How Do I Eat Healthy and Paleo While Traveling
I’ve been Paleo for a very long time. Around 9 years at the time I’m writing this.
And at first, it was very hard for me. But after 3-4 years, it just got easier and easier.
But one thing never seems to get easier.
Traveling is the Hardest Part of Staying Healthy
I love traveling.
In fact, Louise and I often live on the road, without a permanent home. So you can imagine that we travel a lot and face this problem all the time. Check out Louise’s posts of her Top 10 Paleo Snacks For Air Travel here.
It’s also the most popular question I get asked, along with how to eat out well.
How to Stay Healthy and Paleo While Traveling
The most crucial thing you can do is to pack food that you can take to keep you full and not tempted to eat junk.
This may vary from person to person, so I’m going to tell you what we do:
1. Intermittent Fasting. This doesn’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t always work for me, particularly if I have to travel without enough sleep. But if I’m well rested and traveling, then I can often fast for 18-24 hours without getting hungry at all. If you can swing it, this is often the way to go.
2. When on vacation, mostly concentrate on avoiding the worst foods. You often need to eat out on vacation, so my advice is to avoid wheat and avoid processed sugars, if you do nothing else. Other grains, legumes, and even dairy for most people just aren’t as problematic, and although seed oils are terrible, it’s almost impossible to avoid them when you’re eating out.
If you do nothing else, avoid wheat and processed sugar, and you’ll find that you feel better than you otherwise would and that you’ll be able to get back on track faster.
3. For traveling, we pack nuts, fruits, jerky, and deli meats. These are things we don’t actually eat very regularly when we’re home, but they’re all reasonably filling and easy to take with you (we eat the deli meats within the first 5-7 hours of traveling before they start going bad).
Jerky is perhaps the best, but don’t just plan on buying it at the airport, as it’s usually ridiculously expensive.
Louise wrote a great post listing her top 10 air travel Paleo snacks (check it out here).
4. Go Easy on Yourself. I was really hard on myself for a long time when I ate badly while traveling or on vacation. That’s a bad idea, because it makes us feel even worse, and then we tend to go on a spiral downward.
Even if you have a bad day or 2 while traveling, it’s not the end of the world, and if you take it easy on yourself, it’s much easier to get back to 100% Paleo the next day. Mindset is as important as anything else, but don’t take it as an excuse just to eat crap the whole time.
In the end, traveling is hard, because you don’t have healthy food as readily available. A little planning goes a long way, and it’s important to be realistic about how hungry you’ll be and whether or not you’ll be able to resist all the junk.
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