Strategies for Healthy Eating While Traveling

With the holidays rapidly approaching, travel is inevitable for many of us. And with travel we often feel stressed, out of our routines, and surrounded by a lack of healthy options.  There is certainly something to be said for going with the flow while on vacation or even traveling for work, but we also want to feel great. Who wants to be on vacation or be working out of town while simultaneously feeling like crap?  I sure don’t, and I don’t know many people who do.  The foundation for continuing our healthy habits essentially comes down to focusing on our “why” behind why we do what we do. For me, I want to maintain my healthy habits (for the most part) so that I’m able to show up fully emotionally and physically with my family and friends and to be able to partake in physical adventures. For those who travel for work, your “why” may be so you’re able to show up with your best performance and contribution, or perhaps it’s maintaining a stable foundation of feeling well while you’re out of your routine. Whatever our reasons, we need to become clear on them.

Once our foundations have been laid through becoming clear on why we want to maintain healthy habits, we can implement more tactical strategies.

1.     Do Your Research – Unless you’re traveling out of the country and you’ll really be immersing yourself in a new culture (which I fully support and abide by), then I highly recommend doing some research on healthy options near the location you’ll be staying or working.  I believe in leaving room for spontaneity and new experiences, including food, but also be prepared with healthy options.  I’m a huge fan of Whole Foods for prepared foods and hot bar items, so that’s typically the first place I look for. As a foodie, I also love trying unique places I can’t find anywhere else, so I will look at those second.  Some cities and town are more focused on healthy options than others, so the goal here is to simply do our best, not to be perfect.  Other great choices are chain restaurants with customizable options, like Chipotle. If the only reasonably close options are fast food restaurants, then you’ll know in advance that you may need to pack more snacks.

2.     All About the Snacks – before I leave on any trip, especially those on which I know healthy options won’t be readily available (i.e. small or remote towns, road trips), I make a run to the store and stock up on snacks I know will make me feel great, or at the very least won’t make me feel as awful as fast food will. Most snack items tend to be laden with sugar and fat while low on protein, and these don’t make me feel great in excess. Therefore, I focus on options with more protein with a few of the carb/fat laden choices mixed in.

• Some of my favorites protein options include beef or turkey jerky, Tanka buffalo bites, and deli meat (if there is access to refrigeration)
• Other snacks typically include larabars, RX bars, Justin's nut butter packets, and fruit

3.     Structure Most of Your Meals – As I mentioned in point number one, I fully support being spontaneous, especially if the location, culture, or food is unique or special. However, using that as a reason to constantly eat things that will make us feel terrible doesn’t do us any favors. Especially if we’re traveling for an extended period of time. So, when eating out at restaurants, structure most of your meals similarly to how you do when you’re at home. For me, that means a serving of protein (usually meat), a vegetable, a starch, and I usually get my fat through the cooking oils and/or meat. This is especially true to restaurant meals, as then tend to be heavy handed with oils. There may not be options on the menu that are structured in this way, so asking for modifications will be required in that case. Creating structure around most of your meals (i.e. discipline) will actually create more freedom for you to make less healthy choices sporadically. Discipline equals freedom.

4.     Don’t Strive for Perfection – I can’t provide a detailed plan of eating for anyone, as that goes against what I believe is a healthy (physically and emotionally) and sustainable approach.  And I hope you’re not looking for one. Just as striving for “perfect eating,” back home will backfire, it also will while traveling. If anything, you need to give yourself even more leeway while on the road, not less.

Traveling isn’t always an enjoyable activity, usually when it’s being forced upon us for work (or perhaps family?), but we can always make the best of any situation. There’s no need to stress about eating perfectly or working out every day, but I do want you to put your well-being first. If your energy or mood start to tank, your sleep quality is declining, or you’re experiencing any other form of feeling unwell, then audit your food choices and see where you can make small improvements. Because it’s worth a little bit of extra effort to feel our best.

