Nutrition While Travelling: Adapt to Thrive
Travelling naturally disrupts our routines. Sleep patterns shift, gym sessions become less structured, running schedules change, and nutrition is often the first thing to feel unsettled.
However, maintaining our nutrition while travelling doesn’t mean rigidly trying to recreate your home routine. Instead, the opposite is true. Nutrition must adapt to the environment you’re in if progress is to be maintained without creating unnecessary stress or restriction.
Consistency while travelling does not mean eating the same meals everywhere. It means adapting intelligently.
Ingredients change, meal timings differ and the culture of a place sets the rhythm for eating patterns. When we constantly search for the same foods we eat at home, or try to stick to identical meal times, staying consistent becomes far more difficult. Therefore, it is important to adjust your eating patterns to suit your surroundings, rather than resist them.
Eat What Is Local and Seasonal
Eating seasonally generally means higher-quality produce, and naturally supports a more wholefood focused diet.
By prioritising local and seasonal foods, you can still centre your nutrition around protein intake, whole foods, and balanced meals. Often this results in a more nutrient-dense and well-rounded diet than attempting to replicate your home routine using lower quality substitutes.
Stay Hydrated
Weight fluctuations while travelling are common and are often due to water retention or dehydration, rather than true changes in body composition.
Maintaining adequate hydration supports digestion, energy levels, and overall wellbeing, all of which can easily be disrupted during travel. Flights, changes in climate, increased walking, and altered meal patterns all increase hydration demands.
Increase Your NEAT
NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) refers to the energy expended through daily movement outside of structured exercise; such as walking, standing, and general activity.
If your usual training volume decreases while travelling, increasing your NEAT can help maintain cardiovascular fitness and overall output without needing to prioritise gym sessions.
Sometimes a break from structured training is beneficial. Although, if you are travelling frequently, or feel concerned about losing momentum, maintaining high daily movement can provide balance.
Performance Nutrition While Travelling
If you are focused on performance, adapting to a new environment can feel uncomfortable, particularly for those who thrive on structure. However, tighter control is rarely what is required. Instead, informed adjustments to your nutrition plan should be made.
As mentioned, local and seasonal foods are often more nutrient-dense, and this matters when performance is a priority. Meal timings may need to shift, and you will need to work with what is available to you rather than attempting to recreate your exact routine from home.
Maintaining core nutritional principles while travelling is far more important than eating the same foods everywhere you go. Performance is supported by consistency in the fundamentals; adequate protein, sufficient energy intake, hydration, and overall food quality.
Rather than focusing on specific foods, focus on food groups. Aim to include the same key components you would normally prioritise at each meal and around training; protein, carbohydrates, fats, and fibre, just adapt them to the options in front of you.
Consistency over control
When our surroundings shift and environments change, nutrition structure does not need to be abandoned, but control does not need to be tightened either.
Instead, the focus should be on understanding what you are eating and why. With that knowledge, you can stay on track, while adjusting nutrition to fit where you are.