Quebec, Where are My 10 Pounds?

Upon reflection, what I find to be one of the good things about my trip to Quebec is that it can be used as a period of time for which I can make lots of observations and come up with explanations to things that need explanations. It is like being sent away for an experimental "living trip." Unlike regular day-to-day life that seems like an endless (well, relatively speaking) time of sleep and awake with some activity in between, the trip has a definite, short, time a defined space, a defined goal and a defined set of activities. The fact that it was a memorable trip makes it even easier to find explanations with fairly good level of accuracy.

So here goes my weight issue.

When not inflating my repetition numbers, I am usually navigating around the gym, looking through the windows or hopping on to the scale. So the gym is where I watch my weight, literally.

I noticed in my second week of stay in Quebec that I had lost 10 pounds. At first, I thought the scale wasn't accurate, but a friend confirmed that it actually was fairly accurate. Then I blamed the Kg to lb conversion. There must have been an error there. I thought the fact that my weight has not fluctuated much in the last 4 or 5 years made me deny the reality, which I confirmed after I came back from the trip. I have indeed lost 10 pounds during my 5 week trip to Quebec.

But how is that possible?

Stress? What stress?

Eating habits? May be. My eating habits were changed, as I had to eat almost entirely outside, and had no food that I could grab and eat in my room. At the same time, I did not spend much time in my room. My most frequent meals included: morning breakfast was usually a big meal with eggs, bacon and toast; lunch pasta with beef sauce along with a fruit; another lunch option was chicken/fish/beef with rice and a soup + juice. Dinner was either skipped because lunch was eaten late or eaten outside wherever I happen to be -- usually light food. Fast food was avoided as much as possible. In fact, the only fast food outing I can think of was to Ashton's for a poutine dinner. Even for a poutine, I noticed that the food I ate in Quebec didn't have "enough salt" so I had to add extra salt to it -- even to a food whose base is essentially French fries!

It must be the activities. There were lots of them. Many of them involved walking: I made a habit of walking on the streets of Old Quebec whenever possible, and was virtually walking there every Sunday evening. Walking was the most common of the activities. We walked for nearly two hours when we did our mandatory weekly photograph trips; we walked for 7 kilometers in total when we had a class trip; we walked from the pub in down town to our residence when the bus wasn't coming early enough...the list goes on. And then there was the hiking up the Jacques-Cartier Parc mountain, and there was the swimming, and the kayaking, and the other swimming...and the dancing, too. There were also occasional gym visits, and an intense soccer game.

It must be the activities then, and the walking, and the dancing and swimming, not Quebec, that took my 10 pounds away.