How to Navigate the Holidays without Stressing About Your Body

The holidays are one of my favorite times of the year. I’m able to see my extended and immediate family who I don’t see often, and everyone is typically in a relaxed and jovial mood.  To me, this season is about quality time (my love language, if you’re familiar with the quiz) with some of my favorite humans, but it wasn’t always that way. I formerly used my Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s holiday breaks as opportunities to eat and drink with abandon. That’s just what you do, right?!  This would leave me with intense anxiety and guilt throughout the entire season, in addition to the months following.

Understandably, the holidays can be a major source of stress for some of us. And if we haven’t developed healthy coping mechanisms, then eating and drinking to excess might alleviate this discomfort temporarily, only to leave us worse off once the season is over by feeling physically and emotionally unwell. Whatever our reason for going off the rails over the holidays (i.e. family drama, finances, relationships, old habits) it’s a futile attempt at solving the root cause and it never results in a positive or fulfilling ending.  Why do we continue to do it, then?

In my experience, it boils down to a few things:

1.     We aren’t aware of an alternative: If we’ve only ever navigated the holidays by going overboard the entire time and subsequently beating ourselves up, and everyone around us acts similarly, then chances are that we haven’t considered an alternative. When we’re surrounded by people who think and act alike, it’s much more difficult to be aware of other options, let alone choose a different path. Consider this your notification that there is, in fact, an alternative.

2.     We don’t know how to navigate the pushback and/or negativity from our family and friends: We may receive resistance from our loved ones (or the random tag-along we don’t know) if we’re opting for more healthy choices (i.e. the popular, “come on, live a little!”), and it can often feel easier to simply succumb to the pressure than stand firm in doing what’s best for us. I remember feeling insecure and overwhelmed about the comments I would receive because I didn’t partake in eating all of my dessert during on Thanksgiving, so much so that I would eat it just to shut everyone up.  Once I learned how to use my words and communicate directly, I started to enjoy a few bites (the amount I really wanted that wouldn’t make me feel awful afterwards) and relayed that I just didn’t want the whole damn pie.  I actually presented my perspective in a much politer tone (**hostility doesn’t usually work here), and that was the end of it. The initial resistance wears off after a few interactions once said pushers realize I’m going to do what I want in the end anyway. So stand firm in your decision!

3.     We approach each party/dinner with an “all-or-nothing” mentality: if we expect to arrive at Thanksgiving or a holiday party and not partake in any booze, dessert, stuffing, (insert favorite unhealthy food here), we’re kidding ourselves. And we’re also setting ourselves up for failure. The idea is to participate and enjoy our favorite foods without going overboard. I recommend choosing a few of your less-than-ideal favorites before you or the guests arrive and choosing to forgo the rest. For me, I prefer to have wine, small servings of the savory and calorie dense foods (i.e. stuffing and green bean casserole), and a small serving of the dessert while filling up on protein and veggies. This means I forgo the bread, most of the appetizers, and huge servings of dessert. Using this approach, I don’t feel deprived at all, but I also don’t feel like shit.

4.     We simply don’t have enough practice in implementing moderation, so we let one perceived misstep ruin our long-term goals: This is a huge one for most people, typically as a result of not utilizing the awareness and strategies described in step three. Or simply not enough practice with either of these. It took me MANY parties and holiday seasons to nail down a consistent practice with moderation, and I had several missteps along the way.  However, I never used one meal of feeling overly full or one day of going off the rails as an excuse to throw my well-being and practice of awareness out the window. We can make the decision to take a better approach at any moment, and beating ourselves up does nothing. Literally nothing.

For some, taking a moderate approach to eating and drinking throughout the holidays is boring and uneventful. To me, this comes down to what one values throughout the season. If someone uses it as an opportunity to indulge in excess, materially or with food/booze, then this entire concept will prove unappealing. However, if one wants to be able to be fully present with their family and friends throughout the next two months without stressing about gaining weight or feeling terrible, I highly recommend considering a middle of the road approach. Moderation isn’t sexy, but it works.

