Bloat, Scale Jumps, and Getting Back on Track After Vacation

If you’ve ever come home from a trip feeling bloated, off track, and like you need to “make up for it” or lock back in… this episode is for you.

I’m walking you through what vacation actually looked like for me — yes, the meals out, drinks, desserts, late nights, less movement — and why none of it ruined my progress (and it didn’t ruin yours either).

We’re talking about:

• Why vacation is not a failure or something to “recover” from
• What’s actually happening in your body when you feel bloated, puffy, or off
• The biggest mistake women make when they get home (hint: it’s not the food)
• What “getting back on track” looked like for me — without restriction, detoxes, or punishment
• How to stop the cycle of being “perfect,” falling off, and starting over

I’ll also walk you through my first week back — what I focused on, what I didn’t do, and how I returned to my routine without guilt or extremes.

Because the goal isn’t to be perfect on vacation.
And it’s not to avoid living your life.

The goal is to become someone who can enjoy it — and always come back to your habits without spiraling.

If you’ve been stuck in that post-trip guilt cycle, this episode will help you finally break it.

Follow Kelsey on Socials: @sassybrunettefitness

Transcript

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Hey, I'm Kelsey, and welcome to the Mama Wellness Hour, a place for moms who want to lose weight, but don't want to lose themselves, their sanity, or their life in the process. This is a space for real mom life: the highs, the lows, and the messy middle. No pressure, no perfection, just simple tools, real support, and the reminder that you are not alone in this. If you're ready to start moving forward at your pace, on your terms, I'm right here with you. Let's get into it. Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Mama Wellness Hour. In today's episode, I want to share with you all about my vacation. We went on a weeklong vacation to Cabo, and oh my gosh, it was much needed. It was a parents-only vacation. So we left the kids at home, and Brian and I had some much-needed quality time together. We went with two of our friends, and to be honest, it was a week of relaxation, little movement, a lot of food, a lot of drinks, and really just being present in those moments without worrying about what I was eating, what I was drinking, how I was moving my body, all of that stuff that I normally do when I am home in my routine. Yes, you heard that right. I didn't worry about any of that stuff while I was on vacation. I enjoyed nachos by the pool every day. I tried new foods. I had dessert after every meal because hello, it's an all-inclusive. Of course, I'm going to get dessert. We had a lot of late nights. I laid out by the pool. I think probably the most movement I did was walking up and down the beach looking for seashells and trying to find some crabs. I don't know why, I just love looking for crabs whenever we're at the beach, but I didn't feel any guilt about it at all. In years past, I would have gone into a vacation like this and I would have been panicking about the all-inclusive, about the constant availability of food, about the drinks I was going to have. And I would have lived in my head that whole week. I would have been worrying about all of the calories I was consuming. I would have been mentally calculating how much protein I was getting in. I would have been already thinking ahead to how I was going to burn that food off and get back on track when I got home. And let me just say, it felt so good and so freeing to not even give a millisecond of mental energy to any of that. I have come so far in my relationship with food, in my relationship with movement, and my relationship with weight loss as a whole, that I know a week of vacation where I don't worry about any of that stuff, the food, the movement, the water, all of that. I know that I can let that go for a week and not completely derail my progress. I can enjoy myself on vacation and not feel like I've failed or gained a bunch of weight or like I'm going to have to damage control when I get home. And that's what I really want to talk with you about today because vacation is a part of life. It's not a detour from it. You're hopefully going to have many vacations on your weight loss journey. You're going to have birthdays and anniversaries and celebrations and events and out-of-routine days. That is all a part of life and it's not a detour from it. I think a lot of times we treat these vacations and events like a diet apocalypse. Like everything just falls apart the second we step out of routine. But weight loss doesn't require us to avoid the fun, to avoid restaurants or drinks or dessert. We can enjoy those things and also move forward on our weight loss journey. Because I fully believe that it's what we do most of the time that matters. When you think about my weight loss journey as a whole, I have been on this journey for a long time now. And I know one week is not going to undo all of the work I've put in up until this point. And I know it's not going to determine the work that I am going to put in now that I am home from vacation. And when I look back on this trip, there have been so many trips in the past. Like I can still remember being in high school and going on vacation with my parents and studying my body in the mirror and struggling with the fact that I didn't feel skinny enough, that I had fat in places that I didn't want it. And those are the things that I still remember from vacation growing up. I don't want my vacations to look like that anymore. I remember going on our honeymoon and feeling physically sick with trying different foods because I had restricted myself so much going into that trip. I remember our honeymoon being so sick on the last day of our trip that I couldn't even really hang out at the pool because I was in and out of the bathroom so much. TMI, I know, but it was my reality on that trip. And I look back on