Healthy eating on the road was harder than I thought

I'm not normally someone who watches what I eat. I'm blessed with a fast metabolism, but I put on my pants the other day and they really weren't happy about being buttoned up. I realized I have a problem.

For two and a half weeks I ate out every night, in Happy Valley-Goose Bay covering a few stories and filling in as host of Labrador Morning. That meant time in a hotel and not much cooking.

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With the warning from my waist line, I started taking a closer look at just how bad the food is for me. If it doesn't give you a heart attack, the nutritional information will.

I went out to Jungle Jim's for wing night, ordered a beer and a basket of wings.  I knew these weren't carrot sticks I was eating (they tasted a whole lot better), but I didn't realize just how bad eight small wings are for you.

One basket had more than 100 grams of fat, way beyond your daily limit. There's also 3,700 mg of sodium — one and a half times what you should eat in an entire day. Oh, and one basket with eight wings isn't very big so I ordered two. I'm surprised my heart didn't seize up on the way back to my hotel room.

I thought at least my supper at Subway would make up for it. Boy was I wrong. My foot-long Chicken Pizziola sub was shockingly bad for you.

My sub had more than 50 grams of fat (about 2/3 of my daily limit right there), my entire sodium intake for the day and half the calories I should be eating.

Here's the problem. In the fattest province in the country, with politicians all talking about getting everyone to eat better, you're surrounded by restaurants all pushing fried chicken, burgers, fries and pizza. Like most rural areas of the province, healthy meals in Happy Valley-Goose Bay are few and far between, and it's not in the restaurant's interest to point out to you just how bad the food you're ordering really is for you.

Even when you do make smart a choice by getting a salad instead of fries, Jungle Jim's now charges you extra, so you spend your dinner wishing carrots tasted more like french fries, and paying extra for the privilege.

If you want to get the nutritional facts you have to go online, most restaurant post it on their websites, but sitting with your menu in one hand and your smart phone in the other googling fat totals isn't practical for anyone but the health obsessed.

It's time that restaurants start putting that information right in the menu, another piece of information to help people decide when they're ordering. Jungle Jim's does have their "Slim Jim" options where they post calories for a few options that they advertise as healthier, but you don't have anything to compare it to, and it's not until you go online that you realize many are still filled with a lot of salt or fat.

Even armed with this new information the healthy options are few and far between. Maybe if diners knew how bad their meal truly is, there would be a bigger market for food that will fill you up without filling you out.

Armed with my nutrition print outs, I'll be whittling down my dinner choices and instead of dessert, I think a nice brisk walk will be on the menu.