Hello everyone, from the last days before the holidays 🙂

As you know, the holiday season is starting. The holiday is in two days. Since summer usually begins with Ramadan, we’ve generally postponed our holidays until after this time. If you’re wondering, “Everything’s great, but how do we maintain healthy eating habits during our holidays, what do we eat on the road, and how do we balance out any indulgences?”, I wanted to share how I spent this period 🙂

Generally, we see holidays as an opportunity to eat and drink whatever we want. We always have a sense of entitlement. We’ve waited all year for these days, worked hard, and we deserve to eat everything! But there’s also the regret that comes later… How do I enjoy my holiday without experiencing that regret?

Making the right choices

If you make some healthy preparations at home for the day you leave, you won’t have to eat sandwiches on the road. A jar of yogurt, fruit, and oatmeal will last you a long time. A sandwich made at home with whole wheat bread will also be much better than a sandwich on a plane or at a rest stop.

Carrying almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, other nuts, dried fruit, and sugar-free, additive-free bars with you will prevent you from getting dizzy along the way.

At your hotel or accommodation, you can fill your breakfast plate with plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, greens, cheese, eggs, and olives. Adding yogurt and fruit to your breakfast will further solidify your feeling of fullness. Please don’t hesitate to ask for what you want wherever you go. Last year, the hotel we stayed at didn’t have yogurt for breakfast, and on the first morning I asked for a bowl. The next morning, I saw that yogurt had been added to the breakfast menu. It was a great help to me, and I also encouraged others to try yogurt. I also enjoyed my favorite breakfast combination of yogurt and tahini/fruit mixture during my vacation.

Of course, vacation means stepping outside our normal routine. We can’t always find the luxury of home-cooked meals elsewhere, but if you search for “home-cooked food” on search engines or restaurant apps, you can find incredibly delicious places in resort areas. Those wonderful aunties from the Aegean and Mediterranean regions make incredibly tasty meals. And they even pack them for you to take with you – experience speaks for itself!

I recommend finding and saving these places before you go.

The “Morning-After Pill”

If you say, “Sema, you said it well, we already know all this, but we ate the pastries and desserts because we wanted to,” 🙂

There’s a solution for that too. Indulgences are inevitable. At least, don’t feel guilty about what you eat and enjoy it. We have a “morning-after pill”…

Please pack your sneakers in your vacation suitcase. Do yourself a favor. Once you’ve experienced this, sneakers will be an indispensable part of your suitcase on every vacation from now on. There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of waking up in the morning and taking a walk by the sea before breakfast. It’ll give you energy for the day, and you’ll burn off some of the previous day’s indulgences with extra exercise.

After your walk, drinking plenty of water and eating a day full of vegetables and salads will help balance out the previous day’s eating. This is your “morning pill” for overeating, and you’ll come out unscathed.

The best thing about a vacation is being active. Instead of collapsing from the heaviness of what we’ve eaten, being active with light meals is, in my opinion, what makes a vacation so relaxing.

A vacation means forgetting routines and enjoying yourself. Please savor every moment. And don’t forget to say good morning to a bougainvillea in the mornings 🙂

I wish everyone a healthy, happy, and sugar-free holiday.