Today I’m going to talk about how to eat when you’re on a weekend vacation and you’re trying to lose weight.
Going on Vacation: The Perfect Situation
When you’re trying to lose weight the perfect situation is you go on vacation and everyone else going on vacation with you is planning to eat healthy too. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a vacation like this, so it seems a little improbable. However, if you are in this scenario, you may even lose weight while you’re on vacation!
Going on Vacation: The Realistic Situation
Everyone you’re on vacation with plans to eat continuously while you’re on vacation and it’s going to involve all of your favorite foods. This is hard because just being surrounded by people who are eating whatever they want makes it hard for you to eat healthy. Especially when you’re jet-lagged or tired, and you don’t have your regular go-to healthy foods available. Also, you don’t want to be that not fun friend who isn’t experiencing all the great food everyone else is.
This scenario seems more likely. In this situation, your goal should be to not put on weight while you’re on vacation.
How to Not Put on Weight While You’re on Vacation
Here are three options to try:
- Save Your Cheat Meals or Cheat Days for Your Vacation – For example, if you normally eat 3 cheat meals a week, eat 1 cheat meal the week before and save 2 for your vacation, and eat 1 cheat meal the week after and save 2 for your vacation. You then have 7 cheat meals total (2+3+2) available for your weekend vacation. If your weekend vacation is 48 hours that basically means you can make every vacation meal a cheat meal. More on how to do a cheat meal correctly here.
- Order Family Style -Order food family style for the table and eat how you normally do, the healthy way, by ordering healthy foods too. If you’re ordering for the table you can make sure to order some healthy foods for the table along with the unhealthy foods everyone else wants. This means you have to eat the healthy foods you order. Foods that I’ve found are popular with my friends include salads for the table, roasted Brussels sprouts, and grilled chicken skewers.
- Get a Salad and Try Everyone Else’s Food – Say that you’re not that hungry, you’re ordering a salad, but you’re going to try everyone else’s food too. This only works if you only try one bite of everyone else’s food. If you actually try a plate of everyone else’s food, it won’t work out. Don’t do this option if you think that will happen. The goal is that you should end up eating less unhealthy food total because you’ll feel guilty for eating a whole bunch of someone else’s food.
I usually decide which option to pick depending on who I’m going on vacation with and which option I think will be the easiest with that group of people.
What to Do If You Fall Off the Weight Loss Wagon
Here’s my previous post on how to bounce back if nothing works and you end up falling off the weight loss wagon while you’re on vacation.
Another option to consider is that short-term this may actually be a situation where intermittent fasting might work. As I’ve mentioned before long-term fasting is not a great option for weight loss because eventually, your weight loss will plateau, but short-term fasting after a vacation may work out.
If you’ve never tried fasting before this probably won’t work. But if you’ve successfully fasted before this may be the time to try it again. You could try it for the week after you come back from vacation to offset all the eating you did while you were on vacation. If you were eating double the amount of food you normally do it should even you out.
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P.S. Wondering what negative calorie foods are? Here’s my one-minute video recap .