Healthy Vacation Foods for Weight Control!

If you are like me, you tire easily of fast food, and plan ways to encourage healthy vacation foods for your family while traveling! This is a healthy diet habit! Summer is almost here, and most of you are finalizing plans for your vacations. Road trips to distant states, trips to lake houses, or a nice visit to your relatives! Here are some tips that will allow you to travel and keep your weight under control!

1.      Travel with snacks always! Kids equate vacations with snacks and mostly unhealthy ones. Win the whining wars early, by providing great snacks. Take a cooler in your car and fill it with cut up veggies, frozen fruit, low-fat cheese sticks and whole wheat crackers, home-made granola, popcorn, soy crisps which are yummy and contain protein, trail mix with nuts and dried fruits, and hummus or peanut butter with pitas. I always try to find a few new ideas that my family will love. We refill our cooler with great snack foods along the way! Make sure that you pack your cooler and snack food bags where they are easily reachable. We have learned this the hard way! Coolers facing the wrong way and snacks buried in the way back under everything!

2.      Take along a picnic lunch. Plan on stopping at a great park or vista along your trip path. My family is always excited about finding a new picnic spot. We have some very fun memories of these travel picnics!

3.      Be prepared for the unavoidable fast food stops. Know what you will eat before you enter fast food restaurants. I guarantee that if you do not do this, you will end up with a meal special, loaded with unwanted calories. Spend a few minutes on-line, before your trip, choosing healthy alternatives at your kid’s favorite spots. If you can’t always provide healthy foods, you can offer some healthy choice advice!

4.      Eat at grocery stores. We do this often because they offer healthier choices. You can find a variety of veggie and fruit salads, soups and chilies, freshly made sandwiches, and fresh juice drinks. This beats fried fast food and sodas any day! There is usually a small area set up for in store eaters too.

5.      Keep your home rules on the road most of the time. We do not drink calories at home and we do not drink calories on the road. All grocery stores have flavored waters or we stick with water. This saves many calories per day. We would rather have a food treat!

6.      Practice portion control on your vacation some of the time. Vacations are a time of fun and fun does not mean that you have to splurge at every meal and overeat. That is a vacation habit that you want to avoid unless you want to return home in the next size clothes.

7.      Practice healthy diet habits on the road. We always delete all sauces, mayo and extra calories from our restaurant meals. Ask for calorie counts on foods before you order and make sure that they fit into your meal plan. If you normally plan for 600 lunch calories, stick close to that number when you eat out. Split portions with your family or order kid size meals for adults which is the correct serving size. If you have a cooler, you can save half of your meal for later.

Vacations are a fun lifestyle solution. We enjoy eating, that adds to our fun. We love to locate quaint little shops to eat in our travel destinations. Some of them are not so healthy, but that is okay. We still talk about the giant feet donuts we got in British Columbia, more than once I might add, but splurges are what memories are made of!