5 Tips MS Diet Plan for Travelling - Part 2

 Get The Relaxation Guide   ---  Watch Jen's YouTube Videos

Women Thriving with MS Membership
Get the on the waitlist

I'm sharing with you the MS Diet plan for travels to Greece for 70 days. Here's five tips coming at you. This is part number two of this series. I've now been in Greece for over a month. Following an MS diet while in another country can be tricky. This is my diet plan so far.

TIP SUMMARY 

Tip #1 - Book an accommodation with a kitchen

Tip #2 - Cooked food restaurants

Tip #3 - Where to buy the best groceries

Tip #4 -  MS Diet meal planning & rhythm 

Tip #5 - Treats and Temptation

[Full transcript]

5 Tips MS Diet Plan for Travel [Greece]

I'm sharing with you the MS Diet plan while traveling in Greece for 70 days. Here's five tips coming at you. This is part number two of this series. I've now been in Greece for over a month. Following an MS diet while in another country can be tricky. This is my diet plan so far.

I'm Jen DeTracey, I'm the founder of Women Thriving with MS. And this is the Women Thriving with MS YouTube channel. If you haven't already subscribed, be sure to do that below click that bell to get notifications when a new video comes out and comes your way.

I also have the Women Thriving with MS Facebook page and private Facebook group, which is free check out the information below as well as the website. So we're going to talk about travel right now. I am spending 70 days. That's right. 70 days in Greece. And the reason why I have the opportunity to do that is because my sweetie is doing PhD research here.

So I'm like I'm coming along for the ride for sure. And what I'd like to do before I walk you through these five tips is to talk to you a little bit about why I'm doing this and why now as well as my past experience. And then I'll dive into each of those tips. So stay tuned for those because that's going to be juicy and you're going to want to know what they are,

and no matter where you're traveling, even if it's not in Greece, when you change your life situation, your routine, where you're living, even if it's for a short period of time, there are important considerations to stay on track with your MS diet, whatever you're doing to support you in living a healthy life and to be able to enjoy your travels.

Because if you feel like crap, because of the food you're eating, then you're not going to be having a good time. And, and who, who doesn't want to have a good time when you're traveling, right? Even if it's for a long weekend, it doesn't matter where you're going. Now, the reason why I'm doing this video now is because I have been in Greece for exactly a month.

I've been an Athens, which is a very large city. It's the biggest city in Greece. It'd be like, I suppose, in a way, going to a New York or where I live in Montreal or Toronto, or some of the big cities down in the states like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, you name it.

I wanted to get into my rhythm, be ready for that. Now the truth is that seven years ago I was in Greece before I only spent maybe three or four days from what I can recall in Athens from that trip. I also was in Spain, which if you've watched my other MS Diet video, you'll know. I'll talk more about that in that particular video.

My diet right now, I'll talk about in a moment. What I want to share with is that seven years ago, my lifestyle, my health, my mindset was not exactly the same as it is now. So here I am in Greece. Again, I'm experiencing it in a different way and my life is quite different in some ways. So it's interesting to be back here and be experiencing it through another lens.

So I've been living with MS for 11 years, and right now I'm on an MS diet. I was on the Terry Walls protocol on the keto diet, which is super, super strict. I realized after about nine months of being on that, that's not what I wanted to do. Kind of on a hybrid of Walh's protocol at the mid level, I would say,

and also the Best Bet Diet, which is from MS Hope and the Embry family. So some of the things that I avoid in my diet are gluten, dairy and sugar. Now I'm not a hundred percent hard and fast. Occasionally I will dip into the dairy and the sugar. But like on a day to day basis, I am following that diet,

excluding gluten is very important to me because I get eczema from that. This is a factor in how I navigate when I'm traveling, the considerations that I need to make. Also, I rarely do eggs and legumes. I love legumes, beans basically. The Best Bet diets has no eggs, no legumes, lighter proteins like chicken, turkey, fish, that kind of thing.

In Greece, there's the Mediterranean diet. Which is another diet that a lot of people living with the MS follow. Which is like fish and legumes and maybe a little bread and cheese and a little bit of dairy or not. So there's so many diets out there, but it's interesting to come to Greece and have this opportunity to experience different foods and fresher foods in some ways than I would in Montreal,

Canada, which number one is very cold in the winter time. So obviously the food is being important as opposed to in Greece where the temperatures are not as cool. I'm laying down the framework here. So talking about my own diet, my own experience of being here. When you go to a restaurant in Greece, most likely, they're always going to bring bread out first after you've placed your order.

It comes in a basket and it has a napkin below it. And underneath that bread, you'll find your cutlery and napkins to eat on. So if you are celiac, you need to make sure number one, that you do not have bread. You want to tell them upfront no bread, no bread. That is a factor