You ever go on a trip and think, “Screw it—I’ll start over when I get home”?
Yeah, me too. (Hi, I’m human.)
But after 23 years of being vegan—and plenty of trips where I’ve either stayed on track or had fun—I’ve finally figured out how to do both without turning into a hangry gremlin or hauling a suitcase full of protein powder.
We just dropped a new video showing exactly how I traveled to Colorado, had a great time and kept my nutrition goals intact.
🧠 Real-life strategies
🥗 Easy food swaps
💪 Workouts that actually fit into a travel schedule
🥴 And a few moments of “well… that didn’t go as planned” (because life)
If you’ve ever felt like travel = derailed goals, I promise this video will help shift that mindset.
Got questions or your own tips? Hit reply or drop them in the comments—we read every one.
TRANSCRIPT:
Everyone loves traveling. You get to see new places, meet new people, try new food, not be
able to get to the gym, not have access to the food you have at home, maybe not get the best
night’s sleep. Sounds wonderful.
This is the number one thing that my clients struggle with is being out of their normal
environment and nothing embodies that quite like full-blown travel does. You guys might
remember at the end of 2024, when I saw my calendar for 2025, I had a full-blown panic attack.
I realized that I was going to be away from home more than 25% of the year.
And you guys probably don’t know this about me, but I am someone who’s pretty easily thrown
off of my routine. Every time I travel, I feel thrown off of my routine, and it takes me a couple of
days to get back onto my routine when I get home. When you’re gone for 25% of the year, and
it takes you a couple days to get back on track every time you get home, it’s gonna be a rough
year.
But I knew that canceling these trips was not an option, so I had to figure it out. So there’s quite
a few systems that I put in place at the end of 2024 to make sure that I was thrown off of my
routine as little as possible, and so that I was able to get back on track as quickly as possible
when I got back home. And that’s what this video is gonna be about.
Giacomo and I are headed to Boulder, Colorado to work at the Vegan Strong booth for the
Boulder Boulder. And it’s just a three-day trip. This is a really short one.
Some of the trips we’ve been on this year already have been like up to 12 days. So this one is a
little bit easier. Hopefully it’ll be a little bit easier to film the things that I want to show you.
And Boulder’s a beautiful place, so hopefully I’ll get to show you some of that. A huge chunk of
this success of this protocol… that sounds so lame. Let’s try that again.
I have found that a big chunk to being successful while I travel actually starts before we even
leave, booking the flight. You’ve got to know yourself. What is the best time of day for you to
fly? Some of our Vegan Strong teammates really like the first flight of the day, which is usually
six in the morning.
I do not like the first flight of the day at six in the morning because I am not a morning person.
And having to get up at three o’clock in the morning to get on a 6 a.m. flight is a really bad start
to the day for me. So I try to look for flights that are around like 10 or 11 so that I can wake up
at six or seven in the morning, which is a much more human time.
And also consider where you’re traveling to and the time zone and what time you’re going to be
there, and if that makes sense also. Because although I’m not a morning person, I also wouldn’t
like to land somewhere at midnight and have to get our car and get to the hotel. We’ve done itbefore because we found cheaper flights.
We’ve also done the early morning flights because we found cheaper flights there. And it
backfires every time. So make sure that you find a flight time that works for you, even if it costs
a little bit more.
I would say that it’s worth it if you travel a lot. So one of the things that’s really important for
me to do when I travel, I’ve learned the hard way, is to get ahead on my training before I even
leave. Because no matter how good my intentions are when we travel to get to a gym and get
all my workouts done, sometimes there’s no gym that’s nearby or open when I need it to be
open or affordable enough for us to just get day passes for the whole time we’re there.
So I’m just going to get ahead on my workouts before I leave and bring my bands with me. So
because I have like 20 trips planned this year, I had a method where I basically just left my bag
packed at all times, which so far has worked out really, really great. It means I have to have
duplicates of a handful of things.
It has saved me so much time. But for the sake of this video and the fact that we’re moving into
warmer months, the stuff in that has to change. So I’m going to just pack my bag from scratch
right now.
Can we talk about how awesome this shirt is? Oh, so these are compression socks. They are
very tight. They go up to my knee.
