Eating healthily on the go is goddam HARD.
I generally have an active life, I'm constantly travelling between England and France and even when I'm in one or the other I seem to relentlessly city-hop. Although I tend to be super healthy at home without even getting tempted into filling my fridge with junk, travelling, my friends, is a VERY different story. A lot of the time I find that shops just do not offer a healthy option - even when they "pretend" they do. Take my lunch a couple of days ago for instance. I walked into a cafe, desperate for a bite. Let's be honest, step 1 is to avoid smelling that cheesy wiff and looking at that tempting blackboard of specials. When I managed to succeed in that, I took a look at the sandwiches. Ugh. My story begins.
Scanning over the choices, I soon realised that some foods where there to feed the heart, others - in appearance - to feed the soul. The first typically included bacon and mayonnaise, the latter included some sort of salad and brown bread and was wrapped in a different coloured packet. Most people would probably weigh the pros and cons for a sec and either give in to the unhealthy choice or hold their chin high and go with the wholemeal. HOWEVER, I tend to look things through. Over and over. I nitpick, looking for the con... And I found it.
I didn't actually have to look too far... I just flipped over the packets of two sandwiches, one BLT on white bread and one simple smoked ham on brown bread. To start off, the calories were higher in the ham sandwich. A lot of people would look at this and go for the BLT straight away. Lower calories is indeed a quick sign that the meal is less likely to stay on your hips BUT it doesn't necessarily mean it's healthier. It's all about good calories and bad calories. Few calories in white bread is still worse for you than more calories in the brown bread, for instance (this is due to the fact that there aren't very many nutriments in white bread, if any, and so although you're eating your body is not really getting what it's hungry for). I'm not that worried about my weight at the moment so as far as I was concerned, the higher calorie amount wasn't necessarily a deal breaker - as long as it was still a more nutritious choice. Unfortunately it was not and the deal did break as I read on though the nutritional information.
I had a read through all the other figures, the ones below the calorie description. Almost every single number on the ham sandwich was higher than on the other packet : Salt (sodium), fat - in fact saturated fats too -, sugars, carbs... The ONLY thing which had a higher quantity in the BLT than in the ham sarnie was fiber. And fiber is generally good, right ?!
So there's the catch. And that's why I enjoyed a BLT sandwich on the go. Although I would have much preferred a veggie wrap, a salad (and I don't mean a piece of lettuce covered in ham, cheese, greasy sundried tomatoes and thick sauce) or even a fresh smoothie. But they don't come easy, not even in London.