Joe Mullins of Xenia, Ohio, is a radio broadcaster and banjo player who travels around the country playing bluegrass music with his band, the Radio Ramblers. He turned 49 years old on Monday. When I told him about the Lake Placid Diet and my weight-loss journey, I felt as though I had stumbled upon someone who knows exactly what I’m going through.

“I climbed the same mountain a few years ago,” Mullins said. “I lost over 80 pounds from the summer of 2009 until Christmas of 2010, and I’ve kept most of it off. I’ve got to be diligent about it.”

Mullins and the Radio Ramblers travel on a tour bus, and that gives them control over some of their food consumption.

“So I’m able to keep fresh fruits and low-fat yogurt and the kind of peanut butter I like and all the healthy snacks I can surround myself with. I can keep it there,” Mullins said. “They treated us great backstage, and there’s a variety of foods. There’s light or heavy, whichever one you want. I’ve learned how to maintain, how to eat on the road. I keep the right kind of high-fiber, low-sugar cereal and skim milk and all that kind of stuff on our tour bus.”

Mullins has found more healthy food options on the road than in the past, whether it’s fast food, fine dining or airports.

“But planning ahead helps a bunch,” he said. “Don’t get stuck where there’s nothing but pizza and cheeseburgers. … And I’ve even learned how to enjoy pizza. Just get thin crust, all veggie, and I’m a happy man.”

Sometimes the band will phone ahead to the next town and order pizza.

“Then again, you play a community center like we did last night (in Lowville), and they had a kitchen set up there as a concession area and three or four cool ladies in there who were making homemade pies all night,” Mullins said. “We left there with about 10 slices of homemade pie and about eight big homemade sweet rolls for breakfast this morning. I didn’t indulge, but everybody else has been into it two or three times.”

Mullins admits that he’s not good at sticking to an exercise plan.

“But when you have time to get away from the bus and away from the gig and take a nice walk, it helps out,” Mullins said.

For Mike Terry, who plays mandolin as a Radio Rambler, healthy eating isn’t high on his priority list while on the road.

“I usually like the pizza, doughnuts and Doritos,” Terry said. “That’s the stuff I eat, and some of the other guys, too, but Joe, he stuck with it. He’s done real good on that. But it’s hard when you’re out on the road because you’re always by fast food places and you’re always wanting to stop and rest a little bit and get something to eat.”

Sam Bush — a mandolin player and the “king of newgrass” — doesn’t have a weight problem, but he’s found that being healthy improves the way he makes music. He’s lost 11 pounds in the past four months and feels much better right now. Whether it’s at a gym at home in Nashville or in the workout room at a hotel on the road, he finds the time for exercise.

“Today I could have either gone to a movie or worked out, so I worked out,” Bush said. “I changed my strings and worked out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fanatic about working out, but my wife and I have a trainer, and I’m just trying to keep my core muscles where I stand up straighter. I’ll never be a body builder, but when I keep a certain muscle tone, it helps my arms physically play better.”

As far as eating, Bush only eats when he’s hungry.

“Sometimes I’ve gone too long that day and my blood sugar is low,” Bush said. “I eat a lot of vegetables when I have a choice, vegetables, brown rice and fish. I love fish, and I love sushi. When we’re actually playing that day, red meat just seems to slow me down. I enjoy a good steak as much as anyone, but that doesn’t really work before we play.”

Bush also finds that getting enough sleep is important.

As the Gibson Brothers band recently found out, getting enough rest is also a challenge on the road.

“Sometimes you’re so tired,” said Eric Gibson, who turned 44 years old on Oct. 23. “The last two nights, we’ve had to get up at 4 in the morning to catch flights. I did sit-ups in my room, and I grabbed a muffin at the airport, which is not healthy, and grabbed a quick sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way here because you’re on the run.”

Over the past two years, the Gibson Brothers musicians have made a conscious effort to eat more healthy food and exercise.

“It’s hard on the road,” Eric said. “I’m trying; I really am. I’m trying to eat healthy because I want to do this the rest of my life. I want to be a healthy, old man playing bluegrass.”

The snacks are healthier: almonds, bananas and KIND Bars. And the Gibson Brothers try to find restaurants that serve healthy food, such as the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday.

“We might have a big breakfast, and that’s our meal for the day, have something light for dinner and maybe not have a lunch,” Eric said.

Gibson Brothers fiddler Clayton Campbell said he eats like a bird on the road.

“I don’t eat all that much,” Campbell said. “A banana for breakfast sometimes and something light because, for me, I don’t want to be bogged down by eating a lot and getting into that food coma where you don’t want to move. Every time I do that, I don’t feel like doing anything, and you have to do something. You have to be on the go.”

On their contract, the Gibson Brothers ask for a case of water, fruit and vegetable trays, even though there is always a variety of food available. For example, I remember seeing Hershey candy bars in their Bluegrass Jam dressing room.