And I always thought that it was kind of a stupid thing that I had heard people say. But the
more I have flown, especially the more I have flown longer distances, the more I realized that
wearing these actually really does help my legs feel less tired when I get somewhere. So I
always bring one pair of these because I wear them for the flight.
But since I’m wearing it for the flight, I don’t need to pack it and toss it on this chair because I
always leave my flying outfit out overnight. How did I miss that? It’s a giant chair. What an
athlete she is.
Even though we’re coming into summer months, this is a Memorial Day trip. It is getting, it’s
going to be kind of a cold and rainy weekend and our event is outdoors. I got to make sure I
have enough warm stuff here.
And it also has to be vegan strong themed because that’s the trip. One leggings, two leggings,
undershirt, undershirt, because I’m like a little boy. I feel like I am going to want long sleeve
shirts.
It’s going to be a trip of layers. Ooh, my joggers. Love those.
I’m going to bring those. Three day trip. Am I really going to need to bring that much crap? Yes,
probably.Okay. Two vegan strong shirts, vegan strong hoodie. So I’m also going to bring this.
This is what I’m going to wear, I think, to the airport. Okay. Last bits of clothing.
Last minute decision here, looking at the weather, knowing that I am always cold and that we
will be outside pretty much the entire time. I am bringing my long underwear, just wear it
under my clothes. It’s like skin tight.
It keeps me very warm. Bottoms. I don’t love the waistband on the bottoms, but we do what we
got to do.
I love how I’m like, well, we’re moving into the warmer months and then everything in here is to
prevent me from freezing my butt off. Now, this is usually much more organized than this. This
is usually all in this guy right here.
So I have, I have pre measured out all of my supplements and things like that. And I have two
weeks worth in here at all time. And I also have some extra like Benadryl and Ibuprofen, just in
case.
Band-Aids. So I always bring Band-Aids because I have been on more trips than I can count
where I get a blister on my feet. Sleep mask.
I almost never use this, but I would rather have it and not need it than the other way around.
Here’s all of my toiletries, shampoo, conditioner, a toner, a leave-in conditioner, face wash,
lotion, some makeup remover, and some retinol. And then this little guy has my makeup in it.
I don’t wear a ton of makeup, but I never know what kind of event I’m going to be asked to
attend while I’m there. This usually stays in my backpack with me. I also have sunscreen that I
fill this up.
It feels kind of light though. And I’m going to Colorado where we’re much closer to the sun. So I
got to fill this sucker back up.
And she’s full. So I like to keep the sunscreen with my makeup because I bet it’s, it’s tinted
sunscreen, which means it’s basically my foundation. Cause I don’t wear foundation anymore.
Don’t go back and watch videos of me from 2018. Full cake face. Full cake face.
Don’t love it now. So there we go. That’s all the toiletries, meds, supplements, things like that in
here.
Okay. Now we’re getting into the fun stuff. These are sheets of laundry detergent, and this is a
drain stopper because I always do my laundry in the hotel room.
And the last trip we were on was 10 days long. So I was using this every single day. So that goes
in here.This lives in here at all times. And the other thing, this is a sponge, like a kitchen sponge that I
cut in half so that I can wash any dishes that I need in the sink there. I think that’s it in terms of
packing this bag right now.
So it’s one carry-on and it’s about 65% full. Let’s talk about the food stuff that I’m going to
bring. Bear in mind, this is a three-day trip and depending on the trip, I might bring more food
or less food, but I wanted to show you some of the things that I would bring to help me stay on
track.
Don’t worry. I’ll be sharing my other food tips while we were actually there. So a few things that
I will definitely, definitely bring.
One is this collapsible Tupperware bowl. So it pops out. It’s a pretty big size, so I could fit salad
in here.
I could fit a sandwich in here. I could have my breakfast in here. And then it packs down to
basically nothing.
And I also have my little baby fork and spoon that I’m going to put right in there. I have a travel
straw and that is going to be my cookware, I suppose, if you will. And I also have my water
bottle, which I always bring with me.
It just goes through security empty and then I fill it up beyond that. And I only have one
upstairs. I have a ton more downstairs, but I bring a big old handful of these Ultima Electrolyte
Hydrator sticks.