all of these memories and experiences that I've had on vacation, and I don't want my life to look like that anymore. I don't want my memories of going to different places around the world to look like that anymore. And so I have really focused these past couple years on doing the work to build this healthier relationship with my weight loss journey overall. And thinking back to the week we spent in Cabo, I can see just how much that work has benefited me. Not just in my everyday routine, but really how I felt on that vacation. I enjoyed all of the foods that I wanted to without guilt, without an ounce of guilt. I didn't look at my body in the mirror and pick it apart. I felt good in my swimsuits. I felt confident in the clothes I was wearing. Like there were multiple times that I asked Brian to take a picture of myself, and I looked back at that picture, and my first thought was, man, I look good. And I know that sounds conceited, but that is what I have worked for. That is the type of vacation that I want to have, and it's the type of vacation that I want you to have. I was fully present with our friends. I enjoyed every moment. I wasn't living in my head. I wasn't worried about what I was eating or spending all of this mental energy focused on the food and the lack of movement and the guilt and the obsession and all of this. I was completely present with who and what was in front of me. And I fully believe that that's what made this vacation one that I will absolutely never forget. It made it so special and it's something that I truly walk away from and be like, I did that. I built that. I have this life now where I can step into vacation and fully enjoy it and know that that can coexist with the weight loss goals I have. I think a lot of us have been taught with weight loss that in order to succeed, we have to have perfection. Our behaviors have to be perfect in order for us to be successful with weight loss. And so when we go on vacation, we try to keep that control. We try to execute perfect behaviors. But the real skill in all of this isn't to be perfect on vacation. The real skill is coming home and calmly returning to your normal habits, not spiraling, not panicking, not overcorrecting, but just calmly stepping back into the habits that you have in your day-to-day life. We don't need to detox our bodies. We don't need to do extra cardio. We don't need to go into this severe restriction to make up for all the food that we ate on vacation. We just need to step back into the things that we have been doing normally. And so that's exactly what I have been doing this week. I have been just stepping back into the foundation of habits that carry me on a day-to-day basis that help me feel good. I have been focusing on my water intake. I got back into tracking my calories and my protein intake this week because yes, I am still working towards a weight loss goal. And so I want to make sure that I am getting back into my routine and building that awareness and that intentionality around my food to keep moving me forward towards my weight loss goal. I'm also working on sleep, a lot of sleep, rest, and self-care because our trek home was not the easiest one. It was an almost 24-hour journey home from our vacation where we got diverted to Nashville, then our flight got canceled. We ended up trying to sleep at the airport. The key word is trying there because let's be honest, sleeping in an airport seat is not comfortable at all. Then the next day was daylight savings, so we lost an hour there, and I still feel like I am catching up on that lack of sleep. So sleep and rest and recovery has been a huge focus for me this week now that we are back from vacation. And in terms of movement, to be honest, this week has just looked like walks. One, it's beautiful out here in St. Louis, and I am taking every possible minute I can outside. And I also, like I said, have just been feeling really run down. So I've just been focusing on walking and really just getting my body back into the movement habit without getting into lifts right now. I've also had some headaches that I think just come and go with the weather changes and just all of the lack of sleep and stress we had to deal with with all the travel coming back. So I've just been walking and my plan is to do a couple workouts later in the week when I hopefully catch up on the sleep that I need. But that is what I am doing to step back into my routine. Notice I didn't say that I'm going crazy in the gym every day. I didn't say that I'm eating less calories. I'm actually eating more calories than I was going into vacation because I'm, again, just getting myself regulated and back into routine. I'm not doing some crazy detox or fasting or whatever the case may be. I am just returning to my normal habits calmly and intentionally. The key that the thing that I want you to remember most here is after a week away, I didn't come back and overhaul my life. I just stepped back into the simple habits that work. And like I said earlier, that's the real skill that we need to build on our weight loss journey because that helps bring us out of that all or nothing trap that is so easy to fall into after trips like this. This is where a lot of moms sabotage themselves. It comes with this pattern of vacation indulgence. Then we come home feeling guilty, then we restrict heavily, then we can't keep up with that, so we fall off track, we overeat again, we skip workouts, then we feel guilty again, so we try to restrict heavily again. And it's just this cycle that keeps repeating. But that cycle isn't sustainable weight loss. That cycle is just perpetuating this idea that you are either all in on your weight loss or you're all out. That vacations are ruining your progress and you have to do damage control when you get back. That is not a life that you are going to be able to keep up with in the long term. The fastest way back to your progress is to calmly step back into that consistency, to return to those core habits that work that are going to help you