Sticking to a Diet on Vacation

Vacation can be a scary thing when you are on a diet and workout routine. Oftentimes it feels like right when you hit your groove with it, you take a trip and the whole things gets derailed.

I had this same concern this last weekend. My little sister graduated from Ohio University this weekend and Nate and I joined my family and my grandparents at a house in Hocking Hills so we could go to Lizzie’s graduation and celebrate with her.

First thing’s first, the exercise. Because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to lift in Athens, I decided that I was just going to have to go to the gym every day. So I got up and got my butt to the gym Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Now….I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that was all fine and good. Because I kinda hated it. But I was happy to have my lifting done so I wouldn’t have to worry about missing two days while I was in the middle of nowhere Southern Ohio.

While it wasn’t an ideal solution, it did make me feel a whole lot better knowing that I had taken the time to work all of my lifting into the busy weekend trip. This helped to relax and enjoy my weekend off.

(And to be honest, not lifting for three days in a row was kinda nice.)

As for the food….food is usually the hardest thing to monitor when you are on vacation. Overindulgence basically goes hand in hand with vacationing. If you are Nate and I, vacations where you aren’t in charge of your own food are especially difficult because keto isn’t exactly a super common way to cook.

Thankfully, I had offered to buy breakfasts for the weekend. We were staying in a house with a kitchen so I knew that we could easily grab eggs and bacon and have keto friendly breakfasts each morning.

I also wanted to buy some options that worked for my family. So I went ahead and bought that to die for cinnamon coffee cake from costco and some muffins. Mom wanted to me get fruit too so I bought blackberries and strawberries, both more keto friendly than apples and bananas.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I ate keto all weekend. Cause...I definitely did not. In fact, Nate was way more of a champ at it than I was. Aside from wine and whiskey, Nate pretty much stayed keto the whole weekend. (We both lost out when the graduation cake came out though...it was too delicious.)

But here’s the thing, even though I didn’t stick to keto all weekend, I still tried really hard to watch my calorie intake. While we did do a fair amount of physical activity (Athens is...in a word...huge. So that meant a lot of walking) and we kayaked on the lake that we had at the cabin/house thing, I knew that I wanted to stay pretty close to eating at a deficit or at the very worst, sticking to maintenance.

Fortunately this was pretty easy for me because I didn’t really eat breakfast. I think I stuck to either two eggs and a small piece of coffee cake or nothing. So that helped. And then I almost never ate lunch. That wasn’t on purpose, it was mostly because I wasn’t hungry and we just didn’t really have a lunch any day of the weekend.

The bottomline is that going on vacation doesn’t have to mean that you toss your goals out the window. You can still be mindful of what you are eating and how much you are moving to stay on track.

The most important thing is that you don’t let one slip up meal or day totally derail your progress. For instance, if I had eaten that piece of cake and then just adopted a “screw it. The weekend’s lost let’s binge on all the unhealthy things” I would have been really frustrated come Monday.

The goal is to have that piece of cake and get right back on track. Don’t let one thing ruin how far you’ve come or set you back.

Instead, acknowledge the slip-up and get right back on the wagon. You can never move forward if you are always focusing on what you did in the past.

The weekend was well worth the few extra calories but to be honest, I could’ve probably done without the chocolate pretzel shot while I was standing soaking wet from the rain packed into a bar with college kids. That little blip aside, it was a successful vacation and I am ready to move forward with my goals this week.

185.6 today. Confetti everywhere. Guess it took one weekend of no lunches and some intentional fasting to break that 187-188 stall.

7.6 more pounds to go to my first long-term goal. Woo!