One, they help me drink more water. Two, this is my favorite electrolyte drink. It’s got no
artificial colors or flavors, but it also is lower in sodium than all of the other ones that I’ve seen.
And I am a big sodium proponent. You guys know that, but I get plenty of it from my food and I
don’t need any extra in my water. So this has calcium, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium,
vitamin C, but almost no sodium.
So I love these and they come in some great flavors. The pina colada one is my favorite right
now. So I’m very particular about what little caffeine that I have.
This is my chai tea. I have it every morning. And when I’m traveling, like, yeah, I could go to a
coffee shop or a cafe.
And sometimes I do, but I find that the caffeine content is so different than what I have at home
that I really don’t know how to gauge it. And I always end up having like too much or too little,
but I have a teaspoon of this every morning and I’m only going to be gone for three mornings.
So I only need a little bit.
I take my little steeper ball, put it in here and that’s all set. Some fun ones. I have these kind
max protein bars.So these are a little different. They’re higher in fat than most of the other protein bars that I
have, but sometimes I need that. Like when I’m home, I’m often looking for stuff that’s kind of
lower in various macros, but when I’m traveling, a lot of times I can go hours and hours without
eating at all.
So sometimes I just need something dense to eat. This fits that bill. This has four in there.
I’m going to take it out of the box so it takes up less space. And also keep in mind, this is not
just for me. Giacomo will 100% also be eating this stuff.
Fruits and veg are the hardest thing to find on the road. Carbs, easy. Fats, easy.
Protein, harder. Fruits and veg, hardest. I am going to bring some freeze-dried strawberries
with me.
Again, this, I’m going to take this out. I was also looking for kale chips, like the Rhythm kale
chips. I freaking love those, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.
I haven’t been able to find them anywhere. Did they go out of business, guys? Please don’t
break my heart. Each bag here is 50 calories, rehydrated.
This probably amounts to about 125 or so grams of strawberries, so not bad. There’s about a
pound of strawberries total in these four little bags. A couple fun ones.
These are brand new. Giacomo found these actually. Power Crunch protein crisps.
I don’t know if they make flavors that aren’t vegan, but this one definitely is. They’re shaped like
Pringles. They come in a little Pringles can.
They don’t taste exactly like Pringles. They definitely don’t taste like they’re made out of potato,
and the first ingredient is pea protein, which would make me think I would hate them, but they
are really very good. Half of a can of this is 10 grams of protein.
I’m going to bring these. Giacomo’s going to be like, no, I don’t want any. And then as soon as I
start eating them, he’s going to be like, can I have some? So I’ll bring them both.
These are the Lenny and Larry’s protein pretzels, fitzels. The whole bag, if you ate this whole
bag, it’s three servings. Don’t eat the whole bag at once, but it’s 14 fat, 39 carb, 20 protein, and
they are very, very good, especially when you’re on the plane and the snacks they’re handing
out are like kind of meh or they’re not even vegan.
These are good things to have. A lot of what we do when we travel is a lot of manual labor. So
again, dense foods that you can eat quickly, very helpful.
A couple of little nut butters. These are maple almond butter, a few of those. And the only
actual meal that I bring with me is my breakfast.So it’s going to be, I’m a full convert now, guys. I’m a full convert. I’m not even having the Kashi
anymore.
It’s just this one now. I’m going to bag up a serving of the maple almond Wheaties, a serving of
my edamame puffs, about 20 grams of raisins in there. And when I get there, we’ll buy soy milk.
When all is said and done, this breakfast is going to like kickstart the day with 50 grams of
protein. So even if I do go eight hours without being able to eat something, which is not ideal,
like I got a really good headstart. So I’m going to bag those up now.
The only thing I forgot to show you guys was this bag of daring chicken. Tomorrow morning,
before we leave, I’m going to throw this in the air fryer for about 15 minutes or so, and then put
it in a Ziploc, take it with us. We’ll be in the air for lunch.
