I’ve spent the past 3 days away on a work trip and after my last healthy snacks post a lot of you asked me about food that travels well for work or personal trips, so I made a list of all the snacks I brought with me and share them with you here!
TRANSCRIPT
I am totally taking onboard all your feedback that you want some more easy recipes and they are coming your way soon. But today, I'm going to talk about another topic that you've all asked me about or a lot of you have asked me about, which is travel snacks. So what can you take with you on a plane or to stash in a hotel room so that you're not desperately going to the minibar or saying yes to the crappy plain biscuits when you get really, really hungry?
Now, this is a topic that I'm really passionate about because plane food in general is too salty, too sugary, too full of chemicals that help it to last for ages and just really dehydrated and not right for your body. So I always pack like a thousand snacks with me when I go traveling. I'm literally like pretty much need to take the biggest size suitcase just so I can fit all of my snacks in.
And it's just one of those things, I’d rather not get like snack anxiety where I'm left hungry somewhere or if I'm on a trip like I was on the last few days, I'm not in between meals thinking, "Oh, I'm so hungry, and I don't want to wait," or whatever it might be.
Now, it was a really fun little trip that I've just been on, guys. I basically was away for two to three days with a bunch of amazing fitness professionals from all around the world, US, UK, India, Australia, obviously. It's some incredible, incredible people in Byron Bay doing some awesome fitness device and heart rate testing and it was just so much fun. So I can't wait to post about that and tell you about it after my brain has settled on all the findings.
But today, I'm going to talk you through travel snacks. So these are just some things that you can literally stash in your bag, in your hand bag wherever so that you've got something you can eat at any given time. They're not main meals, they're just little supermarket snacks. Now, we did talk healthy snacks previously. This is slightly different because it has to be stuff you can take with you on a plane, so see how we go.
But I'm going to run through the list of just stuff that I took this trip. So I didn't eat all of this in one day. I promise this was spread across the trip there, the couple of days we spent and then the trip home, of course, me, Justin and Izzy. But I did just write it all down as I packed it so I could tell you about it.
So here are some really cool ideas for those of you who travel frequently for things that you can take with you. The first one, and I mentioned this in my healthy snacks video, but it's worth rementioning because it's just such a cool thing. You have to put this in your hand bag because it's easily squished in your big bag. But dehydrated veggies, amazing. And also dehydrated or baked beans and legumes.
So of course, we talked about the freeze dried broccoli. There's kale chips you can bring. There's freeze dried, even carrots and all that kind of thing these days. But basically I love the broccolis, the kales and then the freeze dried fruits, like these freeze dried strawberries are amazing. Those kinds of things are really great. I find them lower in sugar than regular dried fruit and just really, really great for you. And of course, the veggies are awesome and a great way to get your veggie in the air.
So I love those for travel, I also do like some dried fruits, so I like apricots. They're really high in iron, so I bring a couple of those for me. I also bring some dried mango for Izzy because the long strips of dried mango, not the little ones, but the long ones are just good for her to suck on and it lasts ages. And as long as you keep your hands away from most things ... Speak of the devil, did you hear your ears burning? You wanted to come hang. Okay, you can come give us a cuddle. Anyway, this could go any which way from here.
Anyway, so dehydrated and baked things are great idea. The other thing are baked beans. She wants me to go watch her favourite show. Anyway, dehydrated beans, so things like fava beans and chickpeas that are baked or dehydrated and you can find them literally in any supermarket now, little packets, individually packed already, dehydrated chickpeas, fava beans. I'll buy some next time I go shopping and I will show you here.
So dehydrated veggies, fruit and also beans and legumes, chickpeas. Oh, yum. So those are great. You could also get edamame beans. So I brought this time as well, a couple of little packets of a baked edamame beans. So, really yum.
Next on the list, what else did I pack this time? Oh, yeah. So you can use ziplock bags or I use like reusable silicon bags or you can use beeswax bags if you want to be ... If you want to do that, they're really great too. But basically just pre-chopped veggies, so pre-chopped carrot, pre-chopped cucumber, pre-chopped capsicum. I just shove a whole bunch of those into separate little baggies that I bring with me.
And usually, maybe I'll chew on one on the plane, but mostly I just chuck them in the fridge when I get to the location that I'm at because they're really great just to gnaw on between meals. You're not filling up between a heavier dinner that you might have later, but you have something to snack on. So just chop ones of those and put them in the fridge when you get to your location. It's such a winner.
Next on the list is hard fruits. Now, I don't like to take soft fruits with me for obvious reasons and messy reasons on the plane, but hard fruit. So apples and bananas are my go-to's always. And what I do is I stash them in a place I know they won't get squished or in my hand bag. And then I also bring a whole bunch of individual sachets of nut butter so you can get little individual sachets. I know Pic's Peanut Butter do it. You can also get almond butter and all sorts of things, cashew butter, yum, yum, yum, exactly.