keep that momentum moving forward. The water, the balanced meals, the movement, the sleep, and self-care that matters. That takes you out of that cycle of all in and all out and helps. That is what matters. Now I'm not gonna lie and say that my body, my weight stayed exactly the same from before vacation to after vacation. That's not my reality. And to be honest, it's normal for your body to change on vacation. It's going to feel different after a week off your routine. That doesn't mean that you ruined everything, that you gained a bunch of fat, that you're lost, that you lost all practice. It's just how your body responds to different foods, to different environments, to different things that you are doing. I know it's really easy to interpret things like bloating, the scale going up when you get home, fatigue, feeling uncomfortable in your body as signs that you ruined everything, that you gained a bunch of fat, that you lost all your progress. But those body responses are normal. When you travel, your body naturally holds on to water. You are going to feel some bloating from that. You're going to have inflammation from traveling, from flying, from sitting in the car for extended periods of time. Whether you go on vacation with your kids or not, sleep is probably going to look different. That affects how your body feels and the scale. Maybe you have different food. You probably are eating more on vacation. I ate more foods. I tried different foods that I normally don't have at home. I had more alcohol than normal. All of that, again, leads to my body holding on to water. Does that mean that I gained a bunch of weight on vacation? Absolutely not. It just means that my body is responding the way that it normally does to different environmental factors. The cool thing here is when you step back calmly into your routine, into those intentional habits that we just talked about, your body responds and it settles fairly quickly. We got back from vacation Saturday, so I started getting back into these habits on Sunday. So it's been three days of me just calmly getting back into my routine and to these habits, and my body has already let go and the scale has already gone back down. That is what happens when you just return to these habits. When you return to your when you don't panic, you don't try and overcorrect, you don't try and throw yourself into some crazy workout plan or some restrictive diet to make up for what you did or didn't do on vacation. That is what happens. Your body responds, your body responds, and it settles quickly in just a matter of a few days. As we wrap up this episode, I want to make this perfectly clear. I fully enjoyed vacation. I enjoyed every bit of food, every drink I had. Although I will say the one piece of food I did not enjoy was my husband made me try Marlin, and I am not a seafood girly, and so I definitely gagged a little bit as it went down my throat, but I tried it. And so I fully enjoyed my vacation. And did the scale go up when I got back? Absolutely. Did I have some bloating going on? Absolutely. But I still felt confident on vacation. I still rocked the outfits I brought and felt so freaking fantastic in them. I still had fun, I still had energy to do the things that I wanted to do on vacation. I felt amazing, not just in my body, but in how I was showing up for the vacation that I wanted to have. And I fully believe it's because I've done the work to build a healthier relationship with food, with movement, with weight loss, with my journey as a whole, with what I want my life to look like, with my routines. For so long, I was stuck in this mindset that weight loss had to be all-consuming, that it had to be miserable in order to work, that I had to punish myself, that I had to restrict myself from things, that weight loss took away from my life. But now I fully believe that weight loss gets to add to our life. Weight loss gets to coexist with living a full, abundant life, vacations and all. And if you take one thing away from my vacation story, I hope it's that weight loss can exist alongside a full life. One that includes the vacations, the celebrations, the birthdays, the cake, the champagne, the drink by the pool, the dessert after dinner. Weight loss gets to include all of those things. Weight loss gets to add to our life. Weight loss gets to feel good. Weight loss gets to be enjoyable. Weight loss gets to be something that we look forward to choosing. Weight loss gets to be a part of our life, not our whole life. I hope this episode was helpful for you today as we head into these spring and summer months where you might have more vacations coming up, and maybe you're already stressing a little bit about them or worrying about how you're going to lose weight with all of the events and things you have coming up. I hope you can walk away from this episode and know that you don't have to be perfectly in control all the time. That you can have a week of vacation, that you can celebrate the birthday, that you can enjoy cake on your anniversary, or have champagne, or have a drink by the pool this summer and still move forward on your weight loss goals. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having fun, enjoying food, having a drink, it doesn't disqualify you from losing weight. You can have both. You get to have both. And when you do, I promise you, this journey gets to be so much more enjoyable and so much easier to stick to in the long term. If you enjoyed this episode, I would absolutely love it if you shared it with your mom friends on social media with the moms in your circle. So I can continue to get the mama wellness hour out to all of the moms out there who are wanting to lose weight without losing themselves in the process. And if you have been a follower of the podcast, I would absolutely love if you left me a review that helps me to continue to grow the mama wellness hour and get it out to new listeners as well. I think that is all I have for you on today's episode. I will chat with you in the next one. Bye.