It's Never About the Food

Me and my travel buddy best friend in thailand in 2014

We all have a different story that brought us to a negative and unhealthy relationship with food, exercise, or body image, and uncovering the roots of where these attitudes are born is KEY in making a shift.  My relationship with food, exercise, and my body has changed in direct congruence with perceived amount of control I had over my life, my happiness, and how authentically I was living at the time. This didn’t become clear to me until I reflected on the times when I naturally ceased to obsess about food and exercise and treated my body with a new level of respect and care. To explain how I arrived at this conclusion, I'll walk you through my evolution.

As a teenager, controlling my food intake and exercise regimen provided me with a sense of control.  I was insecure and overwhelmed, so obsessing about my appearance, food, and exercise was my outlet.  In college, I again turned to obsessive behaviors about food and exercise because I felt a huge lack of control and balance in my life, and I didn’t feel as though the extreme nature of my drinking was making me happy (this didn’t stop me, however, so it stayed with me through the duration of college).  During the first few months post-college, when I was studying for my CPA exam at home in Albuquerque, NM, it was the first time I implemented a daily meditation practice and really focused on my personal development. Naturally, my eating habit regulated. I never overate, only ate when hungry, and I focused on movement over exercise.   When I returned to Denver, my partying lifestyle resurfaced, and I once again used controlling food and exercise as a way to try to find balance.

When I quit my first corporate job in public accounting and decided to backpack with girlfriends in Southeast Asia for several months, it was the first time I took a step towards creating the life that I wanted. My inclination to control my food and have a strict exercise regimen melted away just as it had when I was living at home after college.  When I returned home, I reflected on how my relationship with food and exercise had ebbed and flowed throughout my life at that point, and I was searching for the common threads.  It became clear that obsessing about food and exercise was both a coping and control mechanism, and I turned to unhealthy behaviors during times when I wasn’t living an authentic or balanced life.  Presently, I can sense when something is out of alignment in my life, because my mind will return to those negative and unhealthy thought patterns.  It’s a crystal-clear sign that I need to do some internal work when this happens.

Our relationships with food, exercise, and body image are often a reflection of misalignment within.  If we’re not living a life that is authentic to us and are searching for happiness outside of ourselves, we will rely on a form of escapism.  For me and so many women, this is an obsession with food and exercise, but it can manifest as overeating, binge watching TV frequently, excessive drinking, drugs, dependency on others, etc.  When we feel the desire to reach for these, it’s an opportunity, a calling even, to uncover what is truly making us unhappy.  Once we determine what that is, we usually have two options: change our actions/situation or change our attitude/perception.  For example, when I realized I was miserable in my public accounting job, I wasn’t able to leave right away, but I decided to start saving money and made a plan to quit and travel internationally by the end of the year.  And in the meantime, I enjoyed the relationships I developed at work and continued to put my best foot forward. I made a plan to change my situation and actively monitored my attitude at the same time.

Our negative relationships with food, exercise, and body image can be great teachers if we let them, but we have to be willing to take responsibility for our situation and put in the hard work.  Looking within to identify the root cause isn’t always easy, but it is SO worth it. We can’t solve our internal struggles with external solutions.  So, where do we begin if we’re not quite sure where these thoughts and feelings are coming from?

1.     Journal.

Start by asking yourself questions related to your thoughts patterns and habits. If you’re struggling with body image, what are you hoping to gain when you obtain the “perfect body”? Is it admiration and approval from others? If you have an obsessive relationship with food, in what situations do you feel most tempted to restrict or obsess about your food intake and what are the related emotions? If you struggle with overeating, excessive drinking, or always reaching for foods that are terrible for you, what feelings are you running from or trying to solve by reaching for food, excessive booze, overeating, binging, etc.? If you tend to over-exercise, are you using this as a coping mechanism for feelings you’re avoiding, even when you know it’s just harming your body more? Or are you using it as a control mechanism?

