The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #157: 10 Travel Strategies To Keep You Focused On Your Weight Loss Goals

• Kristin Jones

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Ever notice how vacations can flip a switch in your brain—from grounded and intentional to impulsive and “whatever goes” almost instantly?

In this episode, Kristin explores why travel is such a common trigger for emotional eating—and how you can enjoy food, freedom, and unforgettable experiences without falling into all-or-nothing thinking. Using a real-life cruise story filled with buffets, FOMO, and soft-serve ice cream, she breaks down what’s actually happening in your brain when routine disappears—and how to stay connected to who you are, even when everything feels different.

You’ll learn ten practical, realistic strategies you can actually use on real trips with real temptations. She talks about setting vacation intentions that feel empowering (not restrictive), using first-bite awareness to get more enjoyment from less, and keeping simple anchor habits—like movement, hydration, and a quick morning check-in—to remind your brain, I’m still me.

Kristin also dives into emotional awareness on the road, showing how simply naming what you feel can reduce urgency and interrupt the automatic “feel → eat” cycle so many women experience when stress rises or plans change. You’ll hear about a 10-second reset you can use anywhere, gentle “plus-one” movement ideas to calm your nervous system, and a satisfy-don’t-stuff approach that makes leaving food on your plate (or sharing bites) feel neutral—not shameful.

This episode isn’t about perfection. It’s about coming home feeling proud, energized, and aligned with your goals—without needing a “reset” when you return.

If you’re traveling soon (or still trying to recover from your last trip), this one’s for you.


Connect with me online:

1. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristinjonescoaching/
2. You Tube channel, Kristin Jones Coaching: https://www.youtube.com/@KristinJonesCoaching44

3. You Tube channel, Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@breakthroughpodcast-44
3 . Website: https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com

If you want to learn how to stop nighttime eating, get my 3 Day Nighttime Snacking Reset: https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/nighttime-snacking-reset

Needing more specific and direct support for your emotional eating and overeating? Check out my online course, Stop Dieting Start Feeling, and my personalized coaching program, Breakthrough To You.

If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to leave a review on the platform you used to listen and share it with your friends on your Instagram stories. Also, be sure to follow me on Instagram @breakthroughemotionaleating, and don't hesitate to slide into my DMs to share your thoughts ...

SPEAKER_00:

Do you want to lose weight but struggle to stay committed to a meal plan because you constantly feel hungry? Does food provide you comfort when you're bored, angry, lonely, or sad? If so, you are in the right place. My name is Kristen Jones, and I'm a life coach specializing in emotional eating and weight loss, and I'm also a lifelong emotional eater. I want to provide you with information, motivation, and support so you too can learn to manage your issues with food and develop a healthy relationship with yourself. Welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. My name is Kristen Jones, and thank you so much for joining me this week. About two weeks ago, uh yeah, on in the Thanksgiving week here in the United States, I went on a Mexican cruise with my family. And there were 13 of us, and it was a trip that had been planned for six months, and we were all, we had a great time. It was, it was super, super fun. We went to uh Puerto Verde, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. And in anticipation of this trip, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to show up for myself in the way of eating. Because if you've ever been on a cruise, you know that there is just food everywhere and it's constantly available to you, and it's in unlimited amounts, and it's just something that you can get really, really caught up in, especially when you're traveling with other people. And the reason I wanted to do this podcast is I thought about this a lot. And I actually came up with this while I was on the cruise. And the reason I wanted to do this podcast is because I wanted to help my listeners stay connected to their goals, to the direction that they're taking in their lives, the things that they're doing while traveling, either for business or for pleasure, without feeling guilt, without feeling restriction, and without feeling like you have to be perfect. Because that is something that that we try sometimes we try so hard in our regular lives to do that. And when you're on vacation, that seems next to impossible. Or when you're out of your your regular, uh, your regular location and your regular routine. And it's so easy to fall into this pattern of wanting to wanting to try and be perfect. And then, and then once, once the one domino falls over and you're not perfect, then all of a sudden it's like everything just it all cascades down from there. So I really felt like there were there are 10 strategies that I want to lay out. And the best part is you don't have to do all 10. Anytime you go on vacation, whether it's or you go on a work trip or you're out of your element, out of your environment, these 10 strategies you can use and you don't have to use all of them. My recommendation is to pick two or three of the suggestions that I make and go ahead and implement those while you're on your trip. And and a lot of these things you want to think about ahead of time. So you kind of have a have a plan going into things. Because as my first business coach has always told, always told me, what gets planned is what gets done. If we don't plan for things, that's when things go off the rails because we don't have any idea about what we're gonna do and we kind of just wing it. Winging it's never a good idea. Um so why is vacation or being out of your element or being around people that you're not usually around? Why is that such a trigger for emotional eaters? One of the things that I've learned over the course of my eight years of coaching emotional eaters is that as a whole, and I'm not gonna make say every single person, but as a whole, I have seen way more often than not, emotional eaters have a degree of people pleasing. They also have a degree of perfectionism. But the people pleasing is usually pretty evident. And that is usually for people who have issues with food. There are usually elements of people pleasing that are that are within their personalities. And so when emotional eaters get around other people, they don't want anybody to feel uncomfortable, they don't want to do anything different, they want to kind of just go along to get along with everybody else. Well, a majority of the population, when they go on vacation, they want to let loose. They want to do whatever they want to do. They want to eat and drink as much as they possibly can, especially if you're on something like a cruise, which is all inclusive and you can drink and eat unlimited. Um, it's something that that emotional eaters feel that pressure of having to keep up or wanting to keep up and not wanting other people, not wanting to be different, wanting to go along. And that can really, really get them in trouble, especially when they have long-term goals that they've been working on and they don't want to disappoint themselves and they want to be able to maintain what they're what they're doing and the progress that they've already made. But it's so easy to get caught up in the moment of what is going on around you. Um, there are so many things about cruises that create this disconnect with your goals. Uh, buffet eating is one of them. Um FOMO, fear of missing out, um, of of not trying every little thing on the buffet. We have to try everything. We have to try every everything that's on the menu in the in the dining room. Because what if somebody talked about something that we didn't get to have? So there's all of those things that come into play. And if you already have emotional eating triggers, changing your environment is actually only going to exacerbate them. It's only going to make them kind of be under the spotlight because not only are you in your kind of thrown off, because even though we all are so always so excited to go on vacation, we're in a totally different environment with different people. And it can really, especially if we're going to a foreign country, it can really, really throw people off. And the an anxiety can be created. And oftentimes, people