Healthy Eating Tips for Travelers

Recently I have been travelling and staying away from home often.  I should admit that eating healthy while away from home is not easy. Here are few tips I learned from experience. Hopefully you will find them useful during your trips.

1) Drink more water than the usual on flights. Circulated air in airplanes, especially during longer flights, gets drier.

2) Also on flights, drinking too much coffee and tea causes more dehydration. Packaged juice products include too much simple sugars, therefore sticking with water would be the healthiest.

3) Try to find hotel rooms with kitchenettes. Even a small kitchen would help you prepare snacks and sandwiches yourself, which can be healthier than those you buy from supermarkets. Plus the more home-made foods you consume, the less you dine out, which is good not only for your health but for your pocket too!

4) Some residences rent out their condo units on nightly basis. These units come with fully-equipped kitchens where you can cook comfortably. These residences offer fully-equipped gyms which most hotels do not (or offer at lower quality). Extended Stay hotels are also available for travels in the U.S. and Canada.

5) Keep healthy snacks like granola bars in your bag. When hunger attacks while visiting an unknown area, you would not have to eat at the first restaurant you come across.

6) The first day you arrive in your hotel room, get bottled water and healthy snacks from a grocer and store them in your room. Some hotel rooms provide them as extras, however they overcharge.

7) Choosing a hotel that offers full breakfast (rather than continental breakfast) can help you find healthy foods early in the day when we usually are the hungriest. Speaking of breakfasts, if you eat a big breakfast, you can skip lunch unless the breakfast is very early. I tend to feel healthier when I eat big breakfast, small afternoon snack and then decent (not big enough to make me sleepy) amount of dinner.

8) Investigate not only the travelled area`s cuisine but also the restaurants nearby the area you will stay before travelling. Sites like Travel Advisor, Yelp and Zagat are very helpful. I personally use their mobile apps more as I tend to do more search while travelling instead of before.

9) Take your stomach and digestion medicines with you.

10) Avoid tap water at all times.

11) Order your meat cooked at least one grade higher than the usual.

12) Get smoothies and vitamin juices at every opportunity (from a clean store!). I tend to consume less vitamins and vegetables while I am travelling and unfortunately most restaurant meals are meat (rather than vegetable) based especially in English and Spanish speaking countries.

13) At the first day of your trip, avoid eating too much or adventuring into new tastes. New spices and condiments may upset your stomach. Try to get yourself accustomed to foreign cuisines slowly.

Please feel free to add other useful tips you know in the comments section. Let`s help fellow travelers eat healthier :-)

Thank you,

Umit

Meniere's: Is there a good illness?

This is not a moment to celebrate, but I was diagnosed with Meniere's five years ago. After struggling with its symptoms, of which vertigo was the worst, I am now healthy. What a simple but great thing to say!

With Meniere's, I guess one can never say he has overcome it completely. Even if you don't experience its symptoms for years, you wonder if the root-cause is still there, hiding in the tiny canals of your inner ear. Regardless of being sure or not, thank God I am now symptom-less!

Looking back I wonder now if I am happy that I lived what I lived! Frankly, I experienced more positives than negatives. Yes, the negatives were real bad. Being dizzy until vomiting then passing out to wake up with no appetite and power to stand up was hell. Living this intermittently, not knowing when you will get hit by the attack again was neurotic! Yet I still believe MY positives were more than MY negatives. For instance:

1) I now have a constant reminder that I have to take care of myself well. Otherwise, vertigo may show its ugly head anytime! Taking care of myself involves eating healthier foods and staying away from stressful situations and people as much as possible.

2) I now know that when things get worse in life, you can get stronger by managing shorter spans of life. If a week is hard to manage, you go for managing a day. When a day is hard to manage, you go for managing an hour. When an hour... You got the point :-)

3) I now know who and what matters to me more. I also know better than I AM the most important person to me! Not in a selfish way. I am my own doctor, care-giver and care-taker, so I should treat myself even better than my loved ones. In this regard, the Meniere's experience made me more independent, realistic and mature.

4) This one does not apply to all Meniere's patients but I hope one day it does. Due to Meniere's I designed my first website, learned (and still learning) how to promote it, reached and assisted many people who want to be healthier and helped few improve their eating habits. If I had not suffered from Meniere's, I believe I wouldn't have shared a health-conscious message with others at the current level.

In summary, my five year experience with Meniere's made me wonder if there is good illness. Well, my short answer is no, BUT it can be turned into a positive experience as much as possible. It depends on your approach to life. Let me conclude by repeating a cliche "often you can't control what life throws at you, but you can control your reaction to it".

To healthier lives and more positive attitudes! Cheers :-)

Umit

THE list of low sodium diet tips is ready!

As some of the followers of this blog know, I have been running a Facebook fan page for low sodium dieters for sometime. The first comers to the page usually are starting a low sodium diet and look for quick tips and tricks to lower their sodium intake. When I was answering to one of these inquiries the other day, I had an a-ha moment and decided to put all the quick tips I can think of in a webpage. Just to have a central location where I can refer people to. Here is the link to this 'tips' page I made:

http://eatlowsodium.com/osc/low-sodium-diet.php

If there are any ideas you would like to add, please add a comment below. I will update the list per your comments.
Thank you,
Umit