Stay Fit While Traveling
Discovering new destinations, whether for work or vacation, is an excellent opportunity to have fun and expand your knowledge. However, traveling also involves certain challenges, such as managing a balanced diet and staying in good health. Keeping that in mind, we’ll look into some effective tips to stay fit on your travels.
The importance of staying in shape
A lot of people associate staying in shape with feeling good when they stand in front of the mirror. Although this positive image contributes enormously to our well-being, the benefits of managing weight go beyond aesthetics. Being overweight is a risk factor for serious diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and other health concerns.
On the other hand, a person with a healthy weight usually has a strengthened immune system, which provides a greater overall resistance to disease. Additionally, their physical, cognitive, and emotional performance allows them to excel in their work and personal activities.
Five tips to stay fit while traveling
Invest in a balanced diet instead of a restrictive one
Maintaining a healthy weight doesn’t mean living on a strict regime or starving yourself. Conserving a desired weight requires a balanced and natural diet, and not unnecessary sacrifices. Restrictive diets are often ineffective and dangerous to one’s health, as they make it harder to avoid the urge to rebound.
If you want to stay fit while on your travels, you shouldn’t exceed limitations or try to follow ‘miracle solutions’. Simply try to maintain a balanced diet and allow yourself a treat, paired with a higher dose of physical activity.
Keep in mind that consuming fruits and vegetables provide fiber, vitamins, and minerals that facilitate digestion and improve intestinal movement. Furthermore, they help to strengthen the immune system and prevent fluid retention.
Boost daily hydration
Although it may not seem like it, it’s very easy to become dehydrated during a trip. Therefore, it’s important to not forget to consume the minimum amount of required water and mineral salts. We might exceed the number of walks we take too, which can cause us to sweat more than usual and lose more fluid.
A practical and cheap option is to take one or two empty bottles in your luggage to fill them with mineral water. This way, you can refill them whenever you can, and take fresh water out with you during your trips.
Choose healthy snacks
It’s common to want to try the local dishes of each city that we visit. Gastronomy is an essential part of culture and the expressions of its people. However, we should try to moderate snacking between meals to balance our calorie intake.
The lack of time can cause us to eat lots of pastries, sweets, or packaged products with empty calories. Over a few weeks, these bad eating habits will result in undesirable weight gain. Besides, we can also suffer with gastrointestinal disorders–from constipation to diarrhea and stomach pain.
The best advice to stay fit while traveling is to take some healthy snacks with you, such as dried fruit, cereal bars with nuts and seeds, yogurt, fruit salad, etc. The idea is to incorporate fiber, vitamins, and minerals to reduce your consumption of saturated fats and carbohydrates.
Focus on protein during meals
After a long and tiring day of walks and excursions, you’ll surely be hungry and eager to enjoy an exquisite dinner. Far from forbidding you to satisfy your appetite, our tip is for you to give preference to proteins. Consuming lots of fats and carbohydrates in the evening will cause difficult digestion, making you feel heavy or uncomfortable.
To stay fit while traveling, you must eat light dinners, focusing on lean meats and easily digestible vegetables. If you choose to enjoy a glass of wine or another alcoholic beverage, it’s essential to drink plenty of water too, in order to stay hydrated.
Prioritize smart physical activity
Currently, we associate regular physical activity with going to the gym or practicing an ‘urban sport’, such as running. However, we can easily incorporate exercise into our daily lives, and this includes while we are traveling.
You can exercise during vacations, just optimize your time, so that you don’t lose your days off. For example: if you want to visit the main tourist attractions in a city, you can walk instead of taking public transportation. A daily 30 to 40 minute walk is usually a very efficient way to stay fit during your travels.