who have anxiety often have issues with food because food is a natural thing that calms us down. It regulates our nervous system. It's something that we give to ourselves and it calms us down. It controls, you know, it lets our lets our bodies relax. And so when we're presented with those situations, our go-to is, oh, I'm I want to eat something. Doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can be a really a good, happy, exciting thing. And people can still want to turn to food to kind of quell the anxiety or quell the the anxiety of being someplace different and being someplace new. Also, when we are in something like a vacation, or especially when we're on a cruise or an all-inclusive uh resort, we have that all or nothing, all or nothing feeling. Either we're all in and we're getting all of our money's worth, or we're not gonna do anything and we're gonna feel completely restricted and completely deprived. And so we have to learn that believing, we can't believe that we have to be perfect all the time when we are doing our, when we're on vacation. Because there are gonna be days that you're gonna have, you're gonna be able to maintain what you've always done. And there's gonna be days where you are not even gonna come close to that. And that's okay. It's okay if that happens, but we have to just remember that we have to, and and emotional leaders have an issue with being doing that all or nothing thinking, and um, in the for the most part. And so we want to, that's that is a natural part of being on a vacation, is you're like, I'm all in because it's totally different. And why would I not want to get my money's worth? Why would I not want to have such an amazing time? And and what we need to learn is that we can have an amazing time and we don't have to completely abandon the things that we've been working on. Um, so the shift that needs to happen is that we always need to maintain that belief that our lives and our goals and honoring ourselves happens whether we're at home, whether we're at work, or whether we're 5,000 miles away from those places and we're on a vacation, we're sitting on a beach, or we're sitting in a cafe, or we're, you know, doing something that's, you know, walking through a museum or visiting a church or hiking or whatever it is. Our goals are still with us. We don't become a different person. We stay who we are, but we have to remind ourselves because our brain kind of like disappears and kind of does these things that creates this almost like we have we take on this different personality or this different persona. We have to remind ourselves we are who we are, we are who we always will be, and we get to maintain that while we're traveling throughout the world or while we're while we're on vacation, while we're on a business trip, whatever that is, we can maintain the respect that we always have for ourselves by honoring what the things are that we're working on in our lives. So the strategies that I want to introduce to you today that I that I encourage you to consider for your next business trip or vacation are not considered, I don't want you to consider them rules. I want you to consider them intentions. And they're things that you are intending to do. And we always want to go into things not thinking we have to be 100% perfect all the time. These are intentions. Intentions are not rules, so we're not breaking rules. We're intending to do something. We have the best case scenario, we have the best intentions of doing it, and we do commit to it, but we don't want to see them as restricting, we don't want to see them as depriving, and we want to not see it as we have to do all of them all the time. And that's one of the reasons why I would suggest that you only pick two or three of these strategies. So the first one is just that to create vacation intentions. So thinking ahead of time, I want to honor the weight loss that I've already had. I want to honor my emotional eating, I want to honor the person that I have already grown into that I've become. So if you've been following my podcast and you've been, you've been listening to me and you've been following some of the things that I that I recommend for emotional eaters, you don't want to give that up when you go away. You actually, it's a great opportunity to practice and to actually hone your skills. But our brain is going to always do what our brain expects itself to do. So if you've been on a cruise before and you've struggled with vacations and you've struggled with going places and just completely going off the rails, if that's what you keep saying to yourself, and that's what you keep telling yourself, and that is your line of thinking, that is what your brain's gonna do. It's going to remember, oh yeah, this is what we do when we're away from home. We eat all the time. We buy things when we go to the group, you know, we buy things when we go to the gas station or we stop by, you know, little shops, and that's not something you would ordinarily do. And all of a sudden it's a but I'm on vacation, so that's what I want to do. We need to set intentions of uh and and really come up with what are our non-negotiables or our things that we really want to stick with and be very specific about them and make those intentions that I intend to do this, but it's not locked in stone. And if it doesn't happen all the time, it's okay. We give ourselves that freedom. One of the questions, the a couple of the of possible intentions that you could do is I want to feel energized, connected, and in control while I'm on this vacation. That's an intention. An intention is almost like an affirmation. Another example could be I want to come home and feel proud of how I showed up for myself while I was on this trip. That's those are all great intentions. Intentions are things that we put out there. This is how we want to show up, this is what we want to do. I intend, I really want