TJ Walker (speaker) outlines practical strategies for maintaining healthy eating habits while traveling, citing a Thrive Global article. Concrete tips include looking up restaurant menus in advance, bringing fresh fruits and vegetables (or dried fruit for travel), carrying a small portion of unsalted almonds and drinking lots of water, and trying intermittent fasting (with personal reservations). The speaker then shifts to habit-formation advice: make habits easy or fun, schedule specific behaviors (e.g., daily reading 9–10pm), limit video entertainment, and use repetition/self-talk to reinforce routines.
Chapters
For many of us, we may have good habits when it comes to a normal day, we're at home. We may keep a perfectly healthy refrigerator. We may be good about not buying junk food. It's the travel that's what is the downfall. For a lot of us, everything is different. It's easy to exercise less and eat more and eat the wrong things when you're traveling. So I wanted to share with you some insights. This comes from Thrive, Thrive Global. This is a great organization created by Arianna Huffington and they have some of the best personal development insights coming out on a regular basis. They have a new article out and I'll link to this in the show note or if you're interested in the link, let's do it. Even better, just write that you'd like to see the links of this and I will post it wherever you post, no matter what platform you're on right now. But this is an article entitled these tips will help you eat healthy while you're traveling for work. So one of the tips look up the menu in advance. So many restaurants post their menu. Certainly if it's a big chain, they'll post their menu. So if you can see the number of calories and you can see that every single thing on the menu is fried and filled with cheese and has 400% of the daily recommended allowance for salt and fat and sugar then and calories, then you can decide not to go to that restaurant. That could be extremely helpful. Tip number two Bring your own fruits and veggies. Now this is something I've been telling myself I should do, but I have not been doing this regularly, certainly for airplanes. I mean most food on airplanes is just awful little biscuits, pretzels, things completely devoid of nutritional value. So much easier to bring. Small bag of fruit, regular fruit. Dried fruit is not quite as healthy as regular fruit, but it's easier for traveling sometimes. Don't have to worry about the banana getting smushed if it's dried fruit, but that's a great tip. And vegetables too. I've tried doing this but have not made that a regular practice, but need to now. This next tip from Thrive is a little more controversy. Try intermittent fasting. Here's a quote from one expert. The best way I found to eat healthy while traveling through airports is to fast until I reach my destination. The hurried pace in airports and the usual lack of healthy options readily available leads me to drink more water and plain coffee or tea. If you're trying this for the first time, take a fistful of almonds with you. It'll help you get through the hunger pangs. Drink. Drink lots of water too. Well, I like the idea of having just a few almonds. And almonds are very healthy for you as long as they're not salted or honeyed and with sugar on them. And as long as you don't eat giant handfuls. They are high in calories. But. But to eat 3, 4, 5, 6 almonds can really give you some energy, eliminate hunger pangs and not fill your body with lots of extra unwanted fat. Salt, calories. You don't need the whole intermittent fasting. I've tried that. That's the concept where you have a certain amount of time each day where you're not going to eat. Probably the simplest version of this, 12 hours. So if you eat at 7 in the morning, then you're not going to eat for breakfast. Then you're not going to eat anything, even a snack after 7pm so you have to have your dinners a little earlier or your breakfast a little later. Some people go to a smaller window, they might not have breakfast and have a lunch and a dinner within six or seven hours. So they've got every part of the day. They've got a 17 hour window where they're not eating at all. That's a type of intermittent fasting. My problem with this is I hate it so much it's insanely hard. If I had enough willpower to fast intermittently for an entire trip, I would be perfect weight and perfect health anyway. I would have so much discipline. So I personally find this advice of intermittent fasting very realistic for most people because anything. One of my guiding assumptions here on this program with everything I do, if you want a good healthy habit, you've got to make it either easy or fun, ideally both. To me, fasting of any sort is never easy. It's sure not fun. So you can talk about it all day long. I don't think it works for. I know it doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for most people when you do anything for a week. I've tried it for a week. But if you can't do it beyond a week or beyond a month, why start it in the first place? The third big thing I look for in any habit is is it truly sustainable? If you can't sustain it, why bother starting it? It's not going to help in the long run. So I would ask you to take a look at your calendar and where there are holes, try to program specific things in. It could be you're going to exercise every day from 4 to 5. It could be you're going to read a book every night. One thing that's helped me dramatically in just the last year is I literally put on my schedule 9 to 10pm every day. I'm going to read a book in bed before I go to sleep. Helps me sleep better, helps me learn more. And you know what else it does? It keeps me away from the television. The other thing that I find helpful is to give myself a specific allocation of time. So I have literally written down on my phone, I have on my daily to do list, do not watch more than one hour of video entertainment per day. So that's part of it as I actually write down on my to do list every single day. Limit myself to no more than one hour of video entertainment per day. The other thing I do is I created in my selfie speak audio program, I tell myself, tj, you watch at most one hour of video entertainment per day on average. And I've said it in an audio recording. I listen to that recording every single day. The repetition. Remember what I was talking about in the last hour? The power of repetition. So when I hear myself tell myself every day that I'm the sort of person who only watches video entertainment for one hour a day, that has an impact. When I go to my phone every day and I have to hold myself accountable in my notes section and put, no, I failed that or W for when. Yeah, I wanted that today. That drives it home too. And the fact that I also have an audio recording telling myself I'm going to try to read a whole book every day and I'm definitely going to read an hour before bed from 9 to 10 every night. And I have that on my to do list. It crowds out the other options.
