I Fought Airplane Food, and I Won

1st rule of business: Know your customer

You guys, someone should alert the UN about the size of KLM's economy class seats. Someday we will look back on these days in the same way we look at the imprisonment of debtors and the mentally unwell- as a dark period of barbarity before enlightened thought triumphed.

After 24 hours of being kept in a stress position and deprived of sleep, I have arrived in Zambia.

There was plenty that didn't go right with the trip, but one thing that did go right was my snacking.



The first thing that helped was that I brought my FitBit with me, which has a clock, among other features. Keeping track of what time it was at home helped me gauge whether or not I was actually hungry, or just bored.

My flight left DC at 6pm, and when they rolled out the food cart I broke out the big salad from PotBelly I carried on and ate that instead. The stewardess came by, started to offer me whatever she was slinging, saw my salad, and said, "That looks like a MUCH better idea". Which makes me feel bad about every single other time when I said yes to the plane food. Oh well.

They came around with breakfast before we landed, but it was only about 2am DC time, so I skipped it. When we got into the airport, we went upstairs to this awesome quiet lounge and slept until about 10am DC time, then headed down and ate some breakfast.

Because Amsterdam is technically Not America, they had actual food options rather than McDonald's, so I had a pretty decent omelette, a fruit salad, and some tea. Then we got on the plane for the 10 hour flight to Lusaka.

When we took off, they came around with lunch, which I skipped because we'd just eaten. Then I slept until they came by with dinner just before we landed, but I'd eaten some trail mix and beef jerky (OK, and some HobNobs. If you don't know what a HobNob is, please board the next plane to England and consume some immediately). Also, I drank a ton of water.

Given that my activity for the day totaled about 3,000 steps, I didn't really need a ton of calories, and all of the altitude changes left me feeling like a balloon animal, so I wasn't hungry, just tired and in desperate need of a shower.

All in all, I'm quite happy about it all- I felt better than I usually do coming off a trip like this. Double bonus- no one shot me dirty looks for stinking up the joint with my salam-a-rama!