Traveler's Guide to a Healthier Life

Ways to live healthier on the road

“Travel isn’t always pretty… But that’s okay. The journey changes you.” — Anthony Bourdain

If we could each operate in ideal circumstances, I’m quite certain that we’d at least be healthier than we are today, if not healthy altogether. However, we’re subject to the pesky set of inconveniences called daily life. It’s easy to think that, if we could just “get in a groove,” we’d have the perfect morning routine, regular sleep schedule, good exercise habits, consistent meal prep, etc., but we rarely find ourselves in that groove.

Travel is perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks to getting in the “groove” when it comes to healthier living. You lose time. You lose rhythm. You lose control. Even people with disciplined routines can feel totally thrown off the moment they step into an airport. And it’s tempting, during those long travel days or chaotic work trips, to decide it’s just not worth trying—to think that you’ll reset next week when things calm down.

But all too often, we find that things haven’t calmed down. Life is still chaotic, whether we’re traveling or not, and we’re faced with confronting the uncertainty that’s inherent to our daily lives. While this newsletter is focused on building an effective strategy for improving your health while traveling, it’s just as much a strategy for managing uncertainty with regard to our health.

The Problem: Why Travel Breaks Our Routines

When you’re home, you have structure—your kitchen, your gym, your preferred sleep setup. When you travel, all that disappears. Three key things go missing:

1. Time: Flights, delays, and meetings consume the hours you’d normally dedicate to movement, cooking, or sleep. Time zone changes also throw an added curveball to the mix.

2. Control: You often don’t control your schedule, the restaurant menu, or your environment. It’s easy to feel like we’re at the mercy of the travel itinerary, just trying to not miss our next obligation.

3. Convenience: You lack the frictionless setup that supports your routine. No gym nearby? No healthy options? No time? No space in the suitcase for extra gym clothes?

It’s no wonder we often abandon our habits entirely. But here’s the truth: travel doesn’t have to derail your health—it just demands a different approach.

First Principles for Health While Traveling

As I sit on a plane for the third time this week, I’ve been reflecting on what it takes to live a healthier life on the road. I think the best word to sum it up is “inconvenient.” Not having my normal alarm clock. Inconvenient. Not going to the same gym at the same time every day. Inconvenient. Sitting on the runway for an hour and getting home when only fast food restaurants are still open. Inconvenient.

This sort of inconvenience demands a paradoxical stubbornness and tolerance from us. It requires the stubbornness to make a decision to walk the extra 5 blocks from the hotel to eat the healthy dinner instead of the cheeseburger from the hotel bar. Yet, it takes the tolerance to forgive yourself when your morning weightlifting session turns into a 20 minute treadmill walk because you’re just not feeling it.

As I reflect on my time traveling, both for work and personal reasons, here’s what I believe to be the most effective strategies for living a healthier life while on the road

1. Tolerate uncertainty: When we fall out of our routine, the easiest option is to find any and every justification for avoiding that which we do not want to do. Ask yourself whether what’s in your way is truly preventing you from living a healthier life or if it’s just an excuse

2. Get creative: If we were half as creative at finding opportunities to improve our health as we are ways to pursue our greatest vice, we’d be facing far fewer problems. It’s more likely than not that you’ll be forced to try something new or different for your health while on the road, so take that as an opportunity.

3. Don’t be so mean to yourself:

   “It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long?”

   - Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

   There’s much to be gained by not being so mean to yourself. We (the insecure overachievers of the world), feel that our health or any other pursuit we deem necessary requires relentless and unwavering pursuit. However, such an unforgiving attitude does no good. So ask yourself, “if I met the voice in my head—the one berating me—at a party, what would I think of them?”

Travel is a sort of metaphor for whatever life throws your way. To stay the path toward a healthier life, we must control what we can control and leave be that which we cannot. It’s the perfect opportunity to live a healthier life in an imperfect world, and the only way we’ll get there is one step at a time.

Stepwise strategies

Here are a few tactics for improving health that I use while traveling:

1. Always pack enough clothes to exercise while traveling. Never have the excuse be something so easy within your control

2. Book a hotel that’s walking distance from your most frequented locations, whether that’s an office or friend’s house

3. Stay on the same time zone, within reason. If traveling within the continental US, this is particularly effective for maintaining consistent and high quality sleep

4. Eat before you go to the airport given the limited healthy eating options

5. Use the flight to spend time reflecting. It’s only so often in today’s world that we get time to unplug. Embrace the boredom and appreciate the time with your thoughts

6. Take extra steps around the airport, if time allows. Large, terribly designed airports are a great place to get steps in ahead of long seat-bound flights

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Next Newsletter

We’ll discuss what distraction is doing to our health