I can throw this on almost anything that I can find and make it a real lunch or pair it with some
of the things I have here, but I don’t want to cook it now because then it’ll not be as fresh
tomorrow. You know how any kind of chip is like half air? As long as you know you’re going to
put it somewhere where you’re not going to squish it, you can kind of pop it, release a little bit
of the air, and then just tape it back up. It’s going to go from taking up this much space to
taking up this much space.
So that’s what it condensed down to. All of it. One of the things that I like to do before I head
out on a trip is take a few minutes to make the house nice and tidy.
Water the plants, put away the dishes, throw out any food that’s going to go bad, fill the bird
feeder. Little things that help me slip back into my routine as soon as I get home without
feeling overwhelmed by chaos as soon as I walk in the door. Here is the flight outfit.
Comfort is king anytime I travel, and everything that I have fit very easily in this here so I don’t
have to check a bag. When you’re at the airport, to get all of your steps in is a really smart thing
to do because sometimes you’re here for hours and it just makes sense to get as much
movement in as you can before you sit for four hours. I just wanted to point out that Giacomo
did in fact eat my chips even though he said he didn’t want me.
When you are traveling, you are almost inevitably going to end up at some kind of restaurant,
and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now. We’re going to meet up with some friends, pick
up some stuff for the booth tomorrow, and have dinner. So I am currently looking up the menu
online, which I think is a really helpful thing to do so that you can have a good idea of what
you’re going to get that’s going to keep you on track before you get there.
And I’m psyched about this place because they have homemade seitan with a bunch of
different flavors. They have different kinds of salads, different sides of vegetables. I don’t know
exactly what I’m going to get yet, but seitan is definitely going to be on the menu.
So we do this two different ways. Sometimes we’ll just instacart the food that we want to thehotel, but since we had a rental car this time, we decided to go to the grocery store and pick up
the food that we thought we were going to need for the next few days of the expo. So we
decided to make tofurky sandwiches because that’s very easy to make and bring to the expos.
We also got some apples, I got some sugar snap peas, and some carrots, some soy milk for the
cereal, and Alice also got some cereal for herself there too. Now we’re in the hotel room, and as
we expected, and I’m very happy, we have our refrigerator, we have a microwave. Not every
hotel has this, but we do like to call ahead and make sure that the place we’re booking has it.
Now even though I got ahead on my workouts here, I did take my bands with me and when I’m
able to, I squeeze in a quick full body workout. And I usually do two to three sets of each body
part. It doesn’t have to be the best workout of your life to be enough to tell your muscles, hey
there muscles, like yep we still need you, don’t go anywhere.
And here is that breakfast in action before we head out to the expo. Hey guys, I just have to
redact these that I showed you at the beginning of the video. They are trash, do not get them.
Two out of ten. If you buy them, I will not take responsibility for them. Not good.
All right guys, so we are at the Boulder Boulder right now, currently setting up. I’ll give you a
shot of the booth when it’s all set up. Our backdrop just fell down.
Hold. All right, crisis averted. So I wanted to show you that we bring these, crisis not averted,
we bring these Tofurky sandwiches and that’s what we will have once things get, like once
things start taking off and we get really busy.
It is about two o’clock. We have been working at the Boulder Boulder since, it opened at 10, but
we got here at seven. So I haven’t eaten anything since six, which is, what is that, eight hours
right? See I told you I can easily go eight hours without eating anything at these events, but I’m
sitting down, I’m taking a break and I’m gonna eat this sandwich that I made here.
It’s just Tofurky, chow cheese, mustard, Dave’s Killer Bread. That’s all it is, but you know, getting
that in is gonna be the thing that carries me through the end of the day and then there will be
like a much bigger meal later. So you know, it’s not perfect when we’re doing these events.
It just, it can’t be by definition, but these are the things that we do to try to keep ourselves on
track when we are working these very busy events. We got rained out a little bit early. Weather
changed pretty abruptly, so now I’m walking back to the hotel to get our car so that we can put
all the electronics in it and not have to walk it in the rain.
