Stay fit & trim while traveling....

Today's post: Friday, 5-15-2008

I got the article I include below yesterday. Since many of you travel on business & the time of year many people take vacations is coming up soon, it seemed like a good idea to pass on the information & add some ideas myself.

I decided to put the article first & add my ideas after it.

First, here’s the article.:

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

“4 Ways to Stay Fit While Traveling

By Craig Ballantyne

Last year, I flew more than 20,000 miles and visited more than two dozen airports around the world. Along the way, I learned - the hard way - how difficult it is to eat on the road. Especially when you're stuck in an airport for hours and hours at a time (as I was in Washington one night).

Today, I want to share the lessons I've learned about keeping fit while traveling.

The way to keep yourself healthy while on the road is to plan ahead. That goes for everything you do in your fat-loss program, especially eating properly.

You see, nutrition is where people fail big-time when traveling. After all, there isn't much good food for sale in airports. Not to mention all the restaurants you inevitably visit while vacationing or on a business trip. The good news is that it's possible to find nutritious food... if you know where to look. For instance, you can almost always get fresh fruit, nuts, and even grilled chicken in most airports.

After nutrition, simple laziness is the next hurdle you have to overcome while traveling. It's easy to talk yourself into skipping a workout if the hotel gym doesn't have the equipment you're used to. But the truth is, you don't need fancy equipment to get a fat-burning workout. You can do dozens of great bodyweight exercises practically anywhere.

Here are four strategies that can help you stay fit and stave off the fat while traveling.

1. Pack nutritious food for the road.

Yes, you can usually find healthy options in airports and restaurants. But you increase your chances of eating healthfully by packing your own snacks. Some healthy, road-worthy choices include water, green tea, almonds, apples, bananas, and jerky.

There's a saying in the fitness industry: "You can't out-exercise a bad diet." So no matter how often you hit the hotel gym (and not many travelers do at all), you won't be able to fight off weight gain if you continue to down processed foods and sugary beverages.

On a recent flight from Nashville to Toronto, I sat beside an overweight women who was (ironically) reading Dr. Phil's book on how to lose weight while she drank a glass of orange juice.

Now she clearly did not need the orange juice. She could have had water or a club soda (like I did) or even a coffee. Instead, she chose just about the worst drink possible. Within minutes of drinking orange juice, blood sugar levels spike, increasing levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin. To make matters worse, those spiked blood sugar levels eventually crash - making you hungry again.

Bad food choices doom travelers to stay overweight forever. But if you pack your own snacks - and ask for healthy substitutions in restaurants (replacing potatoes with extra veggies, for example) - you can control what you eat. Kelley Herring has written extensively about healthy food options. If you need some inspiration for what to eat while traveling, check out some of her past ETR articles.

2. Schedule your workouts with as much dedication as you schedule your business meetings.

When you book your hotel, make sure you have access to an adequate hotel gym or nearby fitness establishment. That way, you can continue with your regular exercise routine.

You might want to purchase a day pass at a local gym and work out with a personal trainer. If there is no time to schedule a session with a personal trainer, and your hotel gym doesn't have weights, try a bodyweight-only workout.

Here, for example, is how to do the Off-Set Push-Up:

Start in a regular push-up position, with one exception. You move one hand a hand's-length forward. (So it will be at forehead level, not shoulder level.) Do half as many push-ups as you normally do. Then, without resting, switch your hand position so the other hand is now a hand's-length forward. Do an equal number of repetitions.

This push-up works your upper body just as hard as (or harder than) regular push-ups. But it also works your abdominals a lot harder, because your torso muscles are working harder to stabilize your upper body.

Take advantage of whatever time slot is available for exercise during your travels. And don't miss it. An added bonus: Your exercise appointment can be the perfect excuse to skip unnecessary post-meeting cocktails and calories. Which brings me to my next tip...

3. Stay away from alcohol.

Whether you're on vacation or traveling for business, cocktails and wine are usually bountiful. But boozing it up adds hundreds of unnecessary calories. Plus, a few drinks can lead you to indulge in high-fat, high-glycemic foods you would ordinarily avoid. As a group of Canadian researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, just one alcoholic drink can have that effect on your diet.

4. Spend waiting time walking.

If you have a layover between flights or are killing time between meetings, take a brisk walk. Some people think that walking is so low-intensity it doesn't do anything to help keep you fit. But that's just plain wrong. Researchers from Duke University found that walking the equivalent of 11 miles per week helped prevent the accumulation of deadly visceral fat, no matter the intensity of the exercise. So take a pedometer with you when you travel, and walk as often as possible.

