Dr. John A. King shares practical strategies for staying on diet while traveling eight weeks before a competition. Call ahead for a hotel fridge, buy salads and bulk chicken at Costco, use protein shakes, and choose meals like sashimi to hit your macros and calorie targets.
Hey, how you doing? It's amazing how many times people find excuses as opposed to reasons, and traveling and working out and keeping a strict diet for a long period of time is one of those things that people just get a cop-out going whenever they can. So how do you do it? How do you survive on the road, eat well, keep the plan, particularly in my situations? I'm 8 weeks out from my first competition. I can't afford to Be eating at the McDonald's or finding the excuses, I've got to keep the sodium down, all that sort of stuff. So how do we do it? Well, this is what I've done for this week. The first thing I did was I called ahead and got a fridge in my room. If you call ahead and tell them that you need a refrigerator, a little bar fridge to hold medicines, etc., they will just put one in your room. And I do have medicines I need to go in there. It's called chicken. I need to put them in. So I've got no cooking facilities in here at all, so I had to come up with something creative. So I went to the local Costco's. I got 2 packets of lettuce. All it is, it's got, you know, Grand Parmesan. It's got all that bits and pieces in it, a little bit of cheese and stuff, but you don't have to use the additives out of this. So I got those from Costco's. I got, it's like a tabbouleh salad, but it's made with like a couscous rice, a little bit of low GI carbs in there. It also mixes well in there. But here is the bomb. What is it? Costco's do this. It's chicken thighs and there's 10 of them in there, which is basically 5 meals, which is 1 day's worth of food. Well, if I have eggs in the morning downstairs, it's 1 day's worth of food. So peel the skin off, the lettuce, a little bit of the couscous salad, and the whole thing comes in at around just under 350 calories. I brought some protein powder up with me, but I ran out. So to buy a tin of protein is gonna cost me $50. To keep on buying the shakes that I'm buying at the gym, it's costing me $5 or $6. And I've got a box of these big old bad boys for $25 or $24. Now there's 18 of them. If I drink 2 of them, that's 40 grams of protein. And the carbs on it, the sugars are 2, so it's going to have 4 grams of sugar. That's a little bit higher than what I like, but, but Considering I'm on the road, I'm at the end of my stay, I'm doing the level of cardio that I'm doing, I can afford to have these for post-workout, which is when I have my shakes, is post-workout. So a little bit of sugars are actually gonna do me quite good. So there's no reason why my diet will come in way under what my calories are supposed to be, but my proteins will be up, my carbs will be down, I'll be boom where I need to be, which meant that tonight I could go out and have a little sashimi and a little sushi. Just a touch of soy sauce, not much. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Really enjoyed it. There is no reason why you can't find a reason to do something and not just an excuse. So just get creative. Think it through before you go. Make your decision before you get there on who's going to frame your world for you. And if you allow someone else to frame your world for you, they'll always frame it too small.
