Most people expect to “blow” their diet and skip workouts while away from home. They expect to eat more, exercise less, and gain weight. As a result, they don’t even make the effort, and instead of taking control, they resign themselves to maintenance at best or back-sliding at worst. This negative expectancy leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I want you to expect to succeed while you’re away. Set up positive expectations to come home feeling lean, healthy, happy and proud of yourself. Resolve now that you will continue making progress during your trip. Not only can you plan to “stay in shape” over your trip, but you can plan to improve! All you have to do is make the decision, follow my instructions and you will succeed.

Find somewhere that has a kitchen and go food shopping the day you check in. This way your eating lifestyle is no different than it is when you’re home, right?

Prepare most of your meals yourself, and save restaurants and eating out to just a few special treats.

Bonus tip: Go food shopping immediately after checking in. The first thing we do after arriving, is to make a beeline straight to the local grocery store. We take a shopping list to avoid multiple trips to the store.

Once you have a fully-stocked refrigerator and kitchen, your meal planning and preparation are no different than it is when you are home. Also, have you seen what hotel restaurant meals cost these days? Buying and cooking your own food can save you a small fortune!

When presented with opportunities to snack or indulge during your trip during buffets and parties, skip them and save yourself for the proper meals. Empty snacks like chips, dips, pretzels, cookies, salami, candies, punch, liquor will pile on the calories but won’t satisfy you or fill you up properly.

Choose premium quality, satisfying foods and stick to proper meals instead of grazing on mindless snacks. As you know, satisfying proteins and wholesome carbs are what your body really wants to stay lean, healthy and happy, so save yourself for the good stuff, and pass on the snacks.

When it comes to travel, I’ve noticed there always seems to be an increase in the frequency of presented opportunities to eat and drink. So I take this into account by adjusting the portion sizes of my meals slightly. When it gets to meal time, reduce the size of your home cooked meals slightly (mainly reducing carbs and retaining protein and veggies), and select smaller portions and fewer items when eating out. Then when a random food, drink or treat is offered to you (like it always is on holiday), you’ll have more of a choice to have it now or later (see next tip).

One of the most important rules to remember is the law of energy balance, which states: To ensure you are burning body fat, you must be consuming fewer calories than you are using each day. Eating too much will always get stored as fat – even healthy food. Also, small amounts of anything – even junk food – will NOT get stored as fat if you stay in a calorie deficit.

There’s no reason to deprive yourself of things you enjoy as you travel. Just make sure you don’t spill over into fat storage by getting overly full. As long as you enjoy your favourite foods in moderation, and you keep active, you won’t overdo it, and it won’t end up around your waistline.

Imagine yourself at a restaurant with friends. You’ve just finished your mains, are feeling quite full and satisfied, but the others still want dessert. You may be thinking, “It’s now or never, and I don’t want to feel deprived. Sod it, I’ll just have it NOW.”

Why not instead tell yourself, “That dessert looks good, but I’ve eaten plenty already, maybe I’ll take a portion home with me to have tomorrow evening (LATER) after my workout.” In this case, you aren’t denying yourself, you’re simply choosing to save the food for when you’re actually hungry. Now you’ve got something to look forwards to the following night.

Another alternative is simply telling yourself that there will be another time (LATER) you can enjoy something similar. Food is always plentiful in modern society, so don’t feel like the opportunity will never be presented to you again. These days there are endless social opportunities to eat.

During a recent holiday, the family decided after lunch to get some ice cream. I was happy to let them enjoy theirs, but I decided I would wait till another day. I wasn’t hungry because I’d just recently had lunch. A few days later, I knew dessert was expected after dinner so I saved some space and enjoyed a delicious ice cream without feeling full or bloated from eating too much.

To achieve a healthy balance, we need to allow ourselves enough leeway to enjoy our favourite foods and not feel deprived, but still demand enough compliance from ourselves towards mindful eating so that we get the health and fitness results we want.

Many typical restaurant meals can contain over 1000 calories in the main course alone! If you add an appetiser and a dessert you could add another 1000 calories easily. One slice of cheesecake alone has over 700 calories in it, cheese nachos or mozzarella sticks have 800 calories and a typical steak with fries has 1200 calories. That’s half your daily calories for the day just to maintain your weight gone right there.

Do what lean people do and keep restaurant foods to infrequent special occasions, and make smart choices with quantity and quality while eating out. Here are some tips:

You know your schedule is going to get hectic during your travels. Anticipate what’s coming up, and schedule a few workouts during the trip on your calendar. By doing so, you won’t be caught unprepared. Make it fun by inviting someone to join you!

Also, where are you going to train during your trip? Naturally, this depends on your personality and favorite training style. If I can find a gym in the area, I’ll go there, but if I can’t find a gym nearby I do a workout in my hotel room – even with no equipment at all. You could pack resistance bands if you like.

Either way, if you want to stay in shape while traveling, I think everyone should learn how to do at least a handful of challenging body weight resistance exercises including pull-ups, inverted rows (you can do them under a table), push-ups, dips, one-legged squats, Bulgarian split squats and of course, an assortment of abdominal and core exercises.

Almost all hotels at least have cardio machines in their gyms (if not, stairwells = great cardio). Cardio is also easy to do outdoors, weather permitting.

A little mini-rant: About those hotel “gyms”… I sometimes want to go back to the concierge, smack him upside the head and say, “You said you had a gym. That’s not a gym, that’s a workout room!” (more like a workout closet!)

If you try to “wing it” and squeeze in your workouts whenever you have time left over, you’ll find that there never is any time left over! Somehow your daily activities always seem to “expand” to fill the hours in every day. So schedule some training sessions in your calendar just like you would any other appointment or event.