Travel with a "maintenance mindset." Stick to your plan, and you'll return home without gaining any fat or losing any fitness.”

[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne is the creator of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss system.

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Here are my comments & some other ideas.

1. The items on his list to pre-pack can work. My favorite of his list is the green tea. Packets of green tea or your favorite kind of black tea are dramatically better for you than soft drinks; they take up a very tiny amount of space & weigh very little; & you can usually get a cup & hot water for tea.

Almonds, pecan halves, or walnut halves or pieces make a great snack & enough for a tide over snack can easily fit in a sandwich bag in a coat pocket or purse. And, if you get them raw and unprocessed or dry roasted only -- & you aren’t allergic to them, they are marvelously filling and good for you.

However, some people have dangerous allergies to them, so eating them in your seat on an airplane with the cramped quarters filled with people you don’t know & in the enclosed, incompletely ventilated air is NOT a good idea.

Apples & bananas make great snacks if you are driving or for when you first get to the airport and have to wait at the gate before boarding. But they are a bit bulky & potentially messy to pack otherwise.

They can sometimes cause problems if you go out of state or out of the country as many places have regulations about bringing in produce from outside their area. But if you can buy apples or bananas to eat in your room locally, that can work well.

His example of the woman drinking orange juice I give a mixed review. He’s correct that a better choice for her may well have been water, club soda, tea or coffee. But it’s so much better for her than a soft drink, she may have picked the healthier alternative from those she was willing to drink. And, she actually got some vitamin C & folic acid from the orange juice.

His idea of asking for substitutes for starchy or otherwise unhealthy foods in restaurants is excellent, “replacing potatoes with extra veggies” is a great example. It’s become enough more common that most decent restaurants will be happy to do so. I’ve been requesting “extra veggies’ for potatoes or rice for quite a while.

Another great way to go is to focus on eating good quality protein foods, veggies, & fruit and treat yourself by getting them prepared and served for you with items you like but don’t have time to fix at home. If you also do that instead of eating potatoes, rice, extra refined grain bread & desserts, that helps a lot. (Do avoid processed sandwich meat & farmed fish and go a bit easy on cheese due to its high saturated fat content, however.)

One way I found to do this is to stay on the executive floor in a hotel if your budget will handle it. I went to a seminar recently where they booked me into the gold floor of a Fairmont hotel. Every morning & every evening, they provided a buffet of a variety of really good food at no extra charge for the guests on that floor. That meant I did not need to find a restaurant or pay for breakfast & dinner. And, although I did pass on a lot of good tasting refined grain goodies, the variety of well prepared protein foods, veggies, & fresh fruit was so good & so well done I did NOT feel deprived at all.

2. That hotel not only had a gym with some weights and cardio machines, they also provided clean gym clothes at no extra charge.

Exercises you can do in your room also work.

I plan to try his offset pushups. But if you do regular ones at home, they also work fine. Other exercises you can do at home or in your room while traveling include crunches, leg raises, twisting crunches where you pull up the opposite knee and touch it with your elbow, half squats, quarter squats with each leg, rising up on your toes, and what are called wall sits where you use the wall to hold you up in a position as if you were sitting down in a chair but with your legs parallel to the floor. (I do those at home & find that when I count to 250 it takes about 2 &1/2 minutes. I did start at counting to more like 80 & built up to the 250 gradually.)

Some travelers take what are called exercise bands that provide resistance for a variety of strength training exercises; use very little space; & don’t weigh much. That also works.

3. Some thoughts on alcohol. If you drink moderately at home and can afford to when traveling, I think it can make sense, particularly if when you drink at home you are able to make health OK food choices and also drink.

However, the last thing you want to do is to get drunk in a place you don’t know well when you are away from some of the resources you have or are familiar with at home. So, keep your drinking quite moderate. I also decided to only drink at my hotel at the end of the day. That way I didn’t have to drive in an area I didn’t know well or cross any streets or worry about getting lost if I got the least bit tipsy.

And, if you feel like splurging on alcohol or celebrating, try getting higher quality or more expensive drinks instead of more drinks than your normal moderate intake.

I completely agree with him that you can do enough things that really are doable that you can return without gaining a lot of fat or missing regular exercise totally.