And you can then put them onto your fruit. So you know I love doing this so I'll just, in the plane but not as really great. You open the banana, you squeeze a bit of peanut butter on ... Hold tight, you keep performing for camera there ... and you just ate through it. And the apples are usually stashed in the fridge again at the location I'm at and then you could just slice it, put a bit of nut butter on. It's so great. And guys, this is going to be the easy Santa fix version, so all good.
Next one, I know this is an obvious one at trail mix. Please don't get to the newsagents at the airport and buy those shitty trail mixes that are full of fruit and little chocolate bits and nuts that have been using ... No, exactly ... and nuts that used sunflower oil and canola oils and all that gross stuff to bake them. Get your own either raw or activated or just dry roasted nuts. I don't particularly like raw nuts. I know that's controversial but they kind of bloat me and I know they can be really bloating for people too.
So I love activated or dry roasted and I make a little, again, individual things. I actually use the little containers that I used to use to put for her baby food, her mushy baby food and I just chuck in some nuts into lots of individual ones of those and stash those. You can add if you like broken up bits of your own good quality dark chocolate to that too. I have been known to often do that. In fact, I did it with every nut basket I made this trip.
So, yes, so little nuts and/or nuts and dark chocolate. And I also like to add sometimes goji berries. I don't like a lot of dried fruits because they can be really high in sugar and they can be bloating as well. But goji berries are really good and really high in fibre. So I like to add a few of those sometimes as well. So trail mixes are a really, really cool, stash a few for the plane, stash a few in your bag, happy days.
The other thing is alternative chips. So if you go to any store, yes, you can get the normal packets of chips. But there's also now a great range of like popcorn. So there's like lightly salted popcorn and cheesy popcorns and salt and vinegar popcorns and whatever else. And they're just a better version of saying yes to the chips on the plane, all those horrible soy crisps that they give you on the plane that are full of bad vegetable oils and trans fats. So bags of popcorn, I love taking those. You can get those little individual ones, which is awesome. So you can stash some in your bag, bring some on the plane, awesome.
Another cool thing is cheese and crackers. I mean they taste amazing in the air. That's why Virgin is giving them out for however long. But I like to just bring my own so I just literally, I grab those individual wrapped cheeses and some individual crackers, the ones that I like. Or you can actually just get the packs like they sell on the plane in the cheese section now, except they're like a tenth of the price of the ones you buy on the plane. So why buy $8 cheese and crackers when you can buy $1 ones, I don't know. So they are also a good stack and they're nice and handy and easy.
Another one is jerky. So you can do these whether you're a vegan or not. Beef jerky, turkey jerky or mushroom jerky, tofu jerky, there are so many out there. The one I personally choose, of course, is my own jerky-like meat bar, which is called Chief Bar. We have a beef and chilli flavour and a lamb flavour. They're made from really good quality grass fed just sustainably sourced meat and we also support regenerative farming practices.
So I eat those for my meat source every week. I just have one a week. That's my meat source, done. It's pretty much the only meat I eat, red meat I eat that is. But because I know exactly where it comes from and it's healthier than jerky, less salty, et cetera, et cetera. So @chief_bar, if you want to check that out. But jerky is a great choice, whatever one you go for.
And then muesli bars. So there's nothing wrong with muesli bars, but I would say the easiest tip I've got is look at the back of the pack and just check that each muesli bar, so each serve, has single digits of sugar. So for example, the ones I bought this time, I think they are from Be Natural also, I'll double check. But they had 5.4 grams of sugar per bar, and that's totally acceptable. I'm happy with that. That's basically just over a teaspoon of sugar, a little higher than I normally would like from a whole food snack. But while I'm traveling and if I'm desperate, it's better than going for the Mars bar, any of that kind of stuff.
And I'm also cool with breaking off a little bit and then easy chew on it then. So those are really great. Nut bars are great too, but do be careful. Just because it's a nut bar doesn't mean it's low sugar. You need to check for that on the back. Some of them that are like Be Natural bars, they do have literally like 25 grams of sugar, some of these bars. So look, make sure there's somewhere from zero to nine grams of sugar per bar. That's a really good one.
Low sugar dark chocolate, I mentioned this in the trail mix. I've talked before about any of your kind of Green & Black's or Lindt dark chocolate, somewhere between 85% and 95% ideally but anything with, again, single digits per serve but ideally single digits of sugar per a hundred grams of the product is great. And you can bring a little bit of that because you will have a sweet tooth from time to time.
I didn't bring it this time, but sometimes I also bring little individual lock bags of like those digestives, which are basically an oat biscuit with a little bit of chocolate on top. Again, they're not the healthiest food in the world, but they're better than falling for those airplane biscuits full of chunks of amazing tasting but not great for you things. So muesli bars or digestive biscuits are not too bad.
