Are you the type of person who goes on a vacation and when you come back you feel like it takes you a good two to three weeks or maybe even two to three months before you get started and get back on track? If this is you, then this podcast is for you. I just wanna share my experience with you of going to a seven-day all-inclusive resort with my husband, just the two of us.

There’s two parts of this podcast. I wanna talk to you about what I did with the food while I was there, and then I wanna talk to you about when I came back and how I handled the weight gain that I had And just a little CliffsNotes version here.

So last year, one year ago in June of 2025, I went to the same darn place, and I was with my family and with my boys, and I can tell you, I had some trepidation going into it. I hadn’t been to an all-inclusive for quite a while, and I was still struggling with going to restaurants and feeling more stuffed than I really liked when I left. And that was a year ago.

And then my husband took me back to the same place last December. So then six months later, I go there. And then again, six months later, I am back in there. May of 2026. So the point is that this is something that I have been working on really honing, and not in a way that is like I’m doing it wrong, but just as a way of saying, “This is something that I want to overcome.”

I’ve been at my healthy weight for 12 years, and yet the restaurants seem to be an issue. And I have to tell you, it’s one of my husband’s favorite things to do is to go out to eat, and he’s getting near retirement, and so I know we’ll be going out even more. This just seems like the right season of my life to handle this. I like to think of obstacles as the Lord’s next assignment.

So it’s been something that I’ve been working on. So I wanna share with you a new exercise that I learned that has really helped me with that because I wanted to go into this vacation and not feel stuffed, to truly be able to allow myself to have unconditional permission to eat any food, and yet finish a meal and think, “That was great. I really enjoyed that,” and not feel uncomfortably stuffed.

And recently, an exercise has come into my world about looking at unwanted behaviors. And one of the questions that you can ask yourself when you are doing something that you don’t want to be doing, for example, for me, knowing that I was full and still eating more at a restaurant, why was I doing that? What was going on?

And I hope you hear that it has taken years, and finally now I want to put more focus, more effort, and more tools are coming into my life where I can really start to observe this and experiment with some things.

So when you’re doing something that you don’t want to be doing, you can ask yourself, “Well, what feeling am I trying to create? And what feeling am I trying to avoid?” And when I looked at me eating more at restaurants on vacations, ’cause we ate every single meal out, we weren’t staying in a condo or an Airbnb. We had no kitchen. We had a few snacks, that was it. Everything else were travel meals or in restaurants.

What I’ve noticed is that the feeling I am trying to avoid is to feel left out or forgotten or not important. It’s like the food is something that my brain believes is making me feel special. Special or cared for or loved. And when I recognize this, I could ask myself the most important question.

So if we look at the feeling of feeling forgotten or unimportant or left out, and for me, it always comes down to forgotten. The question is fill in the blank with your behavior, and for me it’s eating beyond being full. Is eating after you’re full the best and only way to avoid feeling forgotten? And that, I just thought, wow, that is so… Yeah, no. No, it’s not. That is not even kind of true.

And then the question was for feeling special. Is eating beyond feeling full the best and only way to feel special? And the answer again is obviously no, and it just starts to open up alternatives. And it became very clear to me, and I know this, you guys. I know this. I know that whatever I put in my mouth does not create a feeling.

I know that it is my thoughts that are creating the feeling. It is my thought that I get something extra. This is just for me. This is special just for me. I know that it is my thoughts creating the feeling of being special. But this is why we need coaches, gang, because we cannot look in our own brain sometimes.

But being able to ask that question, is eating beyond being full the best and only way to feel special? The answer was no. And that is how I know I can feel special regardless of what I do or don’t put in my mouth. And so then I went about playing this fun mental game with myself this whole vacation, and I mean that, fun.

I love playing in my brain. I love creating the results that I want because I don’t want to be overeating, and I love knowing I have that power by managing my mind and creating that feeling of being special just simply by my thoughts.

So I took some time and played around with a few thoughts, and a couple of the thoughts that really helped me feel very special and very full were things like, ” Someone truly cares about me.” And God gives me all I’ll ever need.

And I really had a really interesting, fun time playing around with someone truly cares about me. Because once I started saying that, outside of mealtimes, I could see where someone truly cares about me. Our room was decorated for my birthday. Our hotel room was decorated by the staff. It was just so cool.

Or I thought the waitstaff was just so attentive, or maybe when I asked someone for a towel, they were just so kind, or the way my husband treated me, or even how I was treating myself. I was just really intentionally filling up my special cup, if you will, to the brim so it could overflow, so that when I got to meals, I already felt very special.

There was nothing lacking. So that was really fun. I also practiced two other things. Normally when I go to a restaurant, I would practice sitting for 60 seconds without looking at the menu and just getting a sense of what do I want to eat. So when we went to a restaurant that had a menu, I would do that.

So if we went to a buffet, then I would kind of just sit there with myself and think, “What do I want?” before I even saw the options. And then the other thing I started to practice was 60 seconds in the middle of the meal to just… 60 seconds, and I know it because I have an Apple Watch.

And I challenged myself to do nothing in those 60 seconds. Not drink water, not keep chewing, not check my phone, just sit and be and connect with myself. And that was very hard. That was l- 60 seconds is a long time. It was just very eye-opening to me how long it took, just to how long it was, and kind of how uncomfortable it was as well.

But I thought, “I just want to practice this pause.” Nothing… I’m leaving no expectations on this pause. I simply want to stop, check in, see if there’s anything that I can feel or not feel, and if I just did the pause, then I was happy.

And I will tell you, it was amazing. It was just amazing that I could intentionally say, “Oh, I want dessert tonight,” so I would leave some room so I wouldn’t get all the way full. And I can also say I’m really not quite sure about my hunger cues. I can think I’m not stuffed, and then a little bit later feel pretty uncomfortable.