“Yesterday, we were so starving, we landed on the plane and said, ‘Let’s find something,'” Eric said. “And we ate ribs.”

“I had a banana,” Campbell said. “I just wasn’t hungry.”

“Well, we were starving,” Eric said. “We had ribs and chicken. We didn’t have dessert or anything, and we didn’t have carbs or anything, but we still ate a lot. And I was so tired. I was in, like he said, a food coma for the first set last night. By the second set, I came alive. And they fed us a perch dinner before we played.”

For Mike Barber, who’s been the bass player for the Gibson Brothers since 1993, it’s sometimes more important to get any kind of sustenance in your body to keep going because a lot of times they don’t get enough sleep.

“When I’m at home, it’s salads, vegetables, nice slow-cooked meals,” Barber said. “I’m home half the year, so half my eating habits are really good. On the road, sometimes we get nice places, but there’s a lot of Wendy’s, a lot of McDonald’s and doughnuts.”

Leigh Gibson, who turned 43 on Oct. 11, has made an extra effort to eat healthier, losing about 35 pounds this year.

“Leigh’s done really great,” Eric said. “He’s been very disciplined in his diet. I’m not as disciplined as my brother has been. When I’m home, I walk every day, and I lift weights three times a week, but on the road it’s harder. It’s easy to make excuses.”

Leigh’s success has mainly been achieved by cutting carbohydrates.

“I haven’t always been healthy on the road,” Leigh said. “I’m more healthy than I was. I just tend to seek out (healthier options). … There are some festivals where I know it’s just going to be fried dough and all the things that you just want to go grab. It’s not like eating a meal. If you get a bear claw, it’s not like you’re sitting there just having a bite. You just throw that thing down.”

Leigh stays away from fried food. A lot of times, he’ll pack his own food on the road. Sometimes he’ll find steamed clams at festivals, and when he looks hard enough, he discovers raw vegetables are available.

“They were doing deep-fried broccoli at some vendor,” Leigh said. “I asked, ‘Can I just have that broccoli? Can I buy that without deep frying it?’ He said, ‘No one’s ever asked that, but sure!’ It was really funny. I was sitting there eating raw broccoli and talking with somebody, and a couple other people said, ‘Where’d you get that?’ I said, ‘Right over there.’ The guy said, ‘I’ve got to charge what I would charge for breading it.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s fine.'”

Gibson Brothers mandolin player Jesse Brock didn’t eat much backstage at the Bluegrass Jam.

“But they had great salads back there,” Brock said.

When Del McCoury and his band — including sons Ronnie and Rob — arrived in Lake Placid, they hadn’t had a chance to eat anything. They arrived a couple hours before performing on stage at 7 p.m.

“It’s tough because we’re eating late,” Ronnie said. “We didn’t eat at dinner time because we had to be here and get going. If you eat then, before you play, you get into a food coma.”

After the 90-minute performance, they suspended media interviews until they could get something to eat. And the food for musicians backstage was plentiful: salads, sandwiches, baked goods such as brownies, etc.

“That lasagna was awful good a while ago,” Del said after dinner, adding that he can’t eat a full meal prior to a performance.

“Salad is probably the easiest thing before you go on,” Del said. “For me, if I’m going to sing, I won’t eat that much most of the time.”

“If we’re starving and we eat right before we play, nobody thinks right,” Ronnie added. “Your thinker’s gone.”

“It shuts you down,” Rob said.

“It does. It just slows you down,” Del added.

“Dad will say, ‘I can’t breathe to sing,'” Ronnie said.

Ronnie on mandolin and Rob on banjo have been touring with their father for the past 30 years. They are now in their 40s.

“In your 20s, you don’t think about anything like that,” Ronnie said. “And part of your 30s you don’t. But you get a certain age, you start thinking.”

“We did a tour in Europe for 30 days when he was still in high school,” Del said.

“I was 16 then, but I never ate any food but my mom’s,” Ronnie said.

“And Rob went to Japan,” Del said.

“It was my first-ever season,” Rob said. “I was like brother here. I was used to Mom’s cooking, and I got out there and I thought, ‘Oh my God. I can’t eat any of this.’ But I figured out, if it looked really good, I probably wasn’t going to like it. If it didn’t look good, it tasted better.”

Del said it’s hard to stay healthy on the road, but the key is to stay active.

“Dad is 75 and is very healthy,” Ronnie said. “He’s taking care of himself. He and my mother both have done that probably since their late 30s. They started really getting into it. They take a lot of vitamins, a lot of supplements.”

“She walks every night on a treadmill,” Del said about his wife. “I mean, she goes. I can’t keep up with her on that thing. But I can’t stand to walk right here and never get anywhere. I’ve got to go where I can go around and around, you know, and I do that at home. I have a place where I can walk on my property way out there in the back without getting on the road.”

“They’re good role models for us,” Ronnie said about his parents. “We know that we have to take care of ourselves.”