travel

Misbehaving While on Holidays

July 8, 2018 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I travel quite a lot throughout the year. Sticking to a diet of any kind when you’re travelling can be a bit of a challenge, but it’s not impossible. It just requires a concerted effort at times and you need to simply avoid certain types of food. Of course the type of diet you’re following will have an impact on how hard (or easy) sticking to the regime is.

The diet I’ve been on for the better part of a year now is basically “low carb”, so that means in reality that I avoid:

potatoes
rice
pasta
bread
pizza
anything with sugar
sugar
sweet things of any kind (unless they’ve been made following keto style recipes)
beer

When travelling in most parts of the world it’s not that hard to navigate a menu and not go hungry. Most restaurants are happy to swap out fries for either vegetables or a salad, for example, so as long as you haven’t been dragged to a pizzeria you can get around the menu and still stick fairly closely to your diet.

I have always allowed myself alcohol, though I switched from beer to other things. So instead of drinking beer I’ve taken to gin and tonic or Moscow mules.

However for the last week or so I was on holiday in Peru. While I did try to stick to my diet initially I realised fairly quickly that it was going to be either impossible or just miserable.

Why?

Well Peruvian cuisine is all about potatoes. They pride themselves on the large variety that they have, so most dishes are served with some form of potato. So the diet kind of went out the window for most of the week. The only potential saving grace is that I walked quite a lot and also Peruvians use very good fresh ingredients, so my misbehaviour could have been a lot worse.

Peru is also home to pisco, which is a bit like grappa. The pisco sour is available in just about every single bar and restaurant and it is wonderfully decadent. It’s also carb rich!

Today I’m heading home and I know I need to go “cold turkey” pretty much immediately. I am dreading going anywhere near the scales, though I know I’ll have to weigh myself at some point in the next day or two. What worries me is that I know I’ll have put on weight over the last week or so, but I’ve no idea how much. Putting weight on is easy. Losing it again is a LOT harder!

Sticking to the Diet When Travelling

August 28, 2017 by Michele Neylon 5 Comments

I’ve tried various diets over the years. Most of them involved following a plan of some kind pretty closely. For example, the Tesco Diet, was one I stuck to for several months. It sort of worked, but it and all the others ones fell apart as soon as I hit the road for business travel. As soon as I got out of my daily routine and controlled environment I found it very hard to stick with the diet and invariably I failed.

With the ketogenic diet so far I’ve found travelling to be relatively easy.

Sure, it’s not always “simple” and you do run into issues. However it’s possible to stick to the diet pretty closely without developing a massive headache or being miserable.

The ketogenic diet boils down to avoiding carbs and you’re meant to keep the fat content in your diet high. On a daily basis when you’re at home you can control exactly what you are eating. When you’re travelling you’re at the mercy of your circumstances.

But if you’re willing to accept that there will be a few speed bumps along the way it’s doable.

For the last few days I was in Stockholm (thence the photo!).

Breakfast in the hotel was easy – they’d a good choice of cold meats, fish, cheese and eggs, including an omelette station. Lunches weren’t too hard either. Even when they were provided it was simply a matter of avoiding bread, potatoes and other carb-heavy foods. When you’re eating out you can usually choose items from the menu that don’t include carbs or have the flexibility of swapping out the carbs for something else. Don’t want potatoes? Swap them out for a salad.

I probably had a few meals over the last few days that weren’t 100% keto-friendly, but overall I kept pretty close to the diet.

What I like about the ketogenic diet is that it’s “relatively” simple – avoid carbs and you’ll manage (mostly). There were a few things that I’d view as speed bumps:

airport lounges – I used to be able to snack before getting a flight without too much difficulty, but when bread and pastries are off the menu your choices are a bit limited
airport food – again you will find yourself a bit limited in your choices, since most airports seem to specialise in carb heavy options. With a bit of hunting around you can probably get something but your choices will be limited
business meetings / conference breaks – the coffee breaks at most events usually have some food available. Unfortunately that’s nearly always snacks of some kind that are built around bread or pastries, so they’re not going to be of much use to you

The solution? I guess I’ll have to start packing snacks in my carry on luggage! Something to munch on would help, though apparently intermittent fasting isn’t the worst thing ever!

Either way so far I’ve found sticking to the ketogenic diet while travelling and eating out has been a lot easier than other diets I’ve tried in the past.

Compensating For Bad Habits

April 12, 2015 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Eating. Sleeping. Drinking. They’re all things we do, but a lot of us don’t do them properly.

Personally I am all too aware that my eating habits can be quite bad. Sure, when I’m home for a few days I’ll cook fairly healthy meals and eat plenty of salads, fruits and fresh vegetables. I’m picky about where I buy meat, so I tend to get pretty good quality meat from a small local butcher.

But I’m also aware of how much I misbehave, both when I’m travelling and when I’m either too tired or too busy to make the time to cook a proper meal.

Sleeping? I know I don’t get enough of it consistently. I can push myself to get more, but invariably I’ll slip up and go to bed way too late or have to get up way too early.

And drinking? Well that one is one that I can keep more under control. Or at least to a degree.

