Your Guide to Staying Healthy While Traveling
A routine makes it incredibly simple to achieve our health and wellness goals. From meal-prepped lunches to our pre-scheduled workout classes, maintaining healthy habits can actually be fun. However, as many of us have experienced, staying healthy while traveling can pose quite a challenge. Summer is coming to a close and many of us have end-of-summer travel plans that we are anxiously awaiting. However, with this excitement comes concern that we may struggle to uphold the healthy habits we have created for ourselves.
Limiting drinking, choosing healthy meals, staying hydrated, and getting quality sleep can be difficult to achieve while traveling, especially with friends. At Zenbodi, we want to help you maintain your health and wellness goals while on the road. Whether you’re going on an international or domestic flight, a road trip, or just staying somewhere nearby, your healthy routine will be shaken up. In this blog, Let’s learn to roll with the punches and enjoy our trips while sticking to (and enjoying) the healthy options of the place you are visiting.
Pre-Trip Planning: Gathering the Essentials
Successfully staying healthy while traveling comes down to two major factors: pre-planning and bringing your essentials on the road. First, you will want to identify your favorite healthy snacks that are filling and have nutritional value. Nuts, protein powder, granola bars, and fruit bars are a few snacks that do not require refrigeration and offer excellent sources of protein and nutrients.
Although it can sometimes be easy to forget, packing your essential supplements, vitamins, and medications is important to maintain your health. You may have noticed you often get sick when you travel, and there are a few reasons for this. When we travel, we stay up later, drink less water, overconsume alcohol, and are exposed to more germs. While crowded spaces are nearly impossible to avoid in many travel destinations, certain aspects of traveling can be altered to align with your health and wellness goals.
Four Ways to Stay Healthy While Traveling
Whether you are traveling for work or are taking time off to enjoy a weekend with friends or family, your routine may be thrown off. Below, you will find four ways to stay healthy while traveling, including special tips that help us maintain our goals while on the road.
Staying hydrated is a necessary part of staying healthy while traveling, but it can be difficult. As soon as you step on a plane or get in a car, high temperatures, low humidity, and prolonged sitting can all lead to dehydration.
Bringing a reusable water bottle is one of the best ways to remember to stay hydrated. Generally, it is recommended that men drink 15.5 cups a day and women drink 11.5 cups. We get it. Drinking water can be a larger task than it seems. Here are a few ways we like to boost hydration when we travel.
- Drink a glass right in the morning.
- Feeling extra dehydrated? Choose a drink with electrolytes.
- Snack on fruits with high water content (melon, cucumbers, celery, strawberries, etc.)
The best way to stay healthy while traveling is to bring your healthy essentials on the road with you. Grab your favorite supplements, vitamins, and healthy snacks and enjoy them in a new environment.
If you’re anything like us, you might get cravings when you travel. Although this is absolutely acceptable from time to time, consistently eating poorly for multiple days can throw off your progress and result in weakened energy. Zenbodi Control is a dietary supplement that can help you curb cravings and stay on track with your fitness goals. Enriched with green coffee beans, moringa, green tea leaf extracts, and vitamin D3, this supplement is the missing link that can easily fit into your wellness routine – both at home and on the road.
Calling all coffee lovers: here is the secret to remaking our favorite on-the-go coffee. Zenbodi Boost Instant Coffee is a blend curated for your healthy and busy lifestyle. With nootropic ingredients to boost cognitive function and added weight management benefits, these travel packets are the solution to your coffee cravings.
Exploring local cuisines is one of the most fun aspects of traveling. However, how often have you come home and felt the need to immediately resume your diet? Let’s talk about different ways you can explore different foods while maintaining your progress.
To explore food while staying healthy, start by researching traditional dishes and ingredients before your trip. Look for options that are fresh, lean, and cooked in a healthy way (such as grilled or steamed). Avoiding fried foods and ones dense in dairy, and rich in vegetables and protein can help you maintain a lighter diet while ensuring you are still fueled throughout the day. In terms of the sweet treats that are bound to pop up throughout your trip: enjoy them! Find a friend or two and see if they are interested in splitting it with you. The key is to enjoy delicacies in different places without the effects of overeating or overindulging on dishes high in sugar, fats, or carbohydrates.
Exercising to stay healthy while traveling can be difficult, especially when you have busy days scheduled. If you are the kind of person who needs to fit in a workout each day: the best time to do so would be early in the morning. Although the early wake-up call might not be fun – you can make it worth it by organizing an outdoor workout (scenic runs, outdoor yoga, ocean/pool swims, etc.). Creating innovative ways to stay active while embracing your surroundings is the best way to stay motivated while on a trip.
If you aren’t interested in working out while on vacation – that’s okay too! We often don’t realize, but traveling requires more walking than everyday life. Choosing to walk and bike instead of driving places can be an excellent (and fun) form of exercise.
Post-Trip Recovery: Bounce Back After Traveling
Traveling can disrupt even the most disciplined of routines. The key to bouncing back quickly is to take time for yourself to reset, restock the fridge, and organize your schedule for the upcoming week.
The week after travel may seem a little slow, but here are a few of our favorite tips to speed up the “returning to normal” process:
- Sleep as long as you can once you get home.
- Don’t step on the scale as soon as you return. This can cause post-trip anxiety.
- Get plenty of Vitamin C for immune support and energy.
- Cut out alcohol for a few weeks.
Safe travels!
