Vacation Diet Tips: How You Can Stay On Track With Your Diet On Holiday

Holidays are great, but sometimes you want to stay on track with your diet too. It may seem like it’ll be too hard, but with a little bit of effort and careful planning, it’s easy to make sure you’re hitting those diet and training goals while enjoying a vacation too. I’m currently 14 weeks out from my first fitness show so sticking to my diet and exercise program is important. I recently took a trip away for four nights and right now Comp prep is life, so I had to stay on track.

How did I do it? Below are some tips that you can try.

Step 1: Know what you will be eating

When it comes to comp prep its important to be as consistent as possible with training and what you are eating every day, this will give you a better gauge of how the training and diet is going. Inconsistent foods or calories across the week will add more variables and may skew your results making it harder to make adjustments.

Staying on track comes down to being organised, so knowing what you will be eating in advance will make the process a lot easier to follow. I entered all my meals for the five days into a food journal in advance. This allowed me stay on track with my calories and make sure that I was hitting all my macros.

Once I had everything entered into my food journal the next step was to go shopping and to make sure I had everything prepared. Food preparation is essential for staying on track because if you don’t, the natural thing is to search for easily accessible food options (snacks). I also purchased scales to weigh myself each morning as usual and scales to weigh the food. This ensured that I didn’t over consume calories or go outside my macros.

I also took the scale to restaurants for measuring any portion of foods which were not provided on the menu. When it came to eating out at restaurants or functions, I would look up the menu and enter it into my food journal to make sure that calories and macros were kept on track.

Alcohol wasn’t not an option because it doesn’t support my goal at this point in time, if alcohol is something you wish to indulge in, estimate how many drinks and they type of drinks you will be consuming, then fit them into your food journal. If you are a person who tends to over consume alcoholic beverages an option is to have a water in-between your drinks to space them out a bit better. For more information about how drinking affects your training, check out my article “Alcohol: Friend or Foe” here.

Step 2: Organise your training and cardio

When it comes to weight training and cardio, I preferred to get this out of the way in the morning. The goal of my time away was to de-stress so the last thing I wanted was to feel guilty training or having to miss a training session. This meant the most optimal time for me to train was in the morning. If you are not a morning person, I would recommend training about around lunch time, evening sessions will be a more stressful especially if you have night functions planned.

Step 3: Have friends or a partner who keeps you accountable

I’m fortunate to have a girlfriend and friends who understand what is required when it comes to dieting for a show. I always recommend to clients that they surround themselves with a supportive network, it does make the whole process easier and I believe in a whatever endeavour that we have, accountability goes a long way. Another thing is that I always make sure of is that I respect others and their choices. Don’t make people uncomfortable because they’ve chosen to indulge and enjoy themselves, it’s your journey and yours alone. If people choose a different path, respect that and respect them because passing judgement will lose you friendships and relationships.

Step 4: Make the goal important to you

I have learnt a lot on this contest prep journey, one of them being the importance of having a goal that really matters to you. When you have the will, you will find a way. If the end goal is important you are much more likely to stick to the process, even when things get tough. Try to focus on measuring progress as you go and improving from the week before to keep you motivated.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article and I hope these ideas were helpful. If you would like to learn more feel free to contact us. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about the services and training and nutrition programs we provide, please find more information here.