Business Travel And Staying On The Health Plan
3 min read
If you travel for business then you are familiar with the lifestyle and difficulty of it, especially if you are physically working toward improvement. Whether it is weight loss, training, or eating for your health. Out and about, traveling from city to city or even to one city that is not your home can be a challenge. If you are not careful you can go backwards very quickly.
I used to travel heavily, sometimes every week. The nature of the job I had at the time meant going out to dinners, lunches, happy hours, in excess. I loved it, had lots of fun, but chose poorly for my health and ballooned up. Now that I am back into a situation that will have me traveling again and more frequently I am taking my prior experiences and changing how I travel.
The main driver is that this coming weekend I am participating in a half-marathon in-line race. Rollerblading to the layman. That’s 13.1 miles in a competitive mode that I cannot train for while I am 1,400 miles away in Miami, FL for a few days. Usually I have the corporate card and just eat out at the local establishments, have a few beers, enjoy it as much as I can. (I hate traveling away from my family) This time I did it differently and wanted to share it because it’s pretty darn easy.
I don’t want to talk about how to order food in a restaurant, that’s easy. I wanted to talk about how to live to a healthy lifestyle when you are in a hotel room. The easy way is to order room service which usually consists of burgers, fries and other high calorie content. Instead of ordering food look for a local grocery store. You shop at one at home, why not in someone else’s hometown? This trip that’s what I did for my meals. There was a Super Target and a Publix nearby, I shopped at both of them and ate pretty darn good and for a lot less money than eating out at the local bar and grills.
Now this approach my not be for the social butterflies and I do understand the need to get out of the hotel room, especially if you are there for a week. All I am recommending is if you are on a conscious plan, business travel shouldn’t be an excuse to stop it. Bag salads, pre-packaged veggies and fruit, if you have microwave in the room you can get fairly decent meals at the local grocers, bottles of water, low-calorie snacks. All within reach and far better for you going this route.
One challenge I did run across was eating utensils. That’s a unique quirk. Hotel rooms don’t have them and it’s difficult to find a store that just sells a small set. If you want to buy plastic you end up needing to buy a box of at least 50. No practical. One solution I did come across was in the camping section of Target. I purchased a camping swiss army style spoon, fork and bottle opener. That worked out very well, however, I didn’t realize until after I opened it up there was a 3 inch knife on it too. Made sense for what it was, but for traveling with carry on luggage it would have been lost at the TSA checkpoint. So I lost out on the $10 investment and had to leave it behind. Whoops.
My point is that if you travel for business, regularly or not, that doesn’t mean you are stuck in a fast food or restaurant eating rut. Believe me, even the ‘healthy’ choices at most American eating establishments are just as bad as the burgers and fries. If you need to stay on track find a grocery store and shop for yourself.
End of Line.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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