I just came back from a family trip to Disneyland and I think that my eating suffered worse than I had hoped. In the end my wife and I realized that with better planning we could have eaten better. So I thought I would type out some tips to better vacation eating.

5 Best Vacation Eating Tips

Planning – If you plan your eating you are way ahead of the game. We ate out a couple of times easily and with fast food, but as we all know this is the lowest quality vacation eating food possible. After two days we ended up at a WalMart and a nearby grocery store and bought up good snacks and lots of fruit. And where able to eat a lot better and feel a lot better by eating well on the last two thirds of our vacation.

Fruits and vegetables – On a vacation you tend to eat nearly no fresh fruit or vegetables as all you get is from restaurants. Make sure you do the above that I noted and if need be go to a grocery store 2 or 3 times in your trip to buy lots of fruits an vegetables. In California and many other states it is really easy as well during this time of year to find lots of fruit stands that sell high quality produce for your vacation eating and compared to a restaurant you are still far ahead.

Eat a better breakfast – Many hotels offer a free breakfast and I planned to save money by having us all eat at the hotel for breakfast but it turned out to be startlingly low in quality. Our hotel offered donuts, toast (with squeezable margarine), bad muffins and coffee. Not a good breakfast by any stretch. Instead use the tools that are offered to you. We had access to a microwave at the hotel kitchen so you can just bring in your own oatmeal or even some kind of real breakfast food if you want to save money. We also had a fridge in the room and a couple of times we stayed at places with kitchenettes for the same price as a regular room.

Remember that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially on vacation so eat a great breakfast so you are not looking longingly at the McDonalds at 11:00 to completely ruin your day of vacation eating something that is crap. Maybe make your breakfast a restaurant meal instead of lunch or dinner.

Have plenty of snacks around – We ate a lot of snack food while away, pretzels, grapes, water, apples, baked chips. Many where high in carbs but they tasted good and one of the problems is that on vacation you fall back into the eating three big meals a day instead of spacing your food out. I never did get it quite right on this vacation but if you can be snacking on healthy food you can even get healthier as you vacation instead of gaining that you need to lose later.

Choose better at restaurants – Restaurant eating is always one of my highlights of a family vacation but eating well is difficult because most restaurants have very high fat foods. To avoid this try to skip sauces, not use the butter and avoid all of the bread that they give you. And make sure to order the side salad.

There may be a few other issues when it comes to vacation eating that I may have missed so please add them below.