Last Easter I packed a snap-lock bag of my own dukkah into a suitcase headed for Port Douglas. My partner thought it was ridiculous until day four, when we found ourselves eating good avocado on a hotel balcony instead of another buffet pastry, and he stopped laughing. That’s roughly where I’ve landed on healthy habits on holidays: not a strict plan, just a few small things that travel well and make the trip feel better while it’s happening, not just after.
I used to be the person who packed protein bars and a resistance band and felt vaguely guilty the whole time for not using either. These days I pack less gear and think more about rhythm – when I eat, when I move, when I actually rest, because that’s what tends to slip first, not the food itself.
Why holidays undo routines so fast
It’s not really about willpower. Meal times shift, sleep shifts, you’re standing in unfamiliar kitchens or none at all, and the usual cues that keep you eating and moving in a pattern just aren’t there. Healthdirect’s general advice on staying well while travelling makes the same point in plainer terms: routine is doing more of the work than we give it credit for, and losing it for a week or two isn’t a failure of character, it’s just what happens when the scaffolding goes.
What I’ve noticed on my own trips, and heard from friends, is that the guilt spiral does more damage than the extra glass of wine or the missed walk ever could. You have one big lunch, decide the day is ‘ruined’, and then eat that way for the rest of the holiday because the standard’s already gone. I’d argue that mindset is the actual problem, not the lunch.
Pack a little of home, not a lot of rules
I’m not precious about ingredients when I travel but I do like having one or two things that smell like my own kitchen. A small jar of dukkah, some of my balcony-grown chilli flakes dried and crushed, a tin of good tea. It sounds small and it is, but there’s something steadying about tipping dukkah over hotel eggs and having it taste like a Sunday at home rather than a room-service plate that could be anywhere.
If you’re the type who likes a proper breakfast, our smashed avo with dukkah and poached egg travels well as an idea even if you can’t recreate it exactly – most self-contained rentals have eggs, bread and an avocado within reach, and the dukkah does the heavy lifting on flavour.
Movement that doesn’t feel like a chore on top of a holiday
I’ll be honest, I don’t do a proper workout on holidays and I’ve stopped pretending I will. What I do instead is walk more than I would at home, because holidays tend to make that easy – there’s usually somewhere worth walking to. A swim before breakfast at somewhere like Bronte Baths does more for how I feel than any hotel gym session, and it costs nothing and takes twenty minutes.
The Australian Government’s eatforhealth.gov.au guidance is sensible on this: it’s the accumulated movement across a week that counts, not any single session, which takes the pressure off needing a ‘holiday workout’ at all. If a walk to the shops or a wander through a Wednesday market, like the Mullumbimby Farmers Market up on the north coast, is the only movement you get that day, that’s still movement.
One meal a day that resets you
My actual system, if you can call it that, is one deliberate meal a day. Breakfast or dinner, whichever suits the day, built around vegetables and something fresh, and the rest of the day I don’t think about it at all. It’s a small anchor rather than a rulebook.
Things that hold up well in a share house kitchen or a rental with two saucepans and a blunt knife: a chickpea and roast capsicum salad, or a quick Vietnamese-style chicken slaw with nuoc cham dressing if there’s a decent Asian grocer nearby, which there usually is even in smaller coastal towns now. Both keep well for a day if you overbuy, which I always do on holidays because I get overexcited at unfamiliar produce stands.
What I love about this kind of cooking on the road is that it takes fifteen minutes and doesn’t ask anything of you technically. No fussing, no long ingredient list, just good colour on a plate and the smell of ginger or chilli hitting a hot pan, which for me is genuinely one of the better parts of being away from home rather than a chore squeezed in around it.
Snacks that don’t need a fridge
I’ll always have something like date and lime energy balls or a container of spiced popcorn with nutritional yeast in the bag for long drives or flight delays, mostly because service station food on the way to anywhere remote in Australia is patchy at best. It’s a practical thing more than a virtuous one. Being hungry and cranky in a car for three hours is nobody’s idea of a holiday.
The bit nobody says out loud: sometimes it’s not worth the effort
I’ll say this plainly because I think it needs saying: trying to eat exactly as you do at home while you’re travelling is more effort than it’s worth, most of the time. If you’re in a hotel with no kitchen and the only options are the buffet or the restaurant next door, don’t spend your holiday hunting for the ‘healthy’ option on the menu. Order what looks good, enjoy it, and let the next meal be the one you’re a bit more deliberate about. Nutrition Australia’s general messaging on flexible, sustainable eating patterns backs this up better than I can – it’s the pattern over weeks that matters, not any single plate.
Coming home without starting over
The hardest bit for a lot of people isn’t the holiday, it’s the week after, when the fridge is empty, the washing’s piled up, and the temptation is to either swing hard back into strict habits or just keep eating like you’re still away. I try to have one simple thing ready for the first night home – often a version of our warm grain bowl with roasted roots and labne using whatever’s in the crisper, because it needs almost nothing fresh and it feels like a proper meal rather than damage control.
If you want a gentler way back into routine generally, not just after travel, our piece on building a morning routine that actually sticks has some ideas that apply just as well to the Tuesday after you land as they do to any ordinary Monday. And if the whole idea of ‘getting back on track’ feels exhausting before you’ve even started, have a look at how to build a balanced plate without another diet – it’s the mindset I try to hold onto year-round, holidays included.
None of this is about discipline, really. It’s closer to what I tell myself every time I water the chillies on the balcony after a trip and find half of them have gone leggy in my absence: things don’t fall apart as fast as you think, and they come back faster than you’d expect too.
– Mei Lin, Golden Door Living kitchen
