Seat of Our Pants

“I’m really fat right now!” Martin declared, out of the blue.

This honest expletive was made last night during our evening sauna. Grabbing a little (microscopic, really) bulge on his stomach, he looked up at me in a slight state of shock. Having been a life-long skinny guy, this new addition was a bit of a wonder to him. I had to laugh. He obviously isn’t fat – but fatter, yes. Just a little.

The most likely cause? Swedish food. Northern Swedish food, to be more exact. These people eat as if they’re still out tilling the farm. Top on their menu is butter, followed closely by beef, potatoes, and bread, all of which is smothered in more butter. I’m not knocking it – it’s heavenly – but it’s just so different from what we’ve been eating and therein lies the issue.

Swedish sausage (aka the irresistible devil in plastic)

While in Sweden we’ve been catching up on our meat eating, feeling we deserved it. We flew here from India – the land of rice, lentils and chickpeas – where we had a mostly vegetarian diet. Sure, we ate meat from time to time, but only when Martin declared that he would most likely perish if he didn’t eat animal protein that instant (which resulted in some seriously yucky eating at times). Eating vegetarian is what you do in India, just as eating meat is what you do in northern Sweden. So, we went from vegetarianism to meat-eatering in the course of a flight. Did that make us sick? No. Did our bodies send us a little “woah, lets just store a little bit of that meat in your fat cells” bulge. Yes, yes they did.

Bangkok street food vendor

This isn’t the first time we’ve made a major dietary change on this trip, either. We jumped from five months of delicious SE Asian food (does it get any better than the street food in Bangkok?), to four months of veggie-filled Indian/Nepali food. Then it was onto a month of meat-eating in Myanmar and then back for a month of Indian vegetarianism. All this change, packed into a year.

I’m not sure how I feel about it, now that Martin’s comment got me thinking. Where do you draw the line while on the road? Traveling is about experience, right? Food is huge part of that experience for us – but to what extent do we let it go? A little bulge or a little loss from time to time is one thing, but what about the long-term effects of our radically changing diet? Have we thought about that? No, not really. Just as with most things about this trip of ours, we’ve been living in the moment. Is that a bad decision? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, it’s time to start planning how to get rid of the 10 lbs (or what I call the Swedish curse) that we always gain here.

What do you think? Is living the food experience worth more than the (possible) long term effects of a dietary roller coaster?

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