Fat Trap - Going Home

The whole time I've been losing weight I've always struggled with trips "home" - back to St. Louis where ALL of my family is. I am the only one out of my immediate and extended family that now lives outside of the St. Louis area.

Nashville isn't a very far car trip to St. Louis so I get back quite often - usually every 2-3 months. And usually the trip is a weight gain waiting to happen. Every fat bomb that is possible happens while I'm there. Eating out with friends or family, nights of binge drinking with friends (or family), mom's homecooking, and my mom's endless supply of junk food she keeps in her house. I still haven't figured out how to survive.

Also, does anyone else associate long car trips with fast food and junk food? I blame this on childhood trips to the Lake house. Every time we made the 3 hour trip up to the Lake of the Ozarks we would beg my mom to stop at the half-way point to get McDonald or some other fast food. Sometimes, it wouldn't even be a meal time, but it wasn't a family trip to the Lake without some McDonalds fries. That's probably for a whole other blog post...

So back to the point, I can avoid fast food when I want to. Even on long car rides I can plan to bring my own meals and snacks. But for some reason as soon as I step into my mom's house I fall into a puddle mess of no-willpower and raid her fridge and pantry of every junk food item in her house. This time she had Entenmann's donuts, swiss cake rolls, Doritos, Cheez-its, ice cream (she always has Haagen-dazs or Ben & Jerry's pints), and the list goes on. And every time, I feel like I have to sample EVERYTHING.

Her house must be a vortex where all my willpower is sucked out of my brain because I often have things in my cabinets that I could binge on and I don't (usually). Like right now I have some leftover Oreos from a dessert I made. I thought about them last night, but I did not touch them. Now, if that was at my mom's house I would have eaten a whole sleeve of Oreos as soon as I started thinking about them.

I've been trying to come up with an answer for how to avoid this pitfall when I visit home, but after almost 2 years of trying, I just haven't come up with a solution. Thoughts? Ideas?

I'm determined to make a trip home this summer without falling into the junk food pit of doom.