Vacation Eating Part 3: Hotel Breakfast Survival

The hotel breakfast..... You find yourself surrounded by free waffles and danishes and sausage.... Oh my!

I know that at first glance the hotel breakfast looks like a lost cause for a health-conscience eating, but it all reality, you can probably make some good choices here. The biggest key? Don't let your grumbling stomach rule.....Take a deep breath and investigate!

The very first thing I do when I get to the hotel breakfast is peruse the offerings and see if I can't find some healthier options. Sometimes they're buried, but they're almost always there.

One side note that I found amusing is that each of the three mornings I got breakfast on this last trip I found myself being intently watched by the other diners. I don't know if it's because I was making such a scene going back and forth to get what I needed or if they were actually interested in WHAT I was eating, but I found myself have a little more sympathy for zoo animals!

Anyhow......

While instant isn't my preferred method of eating oatmeal (the slow cook kind is the best for you), un-flavored instant oatmeal (you note I said UNflavored! If the only thing they have is flavored, it's back to the drawing board!) is usually a better choice than any cold cereal. It was almost hidden behind the packets of instant hot cocoa when I took my latest trip out of town, but I found it there! I checked the back of a packet and read that they were 100 calories a piece. I wanted to get 150 calories for my starchy carbs, so I used the only two packets there (trust me- no one else wanted them), added hot water to cook and ate 3/4 of it.

So there I'd overcome the biggest hurdle of healthy carbs.

For protein they had scrambled eggs. Okay- so I'm pretty sure they weren't real eggs they were cracking and scrambling back there, but whatever that stuff was it had to have had a fair amount of protein, so I put about two eggs worth on my plate.

Next order of business was finding some kind of fresh fruit, if at all possible. There were grapefruit halves, but I am not a big fan of grapefruit. I kept looking. At the end of the buffet, on a separate little table, next to the garbage (why?) was a bowl of bananas. Bananas aren't my favorite, but they looked the better option than the fruit salad, which I was fairly sure was in some kind of a sugary syrup. So bananas it was.

Poured a glass of 2% milk(would have preferred skim, but it wasn't available), got a cup of coffee (don't usually drink coffee, but treated myself since it was vacation), and some artificial sweetener (I know, not a clean food. So shoot me!) for both the coffee and the oatmeal, as well as a pat of butter (also for the oatmeal), and was all set.

I skipped any of the breakfast meats, which were either link or smoked sausage. Fat was just too high for these options. Although if they'd of had crisp-cooked bacon, I'd of probably grabbed a couple of pieces of it.

I also avoided any pastries (duh!), breads (wheat toast in hotel breakfasts usually has more white than wheat flour in it), and the juices and cereals. Both are highly processed and very low in nutrients. Had there been waffles offered, I'd of avoided those, too. Same reason I wouldn't have eaten the pastries. To me, anything you put syrup on or has the first two ingredients as "sugar" and "flour" aren't breakfast, they're dessert.

Oh, and none of the peanut butter was getting into my oatmeal. It was Skippy- sugar added and fats made hydrogenated (NOT healthy!). Butter was my better option.

I'll be the first to admit that I got lucky in this hotel. Often the selection is not this good. Sometimes I get REALLY lucky and it's better- They'll have slow cooked oatmeal and skim milk and hard boiled eggs. But all in all I was in pretty good shape at this particular hotel (Hawthorne Inns and Suites in Arlington, Texas). I stuck with the same menu all three mornings.

Had my choices been more limited, which they often are, I'd of gone for the raisin bran with skim milk and run back up to the room for protein powder to put in the milk.

Again, I think breakfast is the trickiest meal to eat out. And free hotel breakfasts make it even tougher. But it's hard to pass up a free option when you are already spending a fortune on the vacation itself. If all the hotel had to offer was danishes and Sunny Delight, we'd of had no choice but to eat out. But usually you can do a little investigation and come up with a decent breakfast right there for no additional cost. You just gotta go in with the mindset that YOU are in control, not the buffet!