How to Handle Holidays?

Recently my family and I took a trip to Turkey (or Türkiye as it’s currently known). It’s something that we’ve been planning for a long time and with the recent earthquakes we thought it was even more important to support the Turkish economy in some way.

The holiday was amazing (kudos to my brilliant wife for arranging everything). But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about you and me. More specifically, it’s about you and me on holiday. What should you plan to do when you take a holiday? Should you binge all day and every day on all the foods you used to be addicted to? Or should you be an absolute purist and travel everywhere with a big bag of biltong, a stick of butter and a couple of raw eggs?

The answer, in my opinion, lies somewhere in the middle. Where exactly the "sweet spot" is for you will depend on your goals and where you are in your journey. In my case, the main complication was that I had been avoiding wheat for 5 years or more and I found myself in a country that lives on bread. We travelled around quite a lot and, to be fair, there is a lot of meat and a lot of fish in some regions, especially near the black sea. But there is bread in every region, as well as sugary pastries such as baklava and katmer that are hard to avoid, especially if someone tells you that this is a speciality of the region or of the restaurant.

So what was my plan going in? I had been doing pretty well in recent months. I was more or less at my goal weight. My autoimmune symptoms were in remission and I couldn't remember the last time I had an asthma attack or knee pain or anything like that. So I was just going to do what felt right without going completely overboard and then worry about it later. Which means that I didn't have much of a plan at all. Despite not having a plan, I managed to do pretty well (more on that later). How did I manage? 

In retrospect, the first trick to navigating a holiday is to make sure your holiday includes some form of physical exercise. For us that was really a lot of walking. I didn’t keep track, but in a city like Istanbul you’re going to be walking something like 15 to 20 thousand steps a day just by doing the normal sight-seeing. That may not sound like much, but for most of us it's enough to allow us to get away with more carbs than we usually would.

The next trick that I used was to allow others to taste the carbs and tell me if they’re worth it. Now this may sound like I was asking my family to be my royal food tasters or something, but they were going to eat the bread anyway. The bread comes at the beginning of the meal usually along with the salads and dipping sauces and other meze. I would hold off on this unless my wife or my daughter told me that something was really worth trying. In that case I might put a little on my plate, but I wouldn’t eat it right away.

Which brings us to the next point - save the carbs for last. There have been a couple of studies on how the order of the food you eat really effects how you digest it. If you eat meat and non-starchy carbohydrates first, the glycemic spike from having carbs at the end of your meal is reduced. (I'll save the science for another time, but it's worth noting that the new anti-obesity drug semaglutide (Ozempic) works by activating the same class of hormone - incretins - involved in this process.)

Lastly, try to only have one indulgence per meal or ideally one indulgence per day. So if I’m eating Katmer - which is way better than baklava and I plan to make a low carb version of it soon - then I’ll try to avoid the bread. If I’m having alcohol, I’ll try to avoid the bread and the desert and so on.

So that was my approach. How did I do? Well today was my first day back in the gym after almost a month. I was surprised to see that I didn’t gain any weight - I was maybe half a kilo heavier than the last time I weighed myself on that scale, but for me that falls within the fluctuations I might see from day to day anyway. Furthermore my performance in the gym was, if anything, improved. I’ll do another post on why I think that might be (spoiler: walking is great). And most importantly, my symptoms didn’t come back - my vitiligo is still going down, my knees didn’t ache, my gums didn’t bleed, I never got asthmatic. So as far as I'm concerned, that’s a win.

I was only able to be this flexible because I had reached a point in my journey where I have some metabolic flexibility. I can run on ketones, I can run on meat alone and I can run ok on some carbs. If I had tried this a few years ago, I think I would have had many more problems and I might have had to be more strict.

So how does all this sit with you? In recent years I’ve seen that the keto-carnivore space has become more like the vegan space in that we have more zealots and less room for just navigating life as best we can, knowing that no one is perfect. If the purist approach works for you, great. But I think we have to acknowledge that it doesn’t work for everyone, and that our community has a lot to offer even to people who are never going to be “full converts”. 

If I had been in Turkey for ten days and never tried the bread or the sweets I would have felt bad about it. I would have felt that I had missed out on something. Now that I have tried those foods, I can also reflect on which food that I enjoyed the most (the meat, especially the kebabs) and what food was probably not worth the calories or the insulin spikes (the bread). And that perspective will help me to navigate the next holiday - wherever and whenever that might be.