So getting our steps in, we’re getting our steps in, been on our feet all day and it’s been a really
good day. Even with the rain, it’s still been a nice day. Post show, we found an Indian buffet
nearby and although it didn’t have quite as much vegan food as Happy Cow suggested it might,
I was still able to make a nice filling plate that had fruits and vegetables.So because I was still on East Coast time, I woke up super early at like 5 a.m., which is very early
for me because I had several hours before I had to be at the booth and I didn’t just want to sit
in the hotel room all morning. I decided to go out and get a nice walk and have a decaf latte at
a cafe before I headed over to the booth. It had rained pretty heavily the night before and even
though we pulled everything under the tent and lowered the tent quite a bit, everything still got
pretty soggy overnight.
So it took us a while to set this back up. It usually doesn’t take us this long on day two and we
had to pull everything in really tight under the tent to make sure nothing got ruined. So it was it
was a challenging expo, I would say, but we got it all set up.
We ended up having a good day two, stayed mostly dry and the booth looked great when it was
set up and here’s what it looks like walking down the street from the other side. By the end of
day two, we were absolutely wiped. We went into Denver to City O’ City and I got a Caesar salad
with buffalo seitan on top of it, but I was so hungry and exhausted that I forgot to film it for you
guys.
So here is my sad face and my empty table. One thing I didn’t mention that I do on all of my
trips is I sleep with White Noise. It’s just a White Noise app on my phone that I leave my phone
charged, plug it in, get to bed at a really good time and turn that on and it kind of adds an
element to every place we stay being the same, which makes it a lot easier to fall asleep no
matter where we are.
So now the expo is over and we’re flying home today, but we decided to meet up with some
great friends for lunch and I got this black bean chili for lunch because I wasn’t very hungry at
this point. It came with a bunch of chips but I passed on those because I knew it wouldn’t make
me feel great. And then we had time for one more meal before we headed out and again I got a
Caesar salad and this loaded potato soup at Watercourse Foods in Denver.
And at first I was like, oh this is kind of a lot of food before we head out, but I was very grateful
that we had this because all of our flights ended up being super duper delayed. Like delayed by
an hour, then another hour, then another hour until Giacomo and ended up not flying out till
about 10 p.m. Colorado time and Alice’s poor flight got canceled overnight. I didn’t plan for this
part of the video.
It is five in the morning. We just got home because our flight was so long delayed that it ended
up basically being a red eye and then we had to drive the hour to get home. So this video was
all about how to not get thrown off of your routine and after sleeping about 30 minutes on the
overnight flight, now it’s five in the morning and I have to decide what to do.
So if I try to give myself a full night’s sleep right now I’m going to sleep till three o’clock in the
afternoon, right? Is that right? One o’clock. I’ll sleep till one o’clock in the afternoon. I don’t
want to do that because then I’ll be up all night the following night.So I think I’m going to try to get like maybe five or so hours of sleep right now, wake up at 10
and pray to God that I fall asleep tonight as well. Yeah, when we when we plan these YouTube
videos out, I like to kind of have an idea of what I’m going to show you, how it’s going to go, but
that is the very nature of trips is sometimes often I would say it doesn’t go the way you planned
for it to go. I was not planning on eating a bowl of cereal at 4 45 in the morning before passing
out for five hours and getting up and doing two days worth of work in one.
I did get to see this guy though, I missed him so much. Oh boy, it is a scorcher today and I’m
doing everything in my power to not turn on the air conditioner. So I’m not just greasy, I’m
sweaty.
Anyway, that was a rough day after only five hours of sleep and it did still take me a few days to
re-regulate my clock to get back on schedule here, but I could have been knocked off so much
worse. So that’s the point of this video is I just wanted to show you some of the tactics that I use
to prevent myself from completely derailing every month when I have one of these trips. Do
you guys like these kinds of videos? Because I travel a lot, so if you have questions or things you
want to know about traveling tips or tricks, just let me know.
I’m happy to make more of these and if you’re looking for any kind of one-on-one coaching,
that’s what we do at Vegan Proteins, that’s what we’ve been doing since 2008. I will leave a link
for one-on-one coaching for the coaching assessment in the description down below along with
some other freebies like meal plans and a one-month free trial to our Muscles by Brussels
membership. If you like the video, don’t forget to like the video, subscribe, hit the bell, all the
things I’m supposed to tell you to do at the end of a YouTube video, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Bye!
