How to “Get Back on Track” After Traveling

Yikes, its Sunday night already, where did the weekend go? I spent this weekend trying to recover from a week of travel to Washington, DC and recoup from the nasty cold I got while traveling. It was a weekend of organizing, relaxing, cleaning, and planning. Sometimes you just need those weekends to get back into the swing of things. Sometimes that’s all your body will allow.

That all being said, I get asked often how to “get back on track” with diet and fitness after things like travel and/or holidays. I get it, when traveling it’s easy to have a “YOLO” (aka you only live once) mentality and eat all the things and do none of the fitness. Some people find it very hard to go back to the reality of a strict diet plan after the luxury of a vacation. Although, a lot of meal plan programs such as Fitness Muscle Meals aim to take away the struggle of eating healthy, nutritious food, and make food that’s good for you also taste delicious. For me, I had a blast traveling and didn’t once think about hitting a hard workout. Then when I got back home my body wanted nothing to do with exercise, because, hello cold of the century!

I figured I’d give you some insight today on how to get “back on track” after you travel so that you can travel knowing that when you come home things are going to be a-okay. Let’s first go into some concepts that we should stop buying into that may be sabotaging ourselves.

3 Myths About Diet While Traveling

There are so many myths out there whether stated out loud or thought to ourselves. Let’s get these myths debunked and move on with our lives, what do you say?! Here are the top 3 myths I hear about most:

1. Weight gain is inevitable.
   While it can feel this way, chances are unless you travel all year long, you won’t see sustained weight gain. If you step on a scale after a trip what you might be seeing is water retention (hello salty foods), inflammation (hello airplane legs), and/or lack of full bowel elimination (is anyone 100% regular while traveling?) If you continue to eat croissants maybe you will see weight gain, but traveling for a few days or even a week or two is NOT going to make a difference, calm down.
2. One cannot maintain my diet/lifestyle while traveling.
   Oh boy. Okay, this is silly, really. You CAN maintain your diet/lifestyle while traveling it just may look a little different. Also, you can pack snacks, plan ahead, and even find a grocery store/gym/etc. to help keep you in your comfort zone. If you travel outside of your normal diet?! You’ll be okay.
3. You have to get “back on track” when you come home.
   You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. However, when you get home it’s not like you have to go back to eating boiled chicken and flavorless broccoli. Learn from what you liked while traveling and use it to adapt your diet & lifestyle, that’s the joy of life, change is inevitable, embrace it.

How to “Get Back on Track” after traveling

Okay, as you have probably noticed by now, I’ve used quotations around getting “back on track” in this post because I think it’s kind of a crazy concept. Your life, diet, and health is a journey and a continuum, not a start or end point. So while, yes, you may eat a bit different while traveling, it is not one way or another, it is not black or white. Your diet & lifestyle lives in that gray area and the sooner you can embrace that the sooner you’ll be happier and healthier.

That being said, since you ask for how to get back on track, here are a few tips I have for you:

1. Make a plan.
   Whenever I am heading back from travel I make a plan for the week for food, snacks, meals, etc. I plan my groceries for the week and what meals I’m going to make. This gives me some feeling of organization and direction for when I know that things will be crazy. Tip: it helps to have a healthy stocked pantry & freezer for times like this!
2. Don’t punish yourself.
   OMG! This is the worst thing you can do. You traveled, you ate, you {maybe} drank, you didn’t exercise, etc. Who cares!? This isn’t a time to punish yourself or restrict, don’t even think about it.
3. Have healthy options at home & work.
   If you know you are traveling, always have some go-to healthy options at home and at work that you can turn to upon arrival home. This can even include having healthy places to go to grab food so you don’t have to worry about cooking.
4. Show up to the gym.
   The gym may not be your workout/movement place so wherever it is that YOU go to get movement, exercise, etc. GO. Plan to go the first day you’re back even if you aren’t moving at 100% capacity. Show up so that way you get back into the routine of it ASAP.
5. Leave the guilt, negative self-talk, and regret out of it.
   This is big. So many people dwell on what happened while traveling. That’s like worrying about what you ate when you were 5, you can’t do anything about it now, so having regrets about it are just dumb. What you can do is move on and (if needed) learn from your experience for next time.

Alrighty so I, myself, am getting “back on track” from a week of travel and have no stress about it. The only stress I have is my e-mail inbox, so if you’ve got any solutions for that I’m all ears! Now time to go meal prep so I set myself up for success this week 🙂

xoxo,

Sassy