The Bahamas is cool…unless you’re on The Portion Plate Diet….
No, we didn’t have those all-you-can-eat-throw-your-portion-plate-out-the-window meal plans like you get in Club Med. We should have; it would have been cheaper. We stayed at Atlantis, a labyrinth of pools, temples, aquariums, casinos, John Bull shops, and drunk college kids. The place is gorgeous, and expensive. I learned this when I ordered an ice cream bar for my daughter Sophia after she’d exhausted herself in the kiddie pool. $7. “Uh, I said ice cream bar. Not ice cream sundae with whipped cream and sapphire cherries.”
Our room had a motion-sensitive mini-bar. Imagine, after having one too many Kiliks, rummaging around the bar for one of your own bottled waters that you smuggled through customs and accidentally nudging each airplane bottle of rum. $131. Yikes.
Back on point: there’s no reason I couldn’t have used my portion plate. I brought it, which disappointed my wife only because I remembered it but forgot to bring enough clean t-shirts. But when you’re paying $21 for a chicken BLT or $24 for veggie burger you feel obliged to eat the whole damn thing. Unless you order the $19 Cesar salad with raw chicken and send the damn thing back. “No, don’t re-cook the chicken. Just bring out more nine-dollar beers.”
My wife, who thinks all food not sold by Earth Fare has high fructose corn syrup and is manufactured in a place other than where it’s being sold, wasn’t impressed with the food at Atlantis. She particularly disliked a well-known brand of rum cakes being hawked in the marina shops. “You would think by the marketing (“Made in the Bahamas”) that the stuff would be made here,” she said. “But it’s imported.” I asked the lady hawking the cake: “So, where’s this stuff made?”
“Right down the street.” I smiled and stuffed three samples in my mouth.
(It’s important to note here that Dorothy was impressed with the $3,000 Rolex watches at John Bull, though I doubt Rolexes are manufactured in the Bahamas. In the sports book I was impressed that Notre Dame only lost to West Virginia by two points (that bet paid for 1/10 of our mini-bar bill), although the game was being played in New York City.)
None of this has to do with The Portion Plate Diet, except that I think I gained four pounds on the trip. (Official weigh-in tomorrow.) Pathetic. I’m learning it’s easy to use the plate in the structured home environment; but I struggle on the road. Still, I’ve found inspiration in Time article about the eating habits of the French. Synopsis: the French eat a lot of rich food, but it’s good rich food. And they eat slowly …. sitting down. Result: a relatively healthy society. We Americas eat a lot of crappy rich food. We eat it fast. We eat it all the time: while driving, working, watching television, emailing, texting, surfing the web, and so on. What we rarely do is make time to eat. Good food. At tables. That about sums up my vacation: eating on the periphery — snacking on bad food at the kiddie pool, in the hotel lobby, at the Sports Book, at Jamba Juice. The alternative: eating regular meals from my portion plate at designated times. It worked the first week, and it can work again. As long as Atlantis doesn’t offer any more buy three night get the fourth free plus a companion ticket. Because it’s so worth an additional five pounds.
No pictures in this post. I don’t want to take up too much space with my spare tire. My wife gave me a hug today and said I bumped her with it. As for a grade for vacation: D-. Spared an F because no one asked me to put my shirt back on in the kiddie pool. And because I talked my way out of the faux mini-bar bill.
Up next: Schools and Food
