The Paleo Vacation in Greece

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Vacation for me used to always mean going on a diet before the vacation, gaining weight from out of control eating while on vacation and a diet again when I got home. Kind of takes the fun out of vacation. Plus, I usually felt pretty crappy the whole time I was away because I always ate too much. Sound familiar? Well, welcome to the new and improved way to travel. You can still go on vacation and eat well and you won’t have to “diet” when you get back home.

Let’s start with plane food. We never eat it. I actually think I suffer less jet lag since going paleo and skipping out on plane food. We plan ahead and take food with us. Here are a few of the things we often travel with: egg muffins, granola, almond flour blueberry muffins, prosciutto or beef jerky, hard boiled eggs, chopped vegetables, fruit, nuts and sometimes paleo cookies (because it is, after all, vacation). On our recent trip to Greece, we even took some Julie Salad in a glass container.

Our trip to Greece was pretty fabulous and we had beautiful weather every day.

No need to take my daily vitamin D3 supplements. Although it was a beach holiday and we did do plenty of lying about in lounge chairs at the beach, we also found time for a daily workout or some fun play.

Chris and I did a 15 kilometer hike up and down along the cliffs and found some beautiful deserted beaches to explore.

We got lost for awhile and found ourselves wandering through olive groves.

We went on a different hike a few days later and saw wild turtles just hanging out in the pine forests.

We all tried out paddle boarding for the first time.

Julie peddled her kids around in a pedalo.

We did some bootcamp workouts at the playground (much to the delight of a little girl who was very impressed with Julie’s double-under rope skipping…it’s great to get applause while you’re working out!).

We also tried our hands at volleyball (epic fail), ping pong, tag in the water and in the volleyball court, swimming, billiards and soccer on the beach.

But what did we eat? (I know that’s what you really want to know!)

Well, following a paleo eating plan is not all that hard on vacation. Really. You CAN do it. Every morning we ate at the resort buffet. This would have been the highlight of my previous vacations pre-paleo. Pancakes, french toast, pastries, donuts, nutella, bread of all shapes and sizes and lots of cereal. However, if you look closely, breakfast buffets usually do have other choices! We had eggs (omelettes, poached, fried and soft boiled). There was some disappointing bacon (it was more like fried Spam) so I stayed clear of it. There was salad, Greek, of course. There was plenty of fresh fruit and…there was Greek yogurt. I don’t really do dairy, but I did eat some of this. You can’t really go to Greece and not eat Greek yogurt.

We had delicious seafood. Octopus, squid, fish, shrimp and mussels. We had huge shanks of meat (lamb and pork) one night and tender beef fillet another night. I also indulged in my all time favorite grilled halloumi cheese (it’s an unpasteurized cheese made from sheep’s milk).

Don’t you think just about anything would taste good if this was where you were eating?

 

We managed to eat well and stay active. Were we perfect? No, of course not. Chris enjoyed some Baklava and I had some ice cream. We may have also had several bottles of wine, gin and tonics, mojitos and margaritas. But hey, what happens in Greece stays in Greece!

Do you have travel tips for staying on your eating plan? Share in the comments…we love comments (and we want to know what you eat on vacation, too!) 😉

 

 

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