Vacation: How to make healthy choices AND enjoy your vacation!

Going on vacation and trying to make healthy choices is difficult. Although we want to enjoy our vacation and relax some of our normal rules and restrictions, it does not have to be license to go crazy and eat everything. There are ways to enjoy your vacation AND make healthy choices.

Here are some of my standard vacation tips:

1) Try to stay in a condo or home where you can prepare your own meals. 
If you are in a hotel, use your hotel refrigerator to store healthy snacks like yogurt, string cheese, carrots and milk for cereal so you can enjoy simple, healthy breakfasts instead of hitting the hotel restaurant or the nearby bakery! Also, try to keep some fruit and plenty of water in your room.

2) Walk!
Whenever you can, be active. Walk the city, take a hike, go on a bike ride, and go to museums. Not only is it a great way to see a new place, you can get your exercise without even noticing.

3) Plan meals ahead of time.
When you travel, you will eat out and eating out makes it more challenging to make healthy choices. If you plan ahead and look at restaurant menus before you eat, you are more likely to make better choices. Look at menus online or before you enter the restaurant and talk to your child about healthy choices. The key is to have this conversation BEFORE you sit down to eat.


4) Don't wait until you are starving to eat.
I learned this first hand this summer. We would often wait just a little to long to eat lunch, then we would all be starving, eat too much at lunch then not be hungry at the normal dinner hour and have to eat dinner late. You can see the pattern. Try to stick to a schedule as much as possible. Eat before you are starving or you and the kids will be too hungry to make healthy choices (and you will all be less grumpy).

5) Treats are OK!
You are on vacation so treats are inevitable. BUT, it does not have to be a free for all. You can still have a good time, eat healthy AND limit treats. Try to set a limit at 1 - 2 treats (Red Lights) a day. For instance, if my daughter chose to have soda at lunch (which we don't have at home) then that counted as a treat and she could have one more treat after dinner. This is when breakfast is tricky! On vacation, it is easy for those red lights to be readily available at breakfast. Watch out and see how you can budget - perhaps you allow one red light per meal.

Key messages:

• Enjoy your vacation and try new, delicious food but do not use it as an excuse to eat whatever you want, whenever you want.

• Most importantly, remind yourself that when you get home, you will get back on track. Then, when you get home, make sure you get back on track!