Staycation

WHEN I’m home, it’s so easy to do OMAD—one meal a day—with the carnivore diet. But while on vacation, forget it. No OMAD, no carnivore diet, not even low-carb despite the side effects I had to deal with after all the sugar I was ingesting.

I conveniently forgot about oxalates and salicylates, and even took a bite of the hotel’s welcome chocolate. Yum!

And after having bulalo and kare-kare for dinner, I dropped by the hotel’s cafe where I had cafe latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup. And a huge croissant. I asked the barista to please slice it just in case I won’t be able to eat it all. But I ate it all. And there was the barista telling me, Oi, nahurot! Prompting my thought bubble to go, How dare you insinuate that I’m carbo-loading again.

At the breakfast buffet earlier, I had sapin-sapin, maja pandan, bibingka, croissant, burnt cheese croissant, taho, and sikwate, so, yes, I was definitely carbo-loading that day.

For breakfast the next day, I was planning to drop by the yogurt section. Uh.

For the third day, the plan was to have dinner at the hotel’s steakhouse to restart my carnivore diet. Hmmm. Good luck na lang.

I stopped watching carnivore videos on YouTube and Facebook because I didn’t want to disturb my winning, er, carbo-loading streak.

This staycation was making me fat, but with no weighing scale at the hotel room’s bathroom, how to confirm the weight gain?

At least the smart watch was kind of encouraging me to still meet my daily goals for Move, Exercise, and Stand. Exercise was, of course, the most difficult to accomplish this time.

My body was hopelessly confused. I was eating at least three times a day instead of once a day. I was eating carbs in addition to beef, pork, chicken, fish, and eggs. I was eating up to 1 am instead of 5 pm. What the…?

I should have been swimming in the hotel’s pool, lifting weights at its gym, dancing at its roof deck bar.

I was indeed at the pool bar and the roof deck bar each night—drinking Coke Zero. Ho-hum. If only the gym had its own bar, too, I’d be there daily, drinking Coke Zero again.

The difference between the pool bar’s Coke Zero and the roof deck’s was, the latter had a cocktail stirrer and a slice of lemon. Level up pa more.

I was writing this column at both bars and the cafe daily.

The daily visit to the cafe was actually a promise I made to its barista. Achieve na achieve.

Since I’m chinita (Chinese-Filipino), the pool bar wait staff probably thought I’m a foreigner, so he communicated with me through “okay” and the thumbs-up gesture. I played along with it, pretending I couldn’t understand Cebuano.

The roof deck bar’s bands were either the acoustic kind or not playing my type of music so it became a wait-and-see: would they be worth the Coke Zero?

Even at the gym, I cringe if the Muzak is not my type.

Oh, the gym. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be back there, and back to reality.