Travel Fast!

The travel Fast!

No I don’t mean get there as fast as possible

 I mean Fast.

I mean omitting food for the large part, on travel days! simply avoid food on days that your actually travelling to destination, until you arrive at your destination.

This might sound odd, but it actually makes more sense than you think and it really is pretty easy.

Now don’t get me wrong I am not a “fasting guy” i'm an everything guy I will use whatever tools I have at my disposal to do a job, sometimes its not always the most obvious tool either. This is trick I used a couple of years ago when I 1st experimented with fasting, I practiced 24 hour fasts 1 - 2 times weekly while still hitting a standard macro split on the other days. I found the days where I fasted became my most productive days, ever! From there I tested martin berkhans lean gains style of 16 hours daily fast vs 8 hours feeding windows. Once again during the fasted periods of the days I felt awsome,  I lost a little too much muscle for my liking but that has to do with overall calories that needed tweaking, using strategic fasting became more of a psychological trick than a physiological one for me, it kind of brought out extra focus, motivation and clarity, litterally everything is a little brighter and sharper when im a few hours fasted, I call this hunter brain and something ill go into a little more in another blog im writing called the brain upgrade.

Like I said fasting is no magic bullet, the most important factor in successfull dieting I believe is staying consistent with your plan, hitting your target calories, macronutrient ratios or at least close to, repeatedly. Remember the only real difference of a successful fasting protocol is that there is a timeframe put in place. 

flexible dieting, iifym, leangains all succeed because of their respective similarities. They all define calories,  hit target amounts of protein, fats and carbs.

but who says you cant throw in a few personal tweaks everynow and again that help you in hit these targets.

for me the travel fast made this really is to stay on target even while travelling.

Remember everyone likes to be in some kind of nutritional camp where there is a tent for low carbers, a tent for paleo and a tent for intimittant fasters but in my humble opinion, sleep under the stars!

each one has aspects that are logical and work for different reasons at different times dependent on your current situation.

There isn’t one best diet for everyone, we pick find and refine, then re tweak strategies for different times constantly evolving and using little strategies that help us implement the basic principles. Principles which stay constant whichever strategy you adopt. You can take principles places but you can’t always take a box of chicken and rice!

This is one form of strategy building that works for me and many many people I work with and you are welcome to tweak and refine and improve it!

The goal is to learn principles and apply strategies that help you stay on track or stay “ripped on the road”.

You know by now how poor most the choices are especially when you are on a diet. Everything is a sugar or sodium fest! you have to stay strict, disciplined and motivated to stay on your goal right?

The thing is Motivation and intention are funny things. When the conditions are right motivation comes easy. but motivation is non linear and your initial intentions can change in line with where your motivation level lies. while travelling, when you become restless, stressed or hungry discipline wanes and the animal part of your brain starts shouting louder and louder until its subdued, usually by alcohol or confectionery. By no means is it impossible to stick to your diet when you’re travelling but it isn't far off.

Airports, train stations and service stations are not really known for there array of healthy food choices, they are places of convenience and they thrive on that above mentioned animal part of our brain dragging us kicking and screaming to the krispy kremes.

So how do we mitigate this conundrum? Knowing that 90% of choices in these places don’t fit in our plans that lead us to success. instead they prey on our inner animal.

next time you travel, Try this.

The travel Fast

Rule number 1; choose not to choose!

Here’s an Example

My last long car journey was a 7 hour drive down south to cornwall.

We left at 6:30 am

Now on the journey what were my choices? for the large part of the journey service stations are the choices of food unless you have pre-packed (another good option if you are prepared). But i'm trying to make thing as simple as possible for you here.

What are your options at a service station?

Crappy sandwich

Pepperami

Krispy kremes

Pasta salad

Fast food.

Now you cant make a good choices when none of your choices are good choices. So what do you choose? You choose not to choose!

If a wood chuck could chuck wood…..

so basically its as simple as that, i slammed some water in the car and hit the road! We nailed it past the colonel, Ronald and his mates who were hanging around the roads edge attempting to wave us in at every opportunity, but i kept my eyes on the road and my foot to the floor.

Then we arrive at destination, am I hungry? YEAH i'm hungry! But the good thing is I didn’t chow down two 3rds of my calorie quota chewing on shitty food!

 we checked into our hotel went out found a real nice place to sit down and enjoy a local cream tea and chilled before heading out and sitting down to some great seafood with a nice cloudy glass of ciderrr, and so to bed…in total my intake for the day was about 2500 calories, the alcohol bumps it up quickly. 

And even though I only ate one meal plus a cream tea, I still wasn’t over consuming food, I still got to eat the local specials and take in what Cornwall has to offer, now imagine if I stopped off once or even twice and grabbed some food in the service stations, you can easily take a chunk of 500- 800 cals out of your total daily intake by doing that alone. Imagine getting to cornwall and not having a cream tea because you had a pasty!!!!!! Sacrilage!!!!!!!

You have to experience the places you visit right, so it only makes sense to apply a little discipline to a part of the day like travel which will allow you to appreciate your destination all the more, guilt free!

  

Brad Pillon offers this description of fasting.

“The act of willingly abstaining from some or all food, and in some cases drink, for a predetermined period of time”

Now Humans are a resilient bunch, we can last without food for very long periods of time, and we did. Our ancestors would have had to wait it out or stalk prey for days waiting to feed, water on the other hand is a different story.

But nowadays food is abundant and according to the gurus were all meant to be eating every 2-3 hours, and god forbid if we miss breakfast!

Fasting has it lovers and equally its haters, but To me fasting is neither a  detriment to  persons diet or going to cause an eating disorder and neither is it a magic bullet. but it is a tool we can make use of every now and again. hell you’ve probably accidentally gone without food for a prolonged period at some point, its no big deal your’e still here.

its just a strategy, assess, re assess, tweak and re tweak.

there is no fail just testing.