Some of you may have heard of the foreign service fifteen (a.k.a. FS 15), and then there are some of us who are more familiar with it than we would like to be. It is the typical pounds gained when leaving D.C., on R&R in the U.S., and now I have discovered it can also occur when leaving an overseas post.
In my very biased opinion, people in the foreign service community are in general more fit than the general U.S. population. My first guess is that it has to do with all the sorting, packing, cleaning, unpacking, cleaning and sorting that needs to be done every two to three years. Another factor is when posted to a new place it may take a week or so to resume a normal diet and find where those yummy baked goods are sold.
Well the This-May-Be-the-Last-Time started for me last night, when even at two and a half months out I thought, "this may be the last time I eat this food from this particular place." The hardest case is when you are in the U.S. from am overseas post and you haven't had something in a while or have been craving it from afar. Unfortunately those items for me are never low fat, low sugar, or low calories.
I looking forward to enjoying mangoes, Bengali sweets, kati rolls (from at least three different places), kabobs, aloo posto, beckti, dry chili chicken...I have to stop here and get a snack.
6 comments:
I have been thinking about this a lot - especially since I blog about food and the FS. We are planning six weeks of R&R to Austin this summer and I am already doing some meditation on splitting meals, eating only what actually tastes good and reminding myself I will survive if I don't have breakfast tacos, chips and salsa and coffee EVERY morning when I'm there. Thanks for the great post - made me smile!
Every time I came home from Jerusalem, I wanted BACON on EVERYTHING! Turns out, it is not so good with ice cream! :)
I quoted and linked to you here: http://lifeafterjerusalem.blogspot.com/2010/04/foreign-service-15.html
Last Tuesday in Beijing: Sesame beef AND gong bao chicken. Oh, and noodles. And those little pork wrapper things. And fried green beans. And.... well, I'm getting ready to leave post, too. But it was all so, so, SO good.
@Donna oh wow, double yum!
It's Friday, and that means that the Weekly State Department Blog Roundup is up - and you're on it!
Here is the link:
http://bit.ly/aSBoLT
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Thanks!
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