I lost three pounds while I was on my Family Tree tour. That’s roughly a pound a week, and, on one hand, this is great news. I’m thrilled to have those pounds off before the summer. On the other hand, they were lost the hard way. Don’t believe me? Consider the following.

I visited twelve cities in twelve days, with an added day each week in transit. Often it’s the “in transit” part that makes eating difficult. When you’re picked up at 4:30 am for a dawn flight, can you really think about having breakfast prior to leaving? So you get to the airport, where there’s nothing remotely appetizing available, and once on the airplane, the offering is a beverage. I often have a stick of string cheese or a tiny box of raisins in my carry-on, so that was usually breakfast. Not many calories there.

Once I land, things aren’t much better. I usually hit the ground running, with a media escort driving me either to the local tv station for an interview or to a lineup of local bookstores, one after the other, to sign stock. A good media escort will know of a spot where we can stop for a quick lunch, but not all do that, and “quick” is definitely the word.

In most instances during this tour, we got lunch at two in the afternoon, which was too late to bother with dinner prior to the evening event. In some instances, I had a quick something from room service when I got back to my hotel. In other instances, I just went straight to bed.

Lest you’re feeling sorry for me, please don’t. There was one hotel in Philadelphia that had a little dish filled with six small candies and three humongous chocolate-dipped strawberries; I scarfed down every last one. Likewise the lunch I had of Southern fried chicken and stone-ground cheddar grits at the Horseradish Grill in Atlanta; I ate half for lunch and finished the rest in my hotel room much later that night. And then, of course, there was the night in Nashville when, famished, I ordered a room service hamburger from the restaurant downstairs. The hamburger was pure chuck and the bun dripped with more grease than I usually eat in a week, but I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life!

Getting back to weight loss, exercise helped – and I’m not talking about using the workout room in a hotel. I’m talking about great, long, double-time hikes through airports to catch planes that seemed always to be at the farthest gate in the concourse. But hey, I’m not complaining. I ate that chocolate, those grits, and that chuck, and still lost weight.

Now to keep it off.