5 Ways To Holiday Without Halting Your Progress

I can often be found in the local gym on rainy Cornish days. While the kids chill out playing in our holiday rental and the husband has a lie in, I pop round the corner to the gym for a quick hour on the weights. I often run too – a run along the seafront on a beautiful summers morning, is one of the most wonderful things to do, in the cool sea air. It can be difficult when you don’t know the area that well, but if all else fails just run for half your intended time or distance in one direction, then turn around and run back!

Holidays abroad with a pool are a great excuse to get in the water. Swimming is a great all over exercise, toning your arms, legs and core. It has very little impact on your joints too and burns some serious calories. An 11 stone person swimming breast stroke for an hour will burn around 500 calories (more if a person weighs more than 11 stone). That’s almost as much as running. When we go away abroad I swim daily, taking it in turns to go off for a 30 minute swim, especially if there’s a nice quiet adult pool away from the kids! Then there’s the ‘Animation Team’ in most resort hotels, who are always on hand to do a spot of aqua aerobics in the pool, a game of football, or archery, or maybe even a bit of yoga. Why not take a break from the sun lounger and try something new?

If you are off on a city break, or in fact going anywhere where you can do some sightseeing, it usually means that you will be doing plenty of walking, so take advantage of what there is to see and do and get those steps in.

For me in Cornwall, it would be rude not to try the occasional pasty and cream tea, and of course the clotted cream ice cream, but I just don’t do it every day. There are lots of less calorific delicacies too, and we love for at least one night of our holiday to do a fish barbecue from the local fishmongers, that is literally just below the house that we stay in. Lots of delicious salads, new potatoes and fresh fish barbecued in a splash of lemon juice and black pepper, and may be a bit of chilli and garlic too. The fresh flavours are incredible.

We also go fruit picking too, and often pick way more than we actually need, but this makes a great excuse to have lots of fresh strawberries, raspberries and blackberries every day for puddings and snacks.

If you are off on a more exotic holiday than mine, there will be lots of interesting local food to try. Any coastal resort will undoubtedly have lots of fresh fish restaurants to try, and warmer climates will have an abundance of fresh fruit, salad and vegetables for your delectation, so why not make the most of it and experience as many new fresh flavours as you can?

Another strategy is to eat a normal healthy breakfast and lunch, like you would have at home, and then have whatever you want for your evening meal. Depending on what this is, will give you varying results on the scales, but there is definitely some damage limitation in there.

Holidays are absolutely the time to let our hair down, relax, rest and enjoy ourselves.  If you want to go on holiday and sit on a sun lounger for two weeks and read, then that’s great, do it and enjoy it!

And if you do overindulge be prepared to come back and face the scales, acknowledge the good time you have had and the effect it has had on your weight, and then draw a line under it and get back to your usual good habits.

The break from being so focused will have done you good, mentally – just make sure you have a plan to ease yourself back in on your return – this might be something as simple as just aiming to drink 3 sports bottles of water a day, for the first week back, then get back to eating better.