How to Stick to Your Diet and Stay on Track to Meeting Your Goals While Traveling
Travel days and vacations are known for being notoriously difficult times to maintain your nutrition and health goals. While escaping to paradise and relaxing away from the hustle and bustle of your day-to-day, it can be almost too easy to over-indulge. But just because you took a vacation doesn’t mean your diet has to take one, too!
It is possible to make healthy food choices that do not leave you feeling restricted during your trip, but it begins with deciding on the tradeoffs you are willing to make. For example, you may want to create more goals for following your diet and fitness goals while you are on a work trip instead of a family vacation. Regardless of your individual goals, these tips can help you find healthy food on the go. Here’s how to eat healthy while traveling to stick to your goals!
Pack Your Own Snacks
One of the major struggles of eating while traveling is the availability (or lack thereof) of healthy travel food. Packing your own snacks that fall within your nutritional goals ensures you always have food available, helping you stay ahead of feeling “hangry” or overeating. For road trips, you can also meal prep for traveling by making sandwiches and similar foods to prevent convenience food stops.
If you are traveling via plane during your journey, you must also verify the snacks you plan on taking are TSA-approved. If you have an aversion to packing around a bunch of snacks, another option is to visit a local grocery store once you arrive at your destination. You can resupply while also becoming familiar with the local offerings.
Stick to Your Regular Mealtimes
As much as possible, maintain your regular mealtimes. Eating based on your normal routine is one way to eliminate uncertainties with dieting on vacation. Unfortunately, your travel schedule may not allow for easy food access. Having meal replacement bars on hand guarantees that you maintain control over your eating intervals without relying on whatever food happens to be around.
Look for Healthier Options in Unexpected Places
Convenience foods are quick, easy, and often cheap. This is not an ideal recipe for healthy foods; however, many stores are recognizing the importance of supplying healthy options for their patrons and have incorporated low-calorie snacks for road trips into their inventory. Even convenience stores and airports now offer more snack varieties that include foods like cheese plates, yogurt, and salads.
Cooking for yourself may not be feasible with your schedule, not even possible if your amenities do not include a kitchen, or potentially something you are simply uninterested in. This makes it more difficult to choose sustainable healthy meals. To compensate, you can scout ahead and locate healthier restaurants, keeping them in a pre-prepared list that gives you options.
Prioritize Protein
Protein keeps your hunger satisfied, warding off the desire to snack frequently while traveling. Choosing snacks and foods that are high in protein helps maintain a nutritional balance, even if you choose a dessert or an extra cocktail. If your snacks and meals center around proteins and are then supplemented with fruits and veggies, your appetite will be more regulated, even with any indulgences. To increase your protein content, you can easily incorporate protein shakes into even the most on-the-go schedules.
Give Yourself Some Grace
These diet tips are meant to help support your desire to maintain a more nutritionally balanced diet while traveling, but it is also important to remember that traveling will change your routine. This will make it more difficult to stick with the good habits you have formed, but that does not mean you have failed. Simply enjoy your time traveling while doing what you can, and then come back and slide back into your healthy routine.
Stock Up on Weight Loss Products from Nutmeg State Nutrition Before You Jet-Set!
Nutmeg State Nutrition has a wide variety of healthy and nutritionally balanced products for weight loss to help you meet your goals, whether at home or while traveling. Stock up before you go to stay on track to meeting your goals.