to always split my meals in half. I always want to find someone to share a meal with. Great intention. Will it always happen? No. Could you always decide that you could you decide that you don't want to eat all your food? Absolutely, you could. So those are all things that you can do, but you can make those intentions ahead of time. Second strategy is what is called the first bite awareness. And first bite awareness is the practice of slowing down when you're eating and really recognizing and appreciating the first few bites of food and then deciding do I really need to finish this? Is it something that's necessary? Um, because the reason why this strategy works is because the first one or two bites of anything new that you eat is always going to be the best bites. Because your the your brain is your taste buds aren't numb to the flavor, your brain is open and aware of something new that you're eating. It's there's some excitement. And what ends up happening is after the first few bites, when it's so good and it's so delicious, the rest of the meal for emotional eaters, they are chasing that first bite. They're chasing that first bite sensation, that feeling. So if you understand the first bite awareness, you can realize that, like, oh, it's never going to be as good as those first few bites. So how about I move on to something else and I try the first bites of something else? And so we get to try more things, but we also continue to get that first bite excitement, those first few bites, but we end up eating less food because we're not finishing everything, then moving to our next thing, especially when now you know it's not going to be as satisfying. And that's just part of how our taste buds work and how our brain works. And so really deciding and picking and choosing what it is that you want to have and giving yourself those first few bites, but realizing that you don't need to finish everything because when you finish something, you're really just chasing that first bite excitement. And we can let that, we can let that go. Um and it re again, it reduces overeating because it it results in you not actually finishing things, but also being growing an awareness of when you want to be picky about things, when you want to actually taste certain things and you want to enjoy them. And so you decide that you're not going to finish everything. And that's going to prevent you from getting from getting overly full. It's one of the things that I do all the time is I go in to a meal and especially or a buffet, especially, I go in thinking, what are the things that I really want to try? I always walk through the buffet first, all the way through, and see what all the options are. And then I decide what are the, you know, top three things, four things, five things that I really want to have. And I don't take very much of each, but I only really take enough to have those two or three or four bites, and then I'm done. And I don't have anything else, but I go in with the intention. I always have the intention of I'm gonna try as many things as I can, but I'm gonna try them in small amounts. So, and I'm always very aware of not putting myself in a position of getting too full because that physically makes me really uncomfortable. And so I really always want to make sure that I'm not getting overly full when I go to a meal. So, with the intention of, I'm only gonna have two or three bites of each thing, that allows me to kind of stay in control and keep myself kind of in line. So, some questions that you can ask yourself as you're eating is is this, am I still enjoying this? Am I still enjoying this? Or is this really hitting the spot for me? Or am I just doing this? Am I just eating because I'm bored? Am I just eating thinking the next bite's gonna be a better bite? I did catch myself doing this. We had at one of our one of our dinners, they had a variety of creme creme brulees throughout the ship and at various restaurants. And I remember the first night's creme brulee was not very good. It was way too thin and it hadn't set up enough and it it just wasn't very good. And I didn't have very much of it. The second night, we had the offering of a raspberry creme brulee. And I was like, oh, okay, raspberry. Okay, I wonder if that's gonna make it kind of, you know, gel up a little bit more, solidify a little bit more, as if it's gonna be a better creme brulee. So I had the first couple bites, I had the first couple bites of it, and I remember I caught myself, like it was probably, I think I'd eaten almost half of it, and it wasn't very good. And it set up a little bit better than the first nights, but I realized that like I was just eating it hoping that somehow it was gonna start tasting better. And it and it wasn't. So um I just moved on. I moved on to something else. I just put it aside because it was like, this isn't gonna get any better. And I remember thinking that, like, this is not gonna get any better. And I should really stop because it's really not very good. Um, so that is that those are those are definite things that you can that you can ask yourself and really kind of keep yourself online. Um, strategy number three is having anchor behaviors that you go back to and you keep in your routine, whether you're at home or whether you're away. For me, my anchor routines are getting up early, getting up at the same time that I get up during during when I'm home, always going and working out, going to the gym. You know, on a cruise ship, they always have a gym. Uh, I always stay at hotels that have gyms and movement, getting up, working out, um, drinking water, doing the my my my morning routine that I have of of of you know, my gratitude and that sort of thing. Always making sure that I maintain at least those two or two or three keystone routines that I know are gonna keep me grounded. They're gonna remind me who I am, and they're gonna let me stay in that flow that I have when I'm home, because that is when I'm most successful, is when I have that routine and that established, those established anchor behaviors. And those anchor behaviors really are a part of who I am. So I remember better who I am when I'm on vacation, when I'm doing those. Um, strategy number four is emotional awareness and emotional awareness specifically while traveling, because traveling can throw us off. Things can happen. You're in you're in areas that you're not familiar with, you are dealing with things that you probably don't regularly deal with, like Ubers, like um, you know, receptionists, like you know, people at front desk people, um going into strange areas where you don't know people. And our emotional awareness, we want to maintain our emotional awareness. And when I say emotional awareness, I mean you want to check in with yourself. You want to remember to ask yourself when something is happening throughout the day. And you're feeling a certain way, check in with your emotions. What exactly is going on? How am I actually? What am I actually feeling right now? What am I, what am I thinking? And one of the ways to maintain your emotional awareness is to name your emotions, to name how you're feeling. And what that does is it identifies and it kind of takes you out and makes you the third party because you're like actually watching yourself. You're you're becoming an observer. So it gives you some psychological distance from how you're actually feeling. And it allows you to process the feelings a little bit better and a little bit cleaner because you're no longer in the emotion. Now you're kind of analyzing it. And it calms down your nervous system and it reduces the intensity of any urges that you have to kind of make those emotions go away. And for emotional leaders, we use food for that. It also breaks the pattern of you feel something and you eat. In this case, now you feel something, now you identify it. Now you actually verbalize it and you you give it a name, you give it an identity. And that can be really, really helpful because it interrupts to pattern interrupt to a pattern that you've already established that you also know is not a pattern that you really are, that's really working for you at this point. So we're wanting to create those new, those new patterns and those new ways of dealing with things. And so this is a great way to create a pattern interrupt that allows you to be able to kind of step away and be that third-party observer of the emotions in the situation that you're in. One of the things that you can ask yourself is what emotion am I avoiding right now? Because oftentimes when we're feeling things, we're feeling things because we're not wanting to feel something else. Um, and so what feeling am I avoiding can be really, really helpful when it comes to identifying and and and giving that giving that emotion a name and taking you out of being within inside the emotion. Um there are so many vacation triggers that can happen. The concept of having to be excessively on time and feeling rushed. Um for me, not having alone time, very challenging. Um expectations from your family, expectations of the people that you're traveling with. And also just being tired, just being tired and then not always performing our best when we're tired. Um, and so all those things come into play. So recognizing and identifying, like, what am I really feeling? Maybe I'm getting snippy with somebody. You don't just need to say, oh, you're just in a bad mood. No, what am I really feeling? What am I feeling? If you're feeling fatigued, maybe you need to slow down, maybe you need to take a 20-minute power nap. But give yourself what you need and identify those things. Strategy number five is practice the pause. And that is what we call the 10-second reset. And it is a way of just calming yourself, giving yourself that little momentary break in uh in situations and circumstances where you just need to remember to breathe because that's inevitably what we always forget to do. So how it works is you're feeling stress, you're feeling that urge to, I want to go to the buffet, I want to stop at the soft serve, which by the way, I love soft serve. I had soft serve every day, and I figured it into what I was gonna eat, and I had soft serve every day, and I did not feel guilty, and I loved it. I loved every single cone I had. Um, you stop, you pause, you breathe in for four seconds, you breathe out for six seconds, and then you ask yourself, what do I actually need right now? What do I need? Ask yourself that question and then let the urge settle before you decide to take the next step, to do something. Okay. So again, pause, breath in four seconds, breath out six seconds. Ask yourself what you actually need, and then give yourself a moment just to consider that. And what that does is it interrupts the interrupt, and again, is a pattern interrupt. It interrupts the automatic response that we have to go straight for food. The breathing calms your nervous system, and the questions bring you back into your body, bring you back into the present moment, and they really help you ground yourself and remind yourself remember who you are. Remember who you are. So most emotional eaters discover that the urges are never usually about food at all, but a lot of times they're about feeling stressed, about having our feelings hurt, about needing a rest, about wanting to take a break, about needing to feel reassured and feeling disconnected to ourselves and to others. And if we can give ourselves that in that 10-second reset, we're good to go. We can get back to where we need to be. Now, strategy number six is the plus one movement. So we already talked about how we need our anchors. And for me, movement is always an always an anchor, but our plus one movements are movements of our body that allow us to help regulate our nervous system. Movement naturally is an emotional regulation. And the goal is to be supportive and not to be punitive. So that plus one movement could be seen as exercise, could be seen as taking a walk around the ship. Um, we want it to be supportive and restorative, not punitive and demeaning. So we want to make sure that we give ourselves those ideas of like, I'm just gonna go outside and take a walk, or I'm gonna sit out on the balcony and watch the ocean go by. And I'm not doing it to punish myself, I just need those moments of time to myself. And that is absolutely okay. Strategy number seven, satisfy, don't stuff. Always go into every single meal committed to leaving some food on your plate. Leave food on your plate, give it to another relative. My nephew Wilson is my go-to. He is the guy that I always send my food to. He will finish every single one of my meals, every single one of my desserts, and and I and I count on that. And I count on it, and I do it every single time we travel together. I will pass off. And usually when we when I'm at, usually when we were at any family function, I'll give him, if I take too much food on my plate, I will give him the rest. And he will happily eat it. Um, so I I just that's just kind of set up, that's just kind of ingrained. I really try not to finish all of my food. I try to leave some food on the on my plate and then pass it over to him. It allows me not to feel guilty about not eating all of my food. It takes me away from scarcity and lets me be abundant and give the excess food that I have to somebody else. And it just makes me feel more in control of what I'm doing. Strategy number eight: dismantle the vacation versus real life mentality. We have to remember vacation is not fantasy land. Vacation is where we are as our real life people, as our real life person, as our identity. And we have to go back to our identity. And we want to make sure that our body doesn't know, our body doesn't know the difference between vacation or real life. The scale does, but our body doesn't know the difference. And so your brain, you have to remind yourself of like, I get to be who I am all the time. I don't have to be a different person. I don't have to act like everything is I am who I am, and I'm gonna maintain my identity and my connection with myself throughout this entire vacation. And I'm gonna come home and I'm gonna, again, be proud of who I am, be proud of how I performed and what I did on this vacation, how I took care of myself. That is so important because again, we don't want to feel disappointed. We don't want to feel like we've let ourselves down. Strategy number nine, plan, plan, and plan. Plan what you're gonna eat. Take a walk through the buffet first and then decide what you're gonna what you're gonna have. If you know the menu, look at the menus and the places that you're gonna go to. But commit to yourself, make a plan, because when you plan, things get done. And lastly, make satisfaction the goal. Make being satisfied. So don't try and diet on a vacation, but allow yourself to eat the things that you want to eat and give yourself that freedom, but also keep in mind that we eat to satisfy. We don't eat to being stuffed. We allow ourselves to have whatever it is that we want, but we keep in mind the first bite awareness and we do the things that we need to do. We combine some of these things together and we remember what our goals are ultimately for ourselves. Once we're back home from vacation and living our regular lives, we always want to make sure that we remember that vacation is a very uh condensed period of time. We have the rest of our lives to live. We want to honor ourselves and do what we need to do for ourselves. The other 360 days of the year, or, you know, however many other days we have of the year. So as I said in the beginning, I only want you to pick two or three. Don't overwhelm yourself. Don't try to do all of these things, but pick two or three that resonate with you and really try to have those things anchor your behavior, your eating behavior during your trip. And remember, we're about being present, we're about enjoying ourselves, but we're not about being perfect because that will only discourage you, that will only upset you, that will only leave you feeling less than, and that is what then turns to emotional eating. So please send me a DM or a comment on any of my Instagram posts. And the question I want to propose to you is how do you stay focused on your goals while on vacation? How do you do that? You can answer this on my YouTube, you can answer this question in a uh in a comment on my uh my podcast episode, or send me a DM at Kristen Jones Coaching and let me know how do you stay focused on your goals when you're on vacation? And what tips would you give to others? So I want you to make sure that you remember, bookmark this, send it to somebody who's going on vacation, somebody maybe who struggles with food. Let them give them the opportunity to have a better experience on their vacation and keep it for yourself. Save this, download it, make sure that you remember this episode because this episode is going to help you. Business trip, going away with friends, going to the lake, going, you know, wherever you're going. Make sure that you keep this so you can refer back and you can remember. I only have to pick two or three. I don't have to be perfect. I get to enjoy myself. I get to eat things that I want to eat, but there are definitely strategies that I can use. So I come home from vacation, proud of myself and feeling really good in my own body. Hope this was helpful. Please let me know if it was, and I will see you all next week. Take care. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you are interested in learning more about how I can help you understand and manage your emotional eating, including the use of hypnosis to uncover the root cause of your eating, go to my website, Kristen Jones Coaching dot com.