How To Stay Healthy When Traveling Abroad

Eating healthy abroad is important, especially if you’ve worked hard in the gym all winter and time has now come to show off your dedication. To eat healthy while backpacking, while traveling for work, or simply vacating abroad is a challenging aspiration. In this blog, I will shed light on 3 simple yet super effective travel wellness tips to utilise for maintaining healthy eating habits on vacation.

Why Not To Eat On a Plane

Due to its efficiency and speed, the most common method for traveling in our era has become flying. It has also become the normality, especially on longer flights, to indulge in food prepared by the flight carrier. While fine dining at an altitude of 40,000 feet may be a necessity to kill both hunger and boredom, it may be worthwhile to think of alternatives. Despite being far from fresh, lacking quality ingredients, and being subjected to unregulated sanitary conditions, airplane meals are the opposite of nutritious even if the meal is as innocent as chicken, rice, and broccoli!

Airplane food problems are not brought to light enough. An average meal onboard a plane is around 1500 calories (that’s allot) as foods are pumped with fats, sugars, and adhesives. So why you ask? It is scientifically proven that our taste/smell mechanisms are not as effective while flying resulting from factors such as cabin pressure and turbine noise. To combat the passengers lacking judgment of taste, meals are injected with salt and sugar. Sense of taste is not the only area high altitudes affect. Gastrointestinal discomfort can also be caused due to altitude pressure leaving you feeling somewhat bogged down. A great article from Mail online provides more detail on the truth of airline food.

To eat healthy on planes there are two alternative options. 1. Bring your own food/snacks enough to last you the journey. This will keep you satisfied until you land. 2. Fasting. If your flight is not too long, opting for fasting may be a smart strategic choice.

Airplane food is not as good as it seems

Intermittent Fating

That brings me to the subject of fasting. The plethora of benefits such as improved cardiovascular health, decreased inflammation, delayed ageing, and many more, have been demonstrated by countless scientific research. In this blog I will not discuss all the benefits of fasting, you can do that here. However, I will explain how I utilise this powerful tool to stay trim anywhere and everywhere.

While on holiday, I like to try, test, and experience all the local cuisines on offer. In doing so, my daily caloric intake is likely to rocket. If no dietary alterations are made, the extra calories will be stored as fat. To overcome and balance this problem, skipping breakfast is a great way for me and anyone else to decrease total caloric intake. It’s not too hard to do, and it’s satisfying knowing that my body is utilising fat stores until the next meal.

Intermittent fasting is super easy to implement on holiday. Most days I will just skip breakfast and not eat until I am hungry again which for me is around 1-4pm. This works great as I can eat way more from breaking the fast, until dinner which leaves me feeling more satisfied overall.

Intermittent fasting could help you on your travels

Water! Water! Water!

You’ve probably heard this a million times before but here it goes again. Drink plenty of water! Our bodies are 60% water, so it makes sense to drink plenty of it. More so, replacing as many other drinks with water will cut calories down tremendously, leaving more room for the foods you love. While enjoying dinner, consider swapping that glass of Coco-Cola with water and save yourself 150 calories and about 35g of sugar. Not only will you be doing your body a favour, but you’ll also feel more refreshed too.

Make sure your drinking water is clean when travelling

- Final Note -

This blog has provided you with 3 top tips on how to stay healthy while travelling on planes, and staying abroad. It is important to note however that a holiday is a time for relaxation, unwinding, and escape from the stressful realities of our rigidly routined lives. I do not recommend sacrificing enjoyment to maintain a good diet. Although strict eating arrangements may be beneficial for our physical bodies, the same cannot be said for our psychological existence. The art to a happy and healthy life is a balance. Thank you.