When you go on vacation, you may find that it’s extremely tempting to abandon your healthy eating habits and start eating everything in sight. Despite your best intentions to stick to a healthy eating plan, you may be lured in by the sights and scents of delicious restaurant meals, fast food, and rich, home-cooked meals prepared by well-meaning family members.
If you are planning a trip and you’re worried about how to stick to a healthy eating plan on vacation, take a look at the helpful tips below.
Healthy Eating on Vacation Tips:
Sticking to a healthy eating plan on vacation starts before you even leave home. If you are traveling by car, bus, or train, pack a small, portable cooler with quick-and-easy healthy snacks like fresh fruit, sliced raw vegetables, single-serving bags of nuts, and hard-boiled eggs. Keep a small ice-pack in the cooler to keep the snacks cool. Also add a couple of small bottles of water. If you are traveling by plane, taking food with you may not be possible. In that case, be sure to eat a healthy, filling meal before you leave for the airport.
If you stay in a hotel, don’t touch the mini-bar. It’s usually packed with high-calorie, expensive foods and beverages you don’t need. Instead, take a quick trip to a nearby supermarket and purchase an inexpensive foam cooler, healthy snacks, and a bag of ice (unless your suite has a small refrigerator). If a cooler and ice is not available, stick with foods that don’t need to be refrigerated but will last for a few days, like apples, bananas, oranges, pears, peaches, whole grain cereals, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, nuts, seeds, and whole grain crackers.
Luckily, these days many restaurants offer healthier options than the typical fattening, fried foods. In many places you can request vegetarian, low-fat, low-carb, or other diet-friendly meals and snacks. Don’t be afraid to ask for minor modifications to your meal, such as leaving out the oil, substituting steamed vegetables for french fries, or packing half of your meal into a take-out container before you even start eating.
If you have a lot of busy activities planned for your vacation, you may find it hard to eat three balanced meals a day, and if that’s the case, try to break it down into six smaller meals/snacks instead. Try to avoid skipping meals because you’ll be much more likely to go overboard at your next meal. If at all possible, avoid eating heavy meals in the evening. If you’re going to indulge a little bit, do it earlier in the day while you are still active and will burn more calories.
It may sound challenging at first, but healthy eating on vacation is not really that hard. You can easily stick to your healthy eating plan while enjoying your vacation at the same time.
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