A great paradox of the artist’s life is an inclination towards hedonism (great art, music, food, wine, and other excesses) combined with the need to stay fit and look good! Throw in travel to interesting locations famed for their cuisine (just try to diet in New Orleans, y’all), long hours, late night dinners, post-rehearsal pub crawls with your castmates, patron parties, limited access to cooking and gym facilities, and you have a real challenge on your hands.
A few years ago, my husband and I cut out all processed foods, artificial colors, flavorings, and sweeteners, and went organic ; then he became vegetarian (and I lost nearly half my body weight)! We love to cook and eat, so our work is cut out for us, especially when we travel. We don’t eat fast food and rarely eat in chain restaurants, which use low quality ingredients and precook a lot of their food, adding loads of added fat, salt, and sugar. And while you can find a salad or a veggie sandwich almost anywhere, it’s a lot harder to find something tasty with substance and especially with high quality protein. We end up carrying along a supply of protein bars and homemade trail mix for emergencies.
I want to eat healthy, but it’s got to taste good. So I’ve got minimalist healthy cooking down to an art. It’s easiest, of course, when you’re housed in a business hotel or apartment with a kitchenette; but if I find myself in a regular hotel room, I have a “kitchen box” I ship to myself. You’d be amazed at what you can do with an electric skillet and a hot plate. Sometimes the hotel will give or rent a small microwave oven or refrigerator; but if those aren’t available, I buy a cheap Styrofoam cooler and keep perishables for a couple of days in ice.
Here in Idaho, where I’m singing the Marquise de Berkenfield in La fille du regiment, I’m fortunate to have a homestay where my hosts have cleared pantry and fridge space for me. They aren’t big on cooking themselves, so I try not to mess up their kitchen much and keep my home cooking plain.
I try to eat very simply most of the time, because there are so many temptations and parties. Spinach is very versatile (it can be a salad or a basis for a hot meal: top it with canned beans and a sprinkling of parmesean cheese or a couple of crumbled up soy breakfast patties). Dried cranberries and walnuts add a lot of flavor and texture to salads; a little goat cheese adds just the right amount of creaminess, and you can also spread it on toast and stud it with cranberries and slices of banana for a delicious and healthy breakfast. Hummus, whole wheat pita, and a few olives make a great lunch. Baby carrots are great for snacking or adding to the salad. And when you get sick of simple fare, it’s time to have lunch out and bring the leftovers home to dress up your spinach for the next day. Boise happens to have a plethora of great restaurants, including Bardenay’s (where they also distill their own gin), a number of Basque and Irish pubs with great happy hour menus, and a fabulous French bistro called Le Coq Rouge —which recently put on an opera night complete with an opera-themed dinner, including Bellini aperitifs, Pollo Verdi, Votre Toast (a berry-flavored palate cleanser), and Gateau du Fille de Regiment.
Keeping up a workout routine while traveling can also be a challenge. I love to run or walk, because it is so simple and you really don’t need much in the way of equipment. Last summer in Des Moines, the Women of Figaro made it a habit to run together, and we had a great time — what a wonderful way to bond, offstage!
I’m also a big fan of exercise videos. For the past 8 weeks, I’ve been doing P90X, an “extreme” home fitness program that takes very little space. It’s more fun to do it with free weights and a pull-up bar, but all you really need is a yoga mat and resistance bands. I like this program because while it is indeed quite challenging, it’s also varied, and you never get bored. On any given week I’m doing yoga, plyometrics, several different lifting routines, Kenpo, and a boot camp style core workout. The big bonus comes when a castmate is also doing P90X (we’re everywhere, y’all!) and you can compare notes and encourage each other with cheesy slogans. One of my Fille castmates is an X-er (in much better shape than me) and every day we greet each other with some silly statement from one of the videos, or some other “inspiration”. My current favorite is, “That’s not sweat. That’s just your fat cells crying!”
Also, whenever I travel, I look for opportunities to hike. In Idaho, and I’ve enjoyed trails through the foothills and Snake River Canyon, and am looking for a chance to make it up into the mountains and hit one of the ski trails. The best workouts are ones that don’t cost anything or require fancy equipment, and get you outside and exploring your temporary new home!
The trick is to realize that travel and temptation are just part of the job. You’re not on vacation (even though you may be having a lot of fun and getting to see new parts of the country). So you can’t eat like you’re on vacation —- at least not all the time — and you can’t be a couch potato, either. Eating right and working out is as important a part of my work as training and caring for my voice. I never know what my precise living situation is going to be until I get there, so flexibility and adaptability are the name of the game. But one thing I don’t have to worry about when it comes to the challenge of eating well and working out on the road — there’s always a new challenge, so it never gets boring!
