Ryckman: Traveling light

Resist the high-fat temptations of the road

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Every Christmas for 10 years, Peter Greenberg's mom gave him a scale.

He never used any of them. His mother's well-intentioned gifts gathered dust, and her unspoken holiday message - "You're fat!" - went unheeded.

"I was more than in denial," says Greenberg, travel correspondent for the Today show, best-selling author of The Travel Detective books, host of a radio travel show and Oprah's favorite travel guy. "I thought, 'I'm healthy, I play ball, I travel all over the world, people like me.' There was no incentive to do anything about it."

He might have continued zipping merrily around the world, blissfully ignoring his burgeoning bulk, were it not for that check-up in March 2005 when he finally had to step on a scale.

"When I saw what I weighed - no more denial," says Greenberg, who had topped out at 284 pounds. "I'd never weighed that much in my life. It was embarrassing."

It was also understandable, given the inordinate amount of time Greenberg spends arriving at the airport, departing from the airport, running around the airport or sitting in airplanes. He covers more ground in a year than most people will in a lifetime - an average of 400,000 air miles.

But it was no longer possible to ignore the toll that constant travel was taking on Greenberg's global girth; he needed a way to keep his job and his health. So he enlisted the help of a nutritionist, a couple of trainers and various and sundry doctors, researchers, sleep experts and chefs and devised a plan to travel healthier. Then he tucked it all into a fun and useful little book out today, The Traveler's Diet: Eating Right and Staying Fit on the Road.

There was a time when Greenberg guzzled up to 20 Diet Pepsis a day, bought Swedish fish in bulk and inhaled entire boxes of Wheat Thins. (How fattening can something be that's called "Thin"?) He ate dinner late and breakfast never, and he would cope with interminable airport security checks by visualizing the candy bars waiting for him on the other side.

That's over now. The new, improved Greenberg is all about smaller portions, briefcases bulging with apples - he's an apple-holic - and a river of bottled water.

"I hate to say it because I actually miss them: I haven't had a Wheat Thin in nine months," Greenberg says, when I caught up with him during a daylong layover in LA.

So - feeling deprived?

"Are you kidding? I feel terribly deprived," he says. "But I'm not going to sit here and tell you I haven't had a cookie in nine months, because it's not true. I'm also not going to tell you I enjoy going to the gym, because that would be a complete lie. I like having gone to the gym."

That's why Greenberg hits the workout room the minute he arrives at his hotel, wherever he is, lest he fall prey to the urge to lie around and play with his BlackBerry. He's also developed exercises he can do in his room using his carry-on bags.

The result?

"In any given three-week period, pants start falling off me," he says. "I've already gone through four wardrobe changes in the last nine months."

Some of Greenberg's strategies work on the road and at home. Last Wednesday, for example, he went out to dinner shortly after landing in L.A. from Dubai.

"They brought over these huge portions. The old me would've finished everything on the plate," he says. "But I offered other people bites and ended up wrapping up half of it. One of my assistants will eat that today - because I'm going on a plane."

In research by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, some of which was done specifically for Greenberg's book, airports were scoured for healthy dishes and ranked according to percentage of health-conscious restaurants.

Chicago O'Hare won the competition with 92 percent, possibly the only positive award that will ever be given to this most aggravating of airports. Denver came in sixth out of 14, with a 78 percent score. Among the healthier local options: vegetable steamed rice at Panda Express (Concourse A); the portobello mushroom sandwich at Pour La France (Concourse B); and the gardenburger at Lefty's Front Range Grille (Concourse C).

But even if you manage to dodge the bullet on the ground, you've got more trouble in the air. Fortunately or not, depending on your perspective, fewer and fewer airlines seem to bother offering food anymore. But you can be sure that if they do plop something down in front of you, it will contain vast quantities of fat/sugar/calories.

"Airline food is by definition an oxymoron," Greenberg says. "People don't eat it because they're hungry. They eat it because they're bored."

Traveler, beware. A snack pack offered by Southwest, for example, contained six Oreos, six Ritz crackers with cheese and a package of Jell-O Gelatin Snacks, for a grand total of 540 calories, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

That's about one-fourth of the recommended daily caloric intake for the average person.