Sure, when I’m travelling I probably drink a little more than I would normally, but when I’m not “on the road” the most I’ll have is one or two beers in the evening and not most evenings.

There’s no simple way to “compensate” for this behaviour. It’s not like eating well on a Monday is going to magically fix the junk you ate on a Sunday ..

So what can you do?

Personally I’m not too sure, but I know that if I’m going to prepare chips or potato wedges that I’ll use my actifry with only a small bit of olive oil for taste!

Posting about my bad habits won’t fix them, but maybe it’ll make me feel a little guilty .. In any case I know I’ll be eating homemade soup for the next couple of days so I can feel a little less guilty ..

Fitbit And Travel

April 18, 2013 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

The Fitbit One shown compared to a coin

I travel quite a bit and I often end up moving through different timezones.

If you’re using a Fitbit this is important.

You need to remember to update your Fitbit to have your correct timezone. I’m not sure how well the Fibit system compensates for big timezone changes overall, but if you check your progress every day it’ll look rather odd unless you adjust the timezone. If you don’t the Fitbit will happily record that you went to bed in the middle of the day and were really active all night ..

Of course some people probably do live like that 🙂

Eating Reasonably Well While Travelling

March 25, 2012 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

I cannot avoid travelling quite a bit for work. And I need to get past my worries and concerns about what I can and cannot eat while “on the road”.

For the past 3 weeks I’ve been “out and about”. During that time I’ve been relatively careful about what I eat, but not obsessive.

The worst days are those, like last Friday, when you don’t get a proper meal all day (apart from breakfast) and end up snacking when you can.

Good days are when you get 3 good meals during the day and manage to avoid junk.

So apart from the “travel days” I’ve managed to strike a certain rhythm with respect to what I eat.

Breakfast is key. I simply have to have some kind of breakfast or I’ll be really hungry by late morning. When you’re staying in hotels there’s usually plenty of options available. The Hilton chain gives me access to their executive lounges which don’t have exactly “amazing” breakfast choices, but they usually have coffee, juice, cereal and some kind of bread.

Lunch will depend on where I am and how much time I have available. While I would normally settle for a very light lunch of soup and bread when I’m in the office, when I’m travelling that usually isn’t an option and grabbing something relatively good, but not gigantic seems to work.

Dinner of course will vary, but I did quite well over the last few weeks.

I learnt quite a bit from my trip to the US earlier in the year and since I was travelling in Costa Rica and Germany this time round the quality of food available was quite a bit higher. Good salads, simple grilled meat (without sauce) etc., made for a relatively good combination.

Unfortunately the one area that I still haven’t really found a solution to is actually tracking my intake while “on the road”. The only thing I can do, realistically, is to keep an eye on quantities, so only having one serving from a buffet instead of “going nuts” seems to work (to a point).

Alcohol, of course, probably doesn’t help. A week in Germany, for example, is basically a week of drinking lots of nice beer!

Post Florida Diet Post-Mortem

February 20, 2012 by Michele Neylon 14 Comments

Alligator in Gaylord Palms Hotel (Photo credit: blacknight)

Last week I was in Florida for a work related event. I had been worried about eating while “on the road” and unfortunately my fears were more than justified.

I weighed in this morning and I’ve gained over 1kg, which is NOT good. Whether that is due to alcohol or food, or simply the combination, is not clear. I’m not happy about it.

So what went wrong?

And what can I do to fix it next time?

It started pretty badly with the Hilton Dublin Airport. There are no salads or light options on their menu. Nothing. There are a couple of “healthy” options, but I’d have been perfectly happy with a salad. So I opted for a side salad with a steak. Total disaster. The salad was pretty “sad” looking and the dressing was horrible. It tasted of cheap vegetable oil! For a hotel like that you’d expect them to either have a proper dressing or to serve you the oil and balsamic vinegar and let you do it yourself. As I stay there a lot this is a real problem. Do I need to find somewhere else to eat before heading to the hotel or should I make myself a packed dinner?

Days when you spend up to 20 hours in airports are always going to be a bit of a mess. I avoided milky coffee and stuck to plain. Foodwise I just ate the inflight meals.

When I finally got to the Gaylord Palms hotel in Florida problems began.

Breakfast, as I’d suspected, wasn’t an issue. They had a very good breakfast buffet and you could eat plenty of healthy stuff in the morning and get a good start to the day

Unfortunately a lot of the restaurants in the hotel didn’t really “get” the concept of “healthy” at all. Pretty much none of them had anything flagged as “light” or “healthy”, which is odd, as it’s not as if Americans don’t have obesity issues ..

The first evening’s dinner was typical of the problems I encountered. I ordered a steak salad thinking I’d get salad with a bit of meat. Instead I got salads drowned in dressing, cheese and topped with some kind of battered onion thing! (I was able to move some of this to one side and avoid it)

For the rest of the week I tried to get “lighter” options whenever I could, but to be honest I found it really hard. It’s as if nobody in Florida ever eats light food..

The alcohol consumed during the week is a different matter entirely and is linked in part to the type of event I was attending. With a lot of other events I’d probably have been overdosing on coffee, but I need to keep an eye on the alcohol consumption in the future.

travel

Footer