2.     Witness Without Judgment.

Allow the answers to these questions be a stream of consciousness and see what comes up **without judgment***. This part is extremely important!  I remember coming face to face with feelings I had been suppressing for a long time, and it was overwhelming in the beginning. This is a constant practice for me when I uncover subconscious feelings, and I find it really comforting to know that this is just a normal part of any healing process.  But we need to continue to call this shit out, as uncomfortable as it may be.

3.     Consciously Choose New Thought Patterns and Behaviors.

Now that we have identified the feelings, thoughts, and/or situations that are manifesting as poor body image or negative relationships with food or exercise, we need to decide what actions or changes to our thoughts we can make to remedy the root cause. For example, if I have determined that I don’t like my body because I’m worried about not being good enough in the eyes of other people, then I will list out all of the qualities about myself that I like that have nothing to do with my appearance.  Celebrate these! I will also list out the qualities of myself that I’m not particularly fond of (still, nothing to do with appearance) and select one to work on. I HIGHLY recommend you choose one action or thought pattern to work on at a time, as this exercise can quickly become overwhelming and you may be tempted to throw in the towel before you really begin.

It’s also tempting to use the results of this exercise as a reason to berate yourself even more, and I’ve been there. However, every single one of us has things we need to work on to better ourselves, and I don’t believe this process ever ends. So, doing this work from a forgiving and loving place makes the process infinitely more enjoyable.

What does this look like in practice? When I was traveling in Asia, I really had to come to terms with my internal struggles and how they were manifesting through issues with my body.  I journaled my ass off and realized that I didn’t have healthy emotional boundaries with many (if any) people in my life (a root cause).  This lack of boundaries created emotional chaos for me and I felt like I always had to prove my worth in relationships. As a result, I was trying to control everything about my diet and exercise routine to allow for some form of consistency in my life, and I also thought I would finally feel worthy if I looked perfect. An internal struggle I was trying to solve with external means. I decided to read as much as I could get my hands on about creating healthy boundaries (this article was a huge help), and I slowly started creating boundaries with people in my life. It was uncomfortable at first, to be sure, but I started to feel so much more secure in my relationship with myself, and therefore others, as a result.  This was just one piece of the puzzle I needed to work on at the time, but I noticed an immediate shift in my need to control my food and exercise.

Realizing our struggles with food, exercise, and how we view our bodies don't actually have anything to do with our bodies is simultaneously terrifying and liberating. We cling so tightly to our thought and behavioral patterns that the idea of letting them go can be really uncomfortable. However, there is also great freedom in realizing that we have the power to change these relationships and our reality by turning our attention inward and doing the work.  A friend once told me, as we discussed how overwhelmed we were by everything we needed to work on within ourselves, "Doing work on ourselves is the some of the most challenging work in life but also the most important and rewarding." I realize I'm only 28, but so far I agree. And I certainly believe this to be true when it comes to healing our relationships with food and our bodies.

My Journey Thus Far

I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico with two brothers and one sister, all of us born within four years, and our wonderfully supportive parents (and crazy – having us that closely together was a bold move).  Upon graduating high school, I went to the University of Colorado at Boulder and moved to Denver shortly thereafter, where I have been ever since (save for a six-month period in which I traveled throughout Southeast Asia and subsequently moved in my with parents after I returned broke).

My journey with nutrition, fitness, and overall body image started in high school with what I’m sure was meant as an innocent comment regarding the fact that I consistently went back for a second helping of food like my older brother.  Mind you, I was not overweight by any means, but I had put on a few pounds once puberty came a-knocking.  I adopted a low-carb lifestyle that was all the rage at that point, in addition to engaging in high intensity exercise for 30-60 minutes per day.  Not surprisingly, I lost weight quickly.  This was highly motivating for the first few months, but it quickly turned into an obsession and my health started to deteriorate.  Within six months, I lost my period, the palms of my hands started to peel, my mood was TERRIBLE, and I had difficultly focusing on anything else. My family remembers this time in my life pretty vividly simply because of my stellar mood.