So that’s still something that I’m playing around with. And I had this really, really fun thing that I would do, and I gave myself 100% permission to do this, to have dessert any time that I wanted. And what I would do is I would get one plate and put anything chocolate on it that I thought was interesting, chocolate brownie, chocolate, cake, maybe a little truffle something.

And then I would get some ice cream. And I would bring the plate back to the table, and I would taste each one to see which one I really wanted, which one was worth eating, and which one just looked really pretty.

Then I would allow myself to just take what I felt was a peaceful portion of whichever ones I wanted to keep, and usually there was only one that I actually wanted to eat. And I would eat that with my ice cream until I had enough. And it was amazing how much food I didn’t eat, how much food I left, and that is progress.

This is huge progress for me to see food and leave it, to not eat it. That was so fun to just recognize that’s progress. It was so fun to feel so free. It was so fun to just get up and move on, to not feel that attachment or that pull or that I should finish it, or I want to finish it. I could clearly say I don’t even want more. It was really, really cool.

And so I want to share with you when I came back from vacation, I felt very good about myself. I just felt s- like I truly enjoyed vacation. I took care of myself well. I just loved it. I got back home and I thought, “This is gonna be a super fun experiment,” because I really ate quite a variety and in amounts that I normally don’t eat.

And so I’m going to get on the scale and I’m going to see how much I gained, and I thoroughly expected to gain, without mind drama. It was crazy ’cause I thought, “This is gonna be so fun. This is gonna be so fun to see if I gain weight.”

And I gained 3.4 pounds, which is the most amount of weight that I’ve gained in a seven-day period for like a very long time. But here’s what I did, and this is the part I really want you to hear, is number one, I didn’t panic. Honestly, and this is amazing, I didn’t even have to coach myself, I just had no feelings about it.

And I think I had no feelings about it because the thought I was having is I trusted my body to recalibrate. And I also knew that the day after vacation, I wouldn’t keep eating that way because now I’m back home and I eat normally when I come back home. Which just gives me so much appreciation for that ability to say, “I eat normally when I come back home.”

I just have a normal way that I take care of myself when I’m at home. I make my easy to stick to meal plan, and if I make changes, it’s fine to make changes. In general, they’re just equal swaps. In general, it might be rearranging food. You know, maybe I have two snacks in a row instead of a meal and I push a meal back just because of how the day goes unexpectedly.

But in general, whatever I change, they’re just pretty much equal swaps. And you can see that on my Instagram account what I did after I decided that I would do this experiment and then what I ate every day.

But I just trusted my body to restabilize. So after one week of making my Easy to Stick To meal plan. Oh, and by the way, it was not even a typical week last week. We got back from vacation, and I had three meals out, and I usually only eat one meal out a week. But we had a family dinner with the boys, which was amazing.

My husband and I went out one night, which was amazing and fun, and unexpectedly, a friend invited me out. So three meals out. That’s just not typical. So after one week, so like I said, I gained 3.4 pounds. After one week, I lost two. 2.2, I think. Isn’t that incredible? The body will restabilize. We can just trust that.

And so I will weigh again next week after one week, and I thoroughly expect that then my weight will be back to its original weight. But if it’s not, what if it takes like three more weeks? I just don’t care. It’s just not a problem. I just trust my body will restabilize to whatever is normal and balanced for where my body needs to be now because, you guys, here’s what you need to hear.

I just have a simple, peaceful way that I eat now, and but here’s why. Because I do not spiral. I do not spiral out anymore. And some people will spiral out when they step on the scale. Some people will spiral out because they got back from vacation, and they just don’t know how to get back on track.

And here’s the thing, is that person may not have gotten on the scale, but now they’re spiraling out just because they got back from vacation, and they’re thinking, “Oh, I ate all of these other things. Now I need to restrict my food,” so they spiral out, which then will eventually lead to a binge.

Some people spiral out because they’re looking at their vacation pictures, and they think they look not how they expected, and they spiral out and think, “Oh, I need to restrict.” There’s just so many things that lead us to spiral out.

But overcoming your spiral truly is how you get to eat normally and then just let your body do what it needs to do. Your body will balance out. Your body will calibrate to what your healthy weight is.

Now, if you don’t know what your spiral type is, mine was always the binger restrictor. I would get back from vacation, and I would really restrict. I would go on a clean eating plan for three weeks or that’s not even true, three days. I thought I would do three weeks, but it would be, like, three days. But it’s crazy, I don’t have to do that anymore.

So if you don’t know what your spiral type is, I want you to go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com, and you will be able to take my free quiz. And the free quiz will show you what your spiral type is, as well as what you do about it to overcome that spiral type. So that’s kind of fun.

I’ll be doing some podcasts about each one of the spiral types coming up soon, but until then, just go take the quiz. And I give a free mini workshop after you take the quiz. Once you get your results, you’ll see my little workshop there, too, so that’ll be a lot of fun.

All right, everybody, so I hope you can save this podcast for when you come back from vacation or are going on vacation and I want you to know you cannot do vacation wrong. You cannot do vacation wrong.

These are just some of the things that I experimented with this time, and I’ve experimented with a lot of things, and I will probably experiment with many things at each trip that I take, because I always want to just be present, and refine, and create neutrality around food, and detachment, and just really experience my life in a full, rich way, not only in my taste buds, but in all of my senses.

So head over to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. Take that quiz, because here at Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, we are doing weight loss the Catholic way, which means we’re putting God first and keeping God our God, not the false gods of the scale, or the mirror, or our pant size, or the fantastic special diet.

At Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, we keep God our God. Have a blessed day