One nutritionist’s keto life on the road.
Out of a suitcase into a can.
Sometimes keto is indeed inconvenient. Especially, if you decide to take your life on a road to advance your career as a public speaker, food educator and advocate on top of being an online coach. You have to search for all these keto friendly high quality foods to not only live by #IIFYM (if it fits your macros), but also eat nutritionally balanced meals to support your health, your performance, your immune system (who wants to get sick traveling, getting ready to speak, shooting content etc?), to support your body’s ability to manage stress, your emotional balance and energy flow. You have to think outside the box often, learning to eat your foods at a hotel, getting plates, spoons and knives calling room service without ordering anything, very often you have to eat canned food (that is good, but it’s still canned) and cold foods.
Yes, you have to do extra work to stick with your values, finding a way instead of making excuses. Choosing a plate of fatty fish and olives instead of all the variety of vegetable-oils-covered hotel buffet choices.
Let me ask you a question though, “Are you a kind of person, who settles for what’s offered to everyone? Or are you the kind, who actively chooses to create their own path? Creating the exact life — health, work, career, relationships — that you want to live? Are you a kind of person, who waits for life to get better? Or are you the kind, who gets out there and makes it better? Even when it requires extra work?”
I find, that people who make their health a priority in any situation are also great at setting priorities in all the other areas to build the life on their terms.
Choosing a different path every meal every day is a great practice ground to choose different path — your path — consistently everywhere else. Not a safe path of staying in your home town in the middle of Russia, where you could easily become the best, but the path, that makes you feel like you are flying, making a plan to travel through Europe, to speak at any food event, that captures your mind, to build a network of like-minded foodpreneurs, to set up a new company, to build a team to create on-of-a-kind-app to make eating better seamless — yes, that makes me feel like flying, sometimes like jumping out of an airplane without seeing the ground, trusting the wind to bring you, where you were meant to land all along.
So, is keto and life out of a suitcase are difficult to accomplish?
If you think, that anything but eating everything, what’s offered in all-you-can-eat buffet is difficult, then it sure is.
On the other hand, what’s so difficult about getting some salmon and a huge bowl of veggies with olive oil over French fries and a burger followed by some sugar+wheat+vegetable oils+flavorings colorful concoction? It’s not like you starve yourself on keto. You actually eat richer!
I don’t always get to eat amazingly cooked keto meals on the road — it takes time to find great places, time, that I choose to dedicate to my work, my clients, my content, studying. So what do I do, when I don’t have a kitchen, when there is no good place to get high quality keto meals?
I choose canned food!
I’m not a huge fan of cans. Or living out of a suitcase. I do love living in my own house, cooking in my own kitchen.
But sometimes you got to choose — convenience or change. If you do what you’ve always done — you’ll get what you’ve always got.
I need a change. I want to be an international speaker/food advocate. I want to build an international network of people driven by the same passion — food system requires global collaboration. I’ll be building an app, that will help people around the world to eat better, seamlessly satisfying their nutrition needs without thinking about it. I want to help people around the world (as a coach, an educator) to create health on a daily basis without overwhelming themselves, navigating with ease our modern environment, that sabotages our health at every step.
And so sitting in one small city, even in our hyper-connected world, won’t make it happen. And so I kicked myself in the butt and got myself tickets. A few of them. Before my brain could find a million reasons, why I should stay where it’s familiar and convenient.
And so, canned food is not my favorite, but I’m eternally grateful we have it of such a great quality! Canned wild sardines and salmon, canned tuna, canned liver and canned duck meat, great olives, asparagus, mushrooms and artichokes in jars, great sauerkraut. Our food system has great choices! When you choose to search for them instead of the right-at-the-counter candy bar, that needs you to increase their sales.
As an online health coach — I don’t travel that much.
But now, as I’m expanding myself into speaking, workshops and classes all over the world — I’ll be on the road more than I’ll be at home or any one place. When you want to work on global projects — you got to travel the world.
And so now, I really have to figure out a sustainable way to eat healthy while cooking very little.
It shouldn’t be that way, that it’s hard to eat nutrition/quality/taste satisfying meals anywhere in the modern world. But it is.
Even so called “healthy” restaurants do very little work to create meals, that satisfy our basic human nutrition needs (besides calories).
Most of the people working there won’t even know how to do so, talking to you about the amount of protein, sustainability, no added sugars and some anti-oxidant-rich goji berries instead. Like THAT what anyone should only care about.
I leave most of those places hungry, wondering what do they charge so much for… eliminating sugars and adding goji?
So my best strategy?
Find a great Whole-Foods like grocery shop, or even better, a farmers market, and get some simple staples:
- fatty fish (often canned)
- cooked pastured eggs
- avocados, olives, nuts and seeds
- easy to eat raw veggies like red pepper, tomatoes and carrots, baby-greens, steamed veggies + olive oil and some herbs and spices to make it all taste great.
Here are the food rules I follow in all restaurants, cafes — for all meals bought somewhere.
Unless you know the ingredients — go for steamed and grilled, ask for olive oil and salt on the side.
Is keto difficult when traveling? It’s not as easy as eating anything in sight.
Is keto doable anywhere in the world? When you commit to it, you’d be surprised how easy it is.
Some extra advice to fortify your health with nutrition and lifestyle while traveling:
Get great supplements to fortify your health. I don’t think you want to get sick, trying to do your best work, exploring the world. My staples: vitamin C, mineral waters for electrolytes, natural multivitamin, more minerals, Vitamin D and K2.
Get hotel with some gym — it’ll save you lots of time and mental energy, that you’ll need elsewhere.
Have a structured routine right from the start — morning walk, morning exercise, morning meditation, intermittent fasting, 8 hours of sleep, meals on schedule, meals that you planned ahead — and you won’t only accomplish more goals, you’ll also get fitter and leaner!
What’s next:
- Make the hard choice — build the life you love living.
- Ask questions, when you have them.
- Please share to help others to learn, feel great and look awesome!
- Sign-up for my 🔥HOT AND UPDATED 10-day Email Health Course or Schedule your free express session with me — we’ll design your own personalized 14-days healthy eating/living/keto bulletproof-for-life keto plan!