When I moved away for college, I was surrounded by binge drinking, late night eating, eating junk food when hungover, and I participated in all of it!  My weekends were filled with partying to excess, and my weekdays were spent swinging the pendulum to the other end of the spectrum in an attempt to control my weight.  I became frustrated when my weight crept up, despite my obsessively controlled behavior during the week, and my weight ebbed and flowed throughout college as a result.  When I returned from Italy after studying abroad during college, I was at my heaviest.  I don’t regret any part of this time in my life, and I actually wish I had given myself permission to fully enjoy it without all of the internal judgment.  It taught me what life is like when living in extremes, and it highlighted the fact that I need a balanced lifestyle to be happy in the long run.

Since I graduated college, my weight has changed in direct congruence with my lifestyle, priorities, and my internal state (i.e. happiness).  When I was studying for my CPA exam full-time while living with my parents after college, partying was essentially non-existent, and yoga and meditation became staples in my routine.  As a result, my eating habits stabilized, I made my emotional and physical well-being a top priority, and I gradually lost the extra weight I had gained.  When I moved to Denver to start my career in public accounting a few months later, the partying crept back in, my weight increased as a result, and my obsessively controlling behavior with food and exercise returned.  This cycle repeated itself several times throughout my young adult life until I finally had enough with the extremes.  I was utterly exhausted, and I decided that I needed to make a permanent change for myself in order to become the woman I wanted to be with the life I wanted to create for myself.

This need for a complete lifestyle change led me to quitting my corporate job at the end of 2013 and traveling throughout Southeast Asia for three months with a few girlfriends I managed to convince to come with me.  That trip was life-changing for all four of us, and I struggled throughout several parts of the journey.  I was placed in an environment completely outside of my comfort zone without any responsibilities to keep my mind occupied throughout the day, so I was forced to come face to face with the thoughts in my head and the dissonance between who I was and who I wanted to be.  I could no longer avoid the layers of myself I had assumed over the years (i.e. gossiping and judgment of others, lack of boundaries, insecurities about my body, non-existent communication skills, that I was on a career track I hated, my victim mentality, etc.).  I made a promise to myself on that trip: I will always continue to work on myself and will grow into the woman I want to be.  At that moment, I failed to realize that this will be a lifelong endeavor, but it was the first step in changing my life from the inside out.

For the last three years, I have made changes to almost every area of my life, including my career, how I choose to spend my time, relationships, and most importantly, my thoughts and my reactions to them.  Meditation laid the foundation for identifying thoughts and patterns that weren’t serving me, and I then learned how to choose a different narrative.  I truly believe awareness is the magic sauce to making lasting change, and it's a practice that is cultivated and implemented daily.  That's the goal anyway!

As I have worked on my thoughts and my development as a person, my perspective and attitude about my body has changed accordingly.  I no longer define myself by my appearance (although I still have days/moments when my mind goes there→ enter the tools of awareness and meditation), and I continue to learn to love my body where it is right now while still having goals (if I do at the time). While awareness and self-acceptance are the cornerstone of a healthy relationship with food, fitness, and our bodies, I have learned actionable tools that allow myself and others to live a healthy and obsession-free life.

It has been a long road to arrive at where I am today, and my goal is to help women find their freedom with food, exercise, and lifestyle in a way that is authentic and sustainable for them.  There is no one-size-fits-all program, and the notion that there is one is a prevailing reason we all find ourselves in an obsessive and miserable mindset, feeling as though we’re running in place. This is a life-long journey that will continue to evolve, and this evolution will also look different for each person.  There are highs and lows throughout this process, but it’s SO worth the effort.  As a result of my experiences and what I continue to learn daily, I sincerely hope to contribute to your empowered approach to creating your life of freedom.