They had this amazing brownie that was made with cauliflower and this tofu cheesecake, which we ordered both to try.

[00:34:49] It always cracks me up when we’re eating healthy at these healthy restaurants. ’cause you do still have to really look at what you’re eating. Like I ordered this. Salad. My daughter said, you’ve gotta get the salad bomb. You’re gonna love it. And I did. It was filled with like lots of greens and vegetables, but there were nuts in it and avocados and it, and which is fine, all healthy stuff, but calorically.

[00:35:13] If you remove the lettuce leaves, I asked for the dressing on the side, thank God. But there was like a ton of nuts, avocados pieces of roasted squash and things like that. You still have to be mindful about, the content of what you’re eating when you’re getting a salad, and especially, these types of places that are like, we’re healthy.

[00:35:35] The same with the desserts. I was like, cracking up because I’m like, these probably are the calorically the same as the real thing. But they’re just, they’ve got really wholesome and healthy ingredients. I was saying that to my daughter because the brownie came laden with walnuts on top.

[00:35:51] These like roasted walnuts at which. We’re delicious, you still have to be mindful because I see people going to these healthy restaurants and they’re loading up on the desserts and it’s it’s all healthy. And it’s yeah, but that’s and I’ve had clients come to me. I’ve I eat nothing but salads for lunch, and why am I not losing my, I was like, remove the lettuce leaves.

[00:36:13] And then tell me what’s left on the plate. And that might end up being more calories or more food than ordering the pasta or the burrito or whatever, the tacos or whatever. We did a side by side comparison a couple of times with. Different foods, and sometimes salads can be way more caloric than their, more guilty seeming counterparts or they’re more guilty seeming items on the menu.

[00:36:40] So that’s that. But we did have a wonderful time and now we are heading home and I’m feeling good. I’m feeling like I, I was able to maintain my weight. I’m feeling like I’m leaving. Having, I’ll be sitting in this lane the same way as I came, and hopefully it’ll be a safe flight home.

[00:36:58] But thank you for being on this trip with me. I hope you’ve enjoyed the tour of Spain. Sorry about the rain. But hopefully this has been helpful for your upcoming trip or vacation. That’s it. I hope that this has filled out like an idea for you. The importance of staying present really focusing on your pillars.

[00:37:22] Like what are three main things that you can focus on for your travels that are, remind you to stay healthy and, or the foundation of your healthy eating and healthy moving and your good time and good mental state. And and be safe and enjoy your travel.

[00:37:41] So Bon Vage, good luck to you. I hope this has been of help. And remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle. Is inside you, so keep listening and find it.

[00:37:59] Thanks for listening to the Thin Thinking Podcast. Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and do you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release? Head on over to www shift weight mastery.com. That’s www shift weight mastery.com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release. Tips strategies and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book from Fat to Thin Thinking. Unlock your mind for permanent weight loss and to learn how to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode.