Healthy Eating Habits While Traveling
Hiii, it’s Remi!
Today, Nate’s taking over the blog! He recently took a trip to Austin, so I thought it would be super helpful to talk about what healthy habits and eating well looks like during holidays and traveling. Since Nate is the resident personal trainer and eat-like-you-mean-it guru, I decided to let him do all the talking.
xx,
R
How to Optimize Your Health During the Holidays
Holidays, work, and potential travel can throw some disruptions at us. The change in routine can make skipped workouts, overeating, and weight gain feel inevitable. But they don’t have to be. We can strategize to get the most health and fitness in without sacrificing any of the joy and fun that the holidays bring.
No matter what you may find yourselves getting into over the next couple of weeks — or anytime throughout the year — my goal with this post is to help you MAINTAIN all of the hard work you have put in. You don't bust your a** for months on end to let all that hard work slip away in the last three weeks of the year. It’s not worth it.
Putting it simply, I want to demonstrate that there are ways to prioritize health, fitness, and nutrition no matter what life, work, or holidays throw at you. As many of us have learned through everything we’ve experienced in 2020, life can be calm and collected or frantic and chaotic. It’s up to us to choose the kind of life we want to live and build strategies that support and sustain the life we want.
That being said, I believe that food and fitness routines should be designed for your most hectic days, not just the easy and perfect ones — that’s what makes healthy living sustainable. Below are three strategies for sustaining healthy living every day, including the most hectic days. I’ll also share a list of my go-to goods so that you know what to grab when you’re traveling or walking through a grocery store. Let’s get started.
Healthy Habit #1: Eat Slowly
The most effective and sanity-preserving tool for eating during the holidays and traveling may also be the simplest: eating slowly. Put more intricately, “Eat until you’re ‘satisfied,’ not until you’re ‘stuffed.’” This strategy helps you avoid overeating physiologically as well as psychologically. Which is an elaborate way of saying, eating slowly keeps you from overeating both physically and mentally.
It takes 15-20 minutes for your digestive system to let your brain know that you’re satisfied. Slowing down while eating a meal allows your digestive system to communicate to your brain before you have overeaten. Another benefit of slowing down when you eat is that it helps you savor your food. This leads to feeling content or satisfied with less food. In other words, you eat less but enjoy what you’ve eaten more.
Eating slowly is a disciplinary oriented practice — there is no other way to sugar coat it. You have to truly want the health benefits of eating slowly for this to work. There is no logical reason to consume so much food that you put yourself in a coma and have to unbutton your pants. Unless, of course, you're a bear preparing for hibernation. But you’re not.
You are a human with an incredible purpose in this world and a life you are meant to enjoy to the fullest. Just like it takes time to enjoy a vacation or a conversation with a friend, it takes time to enjoy food. Your food will not run away while you eat slowly. In fact, you will feel more satisfied and decrease your chances of gaining weight. On top of that, you’ll probably enjoy life more because you won’t walk around feeling fat and bloated.
Bottom line: Eat slower. Your body and mind with thank you.
Health Tip #2: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
The truth is, life isn’t ideal for anyone all the time, and no matter what, you still have to eat. Even on the busiest days, you are still allowed to prioritize healthy eating. That may mean you sit down with a group of friends in a restaurant and eat a meal you brought out of a Tupperware. People around you may look at you like you're an alien, but that's okay. You’re making the hard choice of sticking to your commitments. And that’s what it comes down to — a single choice to take a break or stick with the habits that have been beneficial. You get to make that choice.
Chances are, no one would think less of you for taking a break. So, it has to be a desire deep inside of you. It has to be an all-out want — voracious hunger — for the very best things life has to offer. Are you going to give yourself a break, after all, you earned it, or keep at it because you’ve come too far to give up on yourself?
If you’re going to keep at it, you need a plan, especially for the moments when it’s hard. First things first, hunger is NOT a state of emergency. I repeat, HUNGER IS NOT A STATE OF EMERGENCY. It is okay to be hungry for a few hours. Feeling hungry will not kill you.
