Every work trip used to cost me about three pounds. Not the kind that disappears by Thursday — real ones. I flew to Chicago in March at 219 and stepped on the scale four days later at 222.6. I hadn’t done anything outrageous. No all-you-can-eat anything. I just traveled the way I’d always traveled.

What I told myself before every trip was some version of “I’ll be good.” That’s not a plan. That’s a wish with a suitcase. And it always fell apart the same way: I’d land at 9:40 PM, the hotel restaurant would be closed, and my dinner would be whatever the lobby shop still had behind the glass.

Here’s the part that surprised me when I finally went back and looked at my own logs. My travel dinners weren’t the problem. Dinner on the road averaged within about 80 calories of dinner at home — I sit down, I order a steak and vegetables, I’m fine. The damage was all in the margins. Hotel breakfast buffet. The pastry tray at the 10 AM session. Airport pretzel at 4 PM because I hadn’t eaten since the buffet. Three or four hundred extra calories a day that I never made a decision about. They just happened to me.

So I stopped trying to be disciplined on the road and started removing decisions instead. One rule: I pick breakfast before I leave my house, and I eat the exact same one every morning of the trip. For me it’s three eggs and whatever meat they’ve got, skip the pastry basket, skip the juice. That’s it. I don’t stand at the buffet negotiating with myself at 7 AM in a strange city. I’ve already decided. Five mornings, same plate.

Two things go in my bag now, every time: a bag of beef jerky and a couple scoops of protein powder in a ziplock. Total cost, maybe six bucks. What they actually buy me is the 4 PM decision. If I’m not starving in an airport terminal, I don’t need willpower — there’s nothing to resist.

And I keep logging, which is the part I used to skip entirely when traveling. I’d tell myself I’d catch up when I got home. I never did — and those missing days were exactly the days I most needed to see. Now I just photograph the plate. That’s the whole reason I built ZeroToHero (zerotoherofit.com) the way I did — I needed something that worked when I was tired, in a hotel room, with no scale and no idea what was in the sauce. A photo takes four seconds. Looking up a restaurant’s menu data does not.

Last week I was in Austin for five days. Left at 208.4. Came home at 208.2. Same breakfast five mornings running. I ate barbecue on a Tuesday night and I logged it. Nothing heroic happened — I just didn’t lose ground, which for me is a completely new outcome for a week on the road.

Two honest caveats. I walked a lot more than usual on that trip, and that probably helped more than I can prove. And I wasn’t trying to lose weight in Austin. That’s the actual mindset shift: on the road, flat is a win. Trying to run a deficit while sleeping badly in a hotel and eating food I didn’t cook is how I used to end up abandoning the whole thing by day three.

I’m down from 232 to 208, and the trips used to be where I gave it all back. Turns out I didn’t need more discipline out there. I needed fewer decisions.

I’m Jason Duskin. I built ZeroToHero (zerotoherofit.com), the photo-based food logging app I use myself — so take my enthusiasm for it with that in mind.