"Pretzels are better than peanuts in terms of having less fat, but they're still basically a wad of white flour with some salt," Susan Bowerman of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition told Greenberg, who reviews the menus of 19 airlines in his book. Bowerman recommends denuding airline sandwiches of cheese and mayo, then dumping your salad on top so there's no dressing issue. Greenberg brings his own food - again with the apples - scavenges the less caloric bits from fruit-and-cheese plates and turns away ice cream sundaes, even though it nearly kills him.

(Just an aside - Robert Young Pelton of National Geographic Adventure magazine gives his Worst-of-the-Worst award for airline food to the stomach-turning offerings of Uzbekistan Airways. "You know it's bad when the president of the country, Islam Karimov, complains about the food," Pelton writes. "I was sitting next to him.")

When he started the diet, Greenberg's stats were dismal: blood pressure, 14 5/95; LDL - that's the bad cholesterol - 95; triglycerides, 148; and total cholesterol, over 200. Nine months later, his pressure had dropped to 10 5/70 and his total cholesterol was 165, with LDL of 65 and triglycerides at 98.

He's also shed 40 pounds, which leaves him 22 more to reach his goal.

Nowadays, Greenberg weighs himself once a month, always on the same scale to avoid variations in calibration that could depress him.

"Never weigh yourself at a hotel, because they lie like you wouldn't believe," he says. "They don't spend an inordinate amount of time in hotels calibrating bathroom scales."

Greenberg's own scale, safe at home in New York, is no longer the enemy.

Mom, it turns out, was right.

Excess baggage

Here are the five worst mistakes travelers make with their diets on the road and some simple solutions, from Peter Greenberg's new book, The Traveler's Diet:

• 1. Eating to combat fatigue - that usually means grazing on high-fat, high-sugar snacks.

Solution: Carry your own healthy snacks.

• 2. Basic lack of planning for a plane trip. If you miss lunch and/or dinner, everything will start looking good - even airline food.

Solution: Carry your own healthy snacks.

• 3. Disconnecting from a lifestyle plan because of travel. Away from home, healthy eating and exercise suddenly seem like too much trouble.

Solution: Make a better food choice. Maybe not the ideal one, but better than abandoning ship. For exercise tips, see Page 5D.

• 4. Calorie-Clueless Syndrome - blissful ignorance about the calorie content of the food you're eating.

Solution: Carry a fast-food calorie guide.

• 5. Failure to monitor liquid calories in all forms - alcohol, juice, energy drinks, smoothies, coffee concoctions.

Solution: Drink lots of water, stick to light versions, substitute a high-fiber, low-calorie snack for the smoothie.

Carry-on fitness

Here are some tips for healthy travel, be it business or pleasure:

• Pick the right hotel. Most hotels have fitness facilities, so be sure to book one that does, such as Hyatt, Westin, Homewood Suites by Hilton and Holiday Inn Select. A great resource to find a hotel that cares about fitness is www.healthytravelnetwork.com.

• Bring your own gym. Pack exercise tubes or bands and water-inflatable dumbbells, or use your carry-on and/or briefcase as a weight. Don't forget the jump rope for a great cardio workout.

• Consider swimming. Most hotels have pools, and a suit and goggles take up no room at all.

• Use your body. You can get a great workout with your own weight. Do push-ups, planks, triceps dips off a chair, squats and lunges.

• No equipment necessary. Bring along workout cards: Pilates by Karon Karter or Yoga by Glenda Twining, in compact boxes of 50 exercises ($10 at Amazon.com). Or try the Fitdecks created by former Navy SEAL Phil Black ($19 at www.fitdeck.com or 1-858-453-6644). Another option: pack an exercise DVD you can play on your laptop.

• Walk it off. On the plane, cruise up and down the aisle every hour. Use layovers to do a few laps around the airport. If you're traveling by car, stop every couple of hours for a brief jog and stretch.

• BYOW. Bring your own water. Never travel without a big bottle of water, and drink some every hour in the air or on the road. Staying hydrated can give you the energy to work out later.

• Make the most of where you are. Run on the beach, take a walking tour of the city, climb the hotel stairs instead of using the elevator.

• Make it regular. Decide on an early-morning workout before you leave, or one in the early evening after you arrive.

Ryckmanl@RockyMountainNews.com