How Trying to Make Healthy Choices Back on the Road Worked Out: A Story of Failures | brokeGIRLrich
So I’m back home from my first show since the end of the pandemic and before I left, I was struggling a little bit with how to balance the healthy habits I’ve built in the many months of not working with how life is while out on a contract.
I’d developed several really good food and exercise habits during the pandemic and as it came time to head off to the hotel for this contract, I was struggling a little with how I was possibly going to maintain them.
There was no pool to swim in, but I also like yoga and felt I could do that anywhere, so I optimistically tossed my yoga mat and blocks into my car as I packed up.
Where they then sat for three weeks and never even made it into the hotel with me.
I was also concerned about how much garbage I usually eat when I’m away from home.
In the calmer days of preproduction leading up to rehearsals, I thought, what can I do to mitigate making these bad choices?
If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you know we’ve been doing a lot of meal kits in the house for the last few months, so I thought, maybe something like that? The company put us in an Extended Stay, so I knew I would have a little kitchenette.
So I ordered a bunch of salads to bring to rehearsal with me from Farmer’s Fresh and a bunch of microwave dinners from Factor, since the Internet kept harping how healthy they were to me.
I knew the odds of me taking the time to cook was laughable, but microwaving or just opening a salad container? That’s got to be doable, right?
The Farmer’s Fridge meals were $58.21 for 6 salads and a breakfast oats. The box had a minimum amount you have to buy up to and a maximum amount you could buy. I decided to fill the box and just bring the salads each day for a week; however, the salads did not last all week and a few had gone bad day four (and five and six).
The salads that did not go bad were pretty good, the only thing was that I thought I could just dump in the salad dressing, shake them up, and eat them from the container, but that didn’t work. They really need to be dumped into another bowl and tossed together because everything is layered with all the greens on top.
Factor was $29.99 for the first 4 meals and $39.99 for the second 4 meals. This was probably my biggest fail because I only managed to eat 4 of the meals total, as you will see below.
I got into town where we would be rehearsing the night before the cast and most of the crew and went grocery shopping for some additional food and did a good job of picking up fruits and vegetables and the general things that I had been eating for the last several months.
In total, I spent $138.22 on groceries, some of them came home with me, but I wound up throwing a lot more out than I expected, which is, of course, a total fail.
At this point I was up to $266.41 spent on food that I hoped would get me through most of the next two weeks before I would have to stock up again. Or $19.03 a day, which is kind of a lot up front, but a pretty reasonable daily amount on food.
However, my mindset, which was correct, was that once things are really rolling, I may not get back to the grocery store because I expected that it was possible that my schedule might be horrendous.
That was the one thing I was totally right about.
And the next day – it began.
On day one, I spent the day checking people in, making sure they had what they needed, and doing a grocery run for everyone else in the evening. I ate a salad for lunch and a Factor meal for dinner.
I was nailing it.
On day two, I threw another salad into my lunchbox to bring to the rehearsal hall. I was actually very excited to start rehearsals. I thought, maybe we will balance work and life and all these things better now as some of the people in the room were even on mental health panels and spent months of the pandemic talking about how important this balance is.
Also, rehearsals, right? The dream of the last 18 months! We’re going to do a show!!
L.O.L.
Except not. I’m not really laughing. I think I did manage a few bites of the salad during the lunch break that day but between the Covid rules of only really being able to eat in certain areas and several unexpected company management tasks that began to take over every single rehearsal break we had, lunch wasn’t really a thing that happened.
When I got home that night, I did microwave a Factor meal though as I tackled the paperwork for the day.
On day three, we learned there were major changes and major funding issues and suddenly the entire show was thrust into chaos.
And I barely ate for three days. So it was kind of funny I had been concerned about gaining weight before leaving for this contract.
Our venue wound up changing from the tent to a theatre, and so a good friend who had been hired as the operations manager was let go once the tent came down the day after it was put up and so he and I drank heavily that night.
A few days later another friend quit for a number of reasons, and so there was no point in letting the alcohol in her room go to waste, right?
Very healthy choices.
Somewhere around day five or day six, after eating almost nothing every day during our twelve to fourteen hours a day of stage management tasks with anything company management crammed into every break, I drove past a Taco Bell.
Till this point, I hadn’t even been hungry, but I was suddenly ravenous.
And I thought, you really have not made a single healthy choice from day two on, and you’ve barely eaten, so if your body thinks Taco Bell is a good idea, eat literally anything you want from there.
So I did.
And then I did almost every night of the contract, which was especially useful after venue issues resulted in us moving our rehearsals to 5 PM – 12 AM, at a place that was an hour away from the hotel.
I thought many times about this concept I’d read about somewhere along the way that discipline is a muscle and you only have so much of it. You can strengthen it over time, but it is what it is.
And I realized that all the discipline I had in me to get through the day was fully used up by this job, and then some, on some days. And I am not convinced that on a job like that one there was any other path.
I literally had healthy food sitting in my fridge and I could not make myself eat it.
I was in a financial position to throw whatever amount of money at healthy eating that I wanted.
I had made it all as easy as possible. And still… no.
To be fair, this show was absolutely one of the rough ones. Currently the reigning roughest. A few years ago, I did a load out in Saudi Arabia that became my comparison point for the most unpleasant day of work in my career and as I was chatting about this contract with a friend who was in Saudi Arabia with me that day, I told him I would’ve happily been loading out that show for two weeks straight rather than do this show again.
Thus, in reality, I guess this is more a post about mental health and work expectations more than it’s about how much it costs to make healthy choices on tour and if the investment is even worth it, because I think once my stress level crosses a certain threshold, there is really no hope in me picking a salad over Taco Bell and a glass of wine on this planet, no matter how much money I throw at it.
I’m also left pondering how much stress is my fault? But I feel (like I suspect many other stage managers do – correctly or incorrectly) that the work has to get done, so sure, if I take my full break, I do get to step away and eat, but then I’m just working an extra hour later on in the evening, which I really prefer not to do, and actually just continues to add to my stress level.
In reality, I feel the correct answer is probably to not expect one person to do three people’s job. Sigh.