However, this would be where a well-prepared meal in your bag could come in handy — just pop a top, get some calories in your body, and go on handling your business. The better you’re prepared, the better your outcome is. But, in the event you have no food on you, keep it simple and aim for better, not perfect.
Remember, you’re outside of your baseline — your routine — so you need to adapt on the fly. In those moments, prioritize these three things:
Healthy Protein: Think grilled or baked meat, not breaded or fried. In the grocery store, you’re looking for something like:
Chicken
Salmon
Steak
Hard-boiled eggs
Lentils
Healthy Carbohydrates: I’m talking about vegetables, fruit, and grains. These include, but are not limited to:
Broccoli
Brussel sprouts
Green beans
Spinach
Red peppers
Apples
Bananas
Blueberries
Grapefruit (any citrus)
Oatmeal
Sweet Potato
Brown rice
Quinoa
Fats with the Least Amount of Sugar: Just like the other two things list, you want to find the least processed options. My go-to healthy fats are:
Almonds
Almond butter
Avocado
Cottage cheese
Yogurt
If you want more ideas of what to pack for trips or grab at the grocery store, check out this video where I take you through exactly what I ate during my three-day trip to Texas. If you’re new to prior planning, I recommend choosing two or three options that you really like so that when you find yourself in a tight spot, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. You can just grab what you enjoy and move on.
You are capable of making these hard and healthy choices. If you try and mess up, don't give up. Just get back on track and try again. Remi and I are rooting for you!
Healthy Habit #3: Maintain
Here’s the deal — when we’re outside of our usual schedule, we aren't looking to have a groundbreaking, revolutionary changes to our physique and performance. So, as I stated earlier, the goal is to strive for better, not perfect or ideal.
When you exercise regularly, you get what’s called “a training effect” — adaptations in the brain, circulatory system, respiratory system, metabolism, muscles, and bones. All of these adaptations optimize health and function. When you stop exercising, your body starts adapting to that — doing nothing — so you start to lose all those benefits you worked so goddamn hard for.
Maintaining doesn't mean you need to do an intense two-hour training session every day. It simply requires getting in some sort of full-body movement each day. Even if it's a 15- 20 minute bodyweight sweat that still helps maintain muscle, keep your metabolism humming, and ward off fat gain — and hell, for me, it's just therapeutic. In this video, you can see me doing a quick bodyweight workout in a Starbucks parking lot. It doesn’t take anything fancy, but it does take showing up!
Again, having a system in place will help keep you from falling completely off track. If you’re looking for an easy system for yourself, Remi and I have put together a workout subscription where you receive a new workout every day. It’s called Hōmebodies. Many of our members have experienced incredible results and say these workouts are the highlights of their day.
We’re committed to creating non-boring workouts and sustainable lifestyle changes. We’re also a community that's committed to keeping each other showing up. So if you need an extra kick in the pants to get off the couch and workout, this was designed with you in mind! We would love to have you join us!
Why You Need to Create Systems and Strategies for Healthy Living
Life is crazy — things can change at the drop of the hat. And change is tough. When things get tough, you find out two things about yourself: what you're made of and what’s really important to you. Do you have what it takes to stick with it when things get hard? Do you want the results enough that even if your routine gets messed up, you get back on track tomorrow?
Because that’s what all this comes down to. Not living, eating, and working out perfectly, but committing to something and going for it like it matters because it does.
More than anything else, Remi and I want to see you stick to your plans, execute with consistency and efficiency, and crush your goals. You’ve SET THE TONE for what you want the next few months — maybe even the rest of your life — to look like, now hold it!
This is the part where Remi would ask you to take a screenshot of this and share this on Instagram. Please do that and tag us both — Remi, @rrayyme, and me, @natesbeard — and let us know which of the three tips you’re going to start using! Make sure you check out Remi’s YouTube channel, where she shares lifestyle, wellness, and beauty tips. You can also find a few more videos from me. And subscribe, so you don’t miss any new content!
Nate