Travel Tips and Intermittent Fasting

Hey, everybody. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. Now, we're mixing things up a bit so that we can cover even more topics and feature even more questions. In today's show, we're going to discuss my tips for staying healthy while traveling, and we're also going to talk about intermittent fasting. Now, let's take a look at our first question, which is a video submission. This is from Allison.

Hi Dr. Hyman, my name is Allison and the question that I have for you is about traveling. I have been doing so much more travel lately than I have in the past few years and I'm going to continue to do so. And I'd love to hear from you what are some great wellness routines to add into our normal wellness routines while we're on the road. I'm usually pretty good at maintaining mine when I travel but it's also a little bit difficult when our schedules shift so much when on the road. I know you travel a ton, so I'd love to hear what you have to say. And I am specifically wondering what additional supplements you would recommend taking while we travel. And also too, if you have any suggestions for adrenal fatigue and jet lag. I know that I like to go all out when I travel, so I can come home sometimes feeling depleted. Let me know. Thank you.

All right, now, Allison asks, what additional things can we add to our wellness routine when we're on the road? and what supplements can we take when we're on the road to prevent us getting sick or tired? And what do you recommend for adrenal fatigue and jet lag? That's a lot of questions, so it's going to take us a minute, but let's get started. Now, when you're traveling, and by the way, I travel a lot. I probably have traveled 50% of the time for years and years, and it's not always easy because your schedule shifts, you can't always eat what you want to eat, and your routine changes. But it's important to maintain some basic strategies. One, I always make sure I eat real food. People go, oh, you know, when you're traveling, you can't eat, you can't control your food. Nonsense. I promise you I do it. I don't gain weight and I eat really well. And what I really do is focus on finding the right restaurants. So I'm in charge. When I go, I'm like, we're going here or we're going there. Like we're not going to Denny's or McDonald's, right? We're gonna pick a restaurant where they have simple food where I can get, some protein and some vegetables. I'll usually order two or three vegetable salads. I'll make sure it's gluten or dairy free if I can. So it's not everything's perfect. It may not be grass-fed this or organic that, but you can eat real food. Also, by the way, I take an emergency snack pack, an emergency food. I mean, if you're in a food emergency and you're hungry and you're in the airport, I'm promising you you're going to eat whatever's there. You're gonna have a Cinnabon if that's all there is. And the problem is, you have to plan. And if you don't plan, you're going to get stuck in a food emergency. So I actually have an emergency snack pack, a food emergency pack. I have a video on it on the website. It's super awesome. You can watch it and I go through what I eat in there and there's a whole blog on it. So I encourage you to check that out. And second is supplements. I do take supplements when I'm on the road, especially things to help keep me strong, fix my adrenals so I don't get wiped out and prevent infection. So you can use vitamin D to help you prevent getting infections. You can take a multivitamin, fish oil, the basic stuff. There's also great things to do for your immune system. So vitamin D and vitamin C are great, but I also recommend these Chinese mushrooms like maitake, reishi, and they come in cocktails. So I can take combinations of immune boosters and sometimes I'll bring echinacea with me if I think I'm gonna get sick. And I'll use adrenal herbs too. And I'll take adrenal support like rhodiola. I'll use lutherococcus. I'll take things like ginseng. So I use a bunch of different ones and that helps. Now after jet lag and fatigue, I make sure I use melatonin to reset. I try to minimize caffeine and alcohol. I make sure I exercise. I get saunas or steams, massage. It really works and go and set yourself at the same time. There's a great book called Circadian Prescription by my mentor, Sid Baker, all about how to avoid jet lag and keep your system working properly. So that is a great question, Allison. Thank you for that question and there's a lot written about it that we can share on our blogs too. All right, next question is a tweet from Tom. Now, Tom says, Any thoughts on whether it's okay to combine intermittent fasting with eat fat, get thin? All right, so intermittent fasting is a way of eating where you time restrict your eating. So let's say you eat nothing between breakfast and lunch, and then you eat lunch and dinner, and you eat it between, let's say, 12 and 8:00 PM, and then you don't eat till the next day at lunch. Now, what that does is it stimulates the effects of fasting, which is to kind of speed up your metabolism in a way to kind of burn calories differently. And it's been very effective and there's really good research on it. So for people who are really weight loss resistant, who struggle, I often recommend it and it's easy to combine with EFAC. Sometimes I'll actually have people just have a Bulletproof coffee in the morning because that makes them ketogenic, which actually helps to stimulate bat burning and feeling metabolism. So I think if you're a diabetic who's treatment resistant, if you're not losing weight, intermittent fasting can be a great solution to try as an experiment and I encourage you to try it. So thanks for that question, Tom. And if you like this video, be sure to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. You can even call them on the phone or meet them in person and tell them. It still works. And if you have any questions, you can tweet them to me or you can send video submissions to DrHyman.com and maybe next week, I'll make a house call to you. Thanks for watching.