Summertime in all its glory has got us thinking about how to live a nutritious life during summer vacation. As you prep for your summer travels and adventures, we’ve come up with simple hacks, helpful reminders and useful advice on how to maintain your healthy lifestyle this season.

Read on for some of the best advice on living your most nutritious life this summer.

Sweat Often

Nutritious Life founder Keri Glassman, MS, RD, CDN, might be a registered dietitian nutritionist, but she embraces the virtues of a whole-person approach to wellness that goes well beyond just eating empowered.

In the summer when Keri travels, she loves being active outdoors and looks for fun ways to incorporate this in the places she is visiting. While in the mountains, she’s all about finding a beautiful hiking trail. When she’s visiting a European city, she might look for a great walking tour that melds a bit of exercise with a dose of history.

“When traveling, I like to think about keeping as many of the pillars of a nutritious life as consistent as possible,” Keri says. “So, even if I may be indulging in food a bit more, I stay consistent with a healthy breakfast (every hotel and every gas station can offer a balanced breakfast!) and I make sure to keep the Drink Up pillar going strong by bringing a water bottle to refill. I also pack my supplements and get my body moving every day.”

Drink Up

As summer and warmer weather arrives, so does the risk of getting dehydrated. If you’re taking your workout outdoors during your vacation or staycation, then you should be extra careful about hydration. Even if you’re just someone who sweats a lot, it pays to be extra prudent with your water intake in the warmer months.

Intense exercise or high heat can lead to water loss. Losing as little as 2% of your body’s water content can have a significant effect on physical performance. Symptoms might include a higher body temperature, less motivation and feeling extra tired (both physically and mentally). Since it’s not uncommon for athletes to lose as much as 10% of their water weight during a workout or sweat sesh, staying hydrated is extra important in warmer weather.

According to this randomized, cross-over study published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, “A tailored hydration plan, based on an athlete’s fluid and sodium loss has the potential to improve anaerobic power, attention and awareness, and heart rate recovery time.”

Tips for staying hydrated:

Drink pineapple water: This recent hydration trend is popular for a reason. It’s mouth-wateringly delicious, hydrating and full of health benefits. Find a recipe and learn more here.

Skip the alcohol: Dehydration also interferes with sleep. To help your body maintain energy, keep alcohol consumption to a minimum. Forgoing alcohol for just one week will leave you more hydrated. We break down the benefits of going without alcohol for three weeks, week by week, benefit by benefit.

H2O & lemon: “I have all my clients start their day with a glass of water with a wedge of lemon in it,” Keri says. Anchoring your day this way starts you out with a feeling of accomplishment because you get the benefits of the water and good hydration. The lemon is a great liver detox tool and the glass with water and lemon can be a visual cue to remind you to eat clean all day long.

Eat Empowered

With air travel still fraught with all sorts of unknowns, more of us will be packing up the car for an old-fashioned road trip this summer.

If your idea of road trip fare involves snacks you pick up at gas stations along the way, think again. Road trip meals can be just as healthy as the ones you prepare at home.

Here are Keri Glassman’s 12 favorite, healthy snacks for on-the-go travel.

If you’re vegan, eating healthy on the road can be extra challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. Check out our guide to vegan road trip meals that includes easy, road-worthy recipes plus healthy vegan-friendly pit stops along the way. And for that road trip snack attack, we have a handy guide to plant-based road trip snacks that even your meat-eating family members will l-o-v-e!

Live Consciously

The holistic remedy of prescribing nature for health has become a growing trend around the globe. Physicians in various countries have been handing out “green prescriptions” in place of pharmaceutical meds as a way of treating chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, lung disease and anxiety, according to the World Economic Forum.

What better way to improve your health while enjoying Mother Earth than to combine a doctor’s Rx with your summer vacation plans for a “wellcation”? Whether you’re traveling domestically or abroad, our guide to prescribing nature for health highlights “green Rx” programs in the U.S. and around the globe.

Love More

As the last two years have taught us, the people in our lives—and maintaining strong, healthy relationships with them—are so critical to our own wellness.

According to the American Psychological Association, maintaining “strong social relationships” or friendships can increase our survival rate by as much as 50%. Yes, our friends are literally saving our lives!

“Human connection isn’t just seeing our friends or smiling at strangers; it’s something we require in order to thrive,” says Monica Berg, author of Rethink Love and host of the Spiritually Hungry podcast. “Social connection improves our physical health and strengthens our psychological well-being.”

So your summer survival guide should definitely include some quality time with friends—whatever that looks like for you, be it in person or virtual (a concept that’s here to stay!) Meanwhile, here are five ways to build stronger friendships virtually that you can apply to in-person situations as well.

Stress Less

Stress is linked to a whole laundry list of health concerns. Its impact on our well-being is hard to quantify, but rest assured it’s a major factor in how we feel. Enter the landscape hotel trend. How does a getaway in your own private glass-enclosed villa in the forest sound? Pretty divine, right!

The cabins and lodges in this new eco-friendly tourism trend provide a serene space for guests to decompress and reap the benefits of being in the calming and therapeutic elements of nature. Depending on where you’re staying, many landscape hotels also offer local dining experiences and relaxing spa treatments. And because these villas are nestled in hiking destinations, many are accessible to outdoor excursions, including climbing and guided forest walks. Here are 5 of the best landscape hotels around the globe.

Sleep Deep

We don’t know about you, but for us vacation can be a time to recalibrate and replenish our stores. For the sleep-deprived, this might mean getting some more quality shut-eye. But what’s the magic elixir for that?

No one seems to have the answer for how deep sleep is regulated by the brain … until now. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found critical clues to this mystery. A study conducted in mice and published in April in the journal Nature Communications, identifies an area of the brain that regulates the fluctuation of delta waves, those electronic signals transmitted across neurons that coincide with our deepest levels of relaxation, AKA restorative sleep.

More research is needed, but if scientists can replicate these findings in animal models, they could lay the groundwork for precision-based therapies to induce deep sleep. Amen to that! Stay tuned for future findings.

Meanwhile, our friend Dr. Michael Breus, the Sleep Doctor, has some advice for how magnesium might help with deeper sleep. (Hint: Insomnia is a common symptom of magnesium deficiency!) Maintaining healthy magnesium levels often leads to deeper sleep, so consider incorporating magnesium into your routine this summer.

​​Nurture Yourself

As we think about the Nurture Yourself pillar of a nutritious life, we can’t help but think about transformation and what that looks like. For Alicia Gitlitz, a board-certified holistic health and nutrition coach, that meant overcoming a serious addiction to sugar. It also meant creating a new path for her future that involves coaching others to live healthier lives.

Diagnosed with gestational diabetes during her pregnancy, Alicia’s sugar party had to come to a complete and abrupt stop. But she found the strength to quit sugar and transform her life through training to become a health and nutrition coach.

If you’ve been considering a career in coaching, read Alicia’s transformative story and learn more about what becoming a nutrition coach can do for you and your purpose-driven future. Summer is the perfect time to get started!

(Images: Shutterstock)