Traveling—whether for sports, work, or leisure—can make maintaining a nutrient-dense diet challenging. Eating out frequently can be costly and impact your health due to low-quality ingredients, cooking methods, and processed food options. Here’s how to stay on track while traveling.
The Downsides of Eating Out While Traveling
- Expense – Dining out adds up quickly, but the bigger issue is health.
- Lack of Ingredient Control – Restaurants prioritize cost over quality, often using cheap seed oils and lower-quality proteins raised with antibiotics and hormones.
- You aren’t going to get high-end expeller-pressed olive oil or any healthy oil choices. If they are using oil it will be the cheapest seed oil they can get. This is a problem for digestion, it’s a problem for inflammation, and eventually, if you have this habit of eating out a lot it will be unhealthy for your heart. It will cause inflammation and you will end up with problems.
- There are more and more restaurants using better quality protein, but for the most part, you still aren’t going to be getting farm-to-table in most locations nationwide. This means the animals were raised on massive industrial farms, not outside, fed junk, and maybe even antibiotics and other hormones. These toxins come from them to you in their meat.
- Unhealthy Cooking Methods – You can’t control how food is prepared, which affects nutritional value and can lead to oxidation and inflammation. When you are at home, you know if your item was baked properly, you know if it was prepped properly. You can make a choice not to fry something. In a restaurant, they choose how they are cooking items. Yes, sometimes they tell you, but once again, you are out of control on that unless you pick and choose (if they tell you) off the menu.
- Hygiene Concerns – Poorly handled or undercooked food can introduce harmful microbes and parasites. I see many people who have gut testing that shows they have parasites or other microbe imbalances. Most of the time they have never traveled outside of the country. Meaning, they got those parasites right here. Most of those parasites, and microbes, come from improperly handled/cooked food.
- Processed Food Overload – Many restaurant menus are heavy on pasta, bread, and desserts, which lack essential nutrients and can contribute to inflammation. You get your nutritional value from high-quality protein, vegetables, fruits, and fats. It’s not common to have a vegetable-forward dish with the balance we look for when going to a restaurant. You can work around this to enjoy a meal out here and there and make a good choice (see solutions below). But overall it’s important to remember if you are trying to maximize nutrients while traveling.
How to Eat Well While Traveling
- Plan Ahead & Cook When Possible
- Stop at a Whole Foods or similar grocery store upon arrival. This takes some research and planning, and to know your schedule if you don’t have a lot of flexibility or solid plans. However, it is easy to research online through searches or using a specific store search location feature.
- Create a meal plan and grocery list before you leave. If you know what you need to make, you can make your grocery list to make the trip to an unknown grocery store faster and more efficient. MOST grocery stores today participate in Instacart or another similar service that lets you “shop” their store online first. You can look up the items you want and their location to make it more efficient.
- Choose accommodations with a kitchen or at least a mini-fridge and microwave. Our favorites are Hilton (Homewood Suites), and Marriott Bonvoy (TownePlace Suites). You can also go house rental, especially for longer stays. Another option is renting a camper if you like to have your own space and want it delivered to a park or other location.
- Prep & Pack Meals
- Bring pre-prepped meals if space allows. If you know you will be on the road, at an event, or just away from your kitchen have those meals prepped when you leave on the trip and packed to transport. If you can’t fit them all right then in the cooler (this happens to us), then you have to find time to prep somewhere between the days in the room/kitchen. You can bring the containers in a separate bag stacked and make them. Having one prepped ahead is always important.
- Use the same ingredients in multiple meals (e.g., veggies for stir-fry and rice bowls). You can pack more by packing whole ingredients if you aren’t going to shop.
- Pre-cook meals for short trips and store them in a cooler. We have a few go-to meals – from breakfast to dinner that are the go-to when we are limited to a mini fridge and microwave. Think of packing one large pot of it for travel, eating it multiple times as a lunch, and just scooping out what you need each day. This is a great hack for sports. We often need a specific set of nutrients as a pre-race meal, we have a few lunches we do that fit that. For a race weekend, we have that pre-cooked, we scoop and go each day of that race. We do the next recipe next race.
- Utilize Hotel Room Hacks
- Microwave meals in a pinch (e.g., scrambled eggs with veggies in a mug).
- Enjoy a Meal Out (Strategically)
- Choose restaurants wisely, prioritizing quality ingredients.
- Schedule dining out when it won’t impact performance or recovery.
With a little planning, you can eat nutrient-dense meals while traveling, save money, and protect your health.