About a week or two ago I went on a little skiing vacation. It was during my whole weight loss journey which still goes on.
I was pretty excited about this since I haven’t gone skiing in a while, but a small part of me was a bit afraid of breaking my diet or, should I say, regime in general. So I came up with a solution. The solution basically being me not caring about any of that. I know it sounds stupid at first, but just hear me out.
So, first of all, let’s get something clear, the 3 main pillars of good health/healthy lifestyle are: sleep, diet, exercise – in that order particularly. If you don’t sleep the right hours and enough – nothing else will help you, if your diet is terrible – exercising like a madman is not going to help you.
Sleep
With that said, I think we should just get the first pillar out of the way first and foremost. I’m pretty sure everyone can get 8 hours of sleep while on vacation since relaxing is most of the time the main point of a vacation anyway and let’s be honest – there’s nothing like laying in bed with your eyes closed, dreaming.
But, of course, the harder to obey part is the “right hours” one. Depending on your vacation type, sleeping the right hours could either be super hard or super easy. I think most people that have gone skiing can agree that this sport is pretty tiring, so usually there’s no problem going to sleep relatively early. Of course, if that’s not the case for you, at least try to get enough sleep.
Diet
Now onto the next pillar of a healthy lifestyle: diet. From my experience, this is the hardest of the 3 to maintain. It’s either the fact that you’re in a foreign country and the supermarkets and food there are pretty weird, so you don’t know what exactly to eat, or it’s the enormous buffet that you just can’t not enjoy because it would be a waste of money or the fact that you’re on vacation so you deserve a freaking cheat meal. The point being that there’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t be able to continue your diet the way you did when you were home – wherever that is. So, the way I go about it is I won’t stress myself out, but just try to not overeat here and there. For example skip breakfast on the days I can just lay in my bed till noon or order the salad instead of the steak for dinner or just eat less fries or bread.
Another good option in my opinion is intermitted fasting because, well, it’s a not-so-hard way to make sure you don’t eat too much, but at the same time not stress too much about what you’re eating.
Exercise
Exercising while on a trip is usually not so hard, yet so many don’t do it. Of course that depends again on the type of trip you’re on or the location where you happen to spend your holiday. There’s 3 main cases I would like to mention.
First of all, let’s start with the active kind. I’m talking about, for example, some hard core tourism where all day you’re on foot in which case I think we can all agree that that might be good enough, but in this case you should really judge for yourself. Another example would be a ski trip (my case for instance) where, seeing as you’re skiing (or snowboarding of course) most of the time, you don’t really need any extra physical activities (especially because of bonuses like fresh mountain air). There’s also the trip to the sea where swimming is more than just good enough. Hiking through a forest. Biking. My point is there’s a lot of times when you’re on vacation where you don’t even have to really try to get your blood flowing.
The second case would be a hotel that has a gym. Depending on the hotel or just place in general that you’re staying at you should check out if they have a gym or not. This way, if they do, you could just go there for a mild workout every other day or so to just make sure you get at least some exercise in; you don’t need to do the most hardcore workout of your life.
The third and final case is when you have none of that. Let’s say you’re going to a hotel and you literally don’t get out of the room for a week. I’m assuming no one really does that, but for sheer example let’s say that happens. A week of minimal physical activity. In this case I recommend that you just try to do some push ups. Of course there’s more “at home”-no-equipment exercises that you can do, but at the end of the day you’re on vacation, so some push ups are just fine. Even during my “active” skiing trip, I still tried to get some push ups in here and there because it’s simply just good for the body and I just felt better.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, if you’re on vacation, or on a trip, while you’re still trying to lose weight make sure not to stress yourself out. The stress of making sure your regime is perfect on top of the stress of the trip can backfire in a really bad way. Just make sure to do what you can – whether it’s not eating past 7 or 8 or doing some push ups every morning or just getting enough good quality sleep.
August 