The other thing you could go for that I always stack, of course, that you can look for, protein bars or health bars. Now, this is also a sticking point in mind and I'm going to go into it in detail and actually can bare a lot of products down the track. But when you're looking at protein bars, you don't want something that's laid in full of chemicals and artificial sugars or something that's really full of dried fruit because the really kind of the actual sugars in the dried fruits will denature the protein. So there's nothing. You're just basically having sugar by the time you eat that bar.
If you're having all the chemicals and artificial sweeteners, it's terrible for your gut health and terrible for your overall health. And it just makes you feel dehydrated and yucky in the plane. So look for health bars that have real ingredients, not many ingredients that don't have ingredients you don't understand the back off, and just do your research. If you can't be bothered doing your research, I don't mean to pimp my own products (Chief Bar) but they're amazing and I made them because I couldn't find anything myself.
You can also find my collagen bars which are really well-sourced beef collagen, plus nuts, plus a tiny bit of monk fruit to sweeten it, which is like the healthiest natural sweetener that's not sugar around. And a little bit of sweet things like vanillas and cinnamons and all that jazz, cacao in the cacao ones, et cetera. So, @chief_bar.
If they're too big for you because they are quite a substantial bar, I also have another brand called Beauty Food, which is about this big. It's at beautyfood.com.au. You can find all these links in my profile, guys. And they literally tastes like the best cookie you've ever tasted, but they are extremely healthy, extremely natural, no crap in there. So you can go for those, but otherwise, just have a look at the back. And if there's a thousand chemicals and numbers on there, no, it's not great. If the first ingredient is dates, it's probably not great unless you're an ultra marathon runner and you really need those sugars.
So those are important. Just keep in mind too that when you're flying about, rushing about, hydration is really important. So keep your water up or if you feel like a light snack, you might want to grab a coconut water, which is full of really good electrolytes as well.
Don't fall for juices because the plane juices are not good and neither are the ones at the airport. All of those are fruit based. They're all going to be really, really high in sugars and liquid sugars are the worst kind because they go straight to spiking your blood sugars, and there's no fibre in them. So don't drink the juices on the plane.
If your kid wants a sip, fine. But it's not the most healthy foods to be stepping down because there's just not the healthiest kind. Wait until you get to the other end. I was going to bar and there's plenty of fresh green veggie juices there being made. Just hold off and have water, have sparkling water, have your tea and have your coconut water if you need something sweet.
So look, they were the things that I stashed. The other thing I did stash as well was some Vita-Wheats, just some like really grainy Vita-Wheats because I also had those little packets of the nut butters, individual nut butters. And if I'm in my room and I'm starving between meals, that can be a really good snack to have with a few veggie sticks.
So those are just some really simple things, guys. And again, it's simple stuff but sometimes it's overwhelming to think about it. Just to recalibrate on a quick list, some of those things were dehydrated veggies and fruits and baked beans and legumes, fava beans, chickpeas, et cetera. Broad beans, ziplock bags or sustainable bags like beeswax bags, and I use the silicon ones of just chopped veggies, chopped hard veggies, so carrots, cucumbers and capsicums. I also do little whole cherry tomatoes, so good and such a good sweet heat.
Also dried fruit, apricots, freeze dried berries, dried mango for the kids. Hard fruit, apples, bananas, but also mandarins also such a fave. So easy to eat on the run and a little individual packets of nut butters, peanut butters, almond butters, et cetera. Trail mix that you make yourself ideally not the crappy ones, or pre-buy it in a supermarket in individual things and have a look at the ingredients to make sure there's not a whole lot of vegetable oil in it, or chocolate, crappy chocolate and cranberries.
And alternative chips, so things like popcorn or like there's almond chips and all that kind of stuff out now too. But have a look, things that aren't laden with vegetable oils and too much salt. Jerky, whether it's beef or turkey or tofu or mushroom or Chief Bar, which is like a jerky-like bar.
Where else am I? Cheese and crackers, cheese and cracker packs from the supermarket. You can just get them in one. Muesli bars with single digits of sugar per muesli bar. So again, the ones I had today were five to six grams, five and a half, somewhere around there. Low sugar dark chocolate, always a winner. Remember you're looking for single digits of sugar per hundred grams ideally or close to that. And then don't eat the whole block, unless it's every now and then.
And then you've got protein bars. So protein or health bars, either one, things that are based on oats or nuts or a good quality protein like again, Chief Bar or Beauty Food. We base it on a really well sourced collagen protein. Make sure there's no nasty artificial sweeteners in there in big amounts or numbers or colours or just random ingredients or high amounts of dried fruit because that will make you feel a bit crappy. And keep hydrated, waters, coconut waters, sparkling water, tea.
That was fun. Travel snacks you can stash in your bag and take with you. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to go watch Hey Duggee with Izzy. And thanks for letting us say hi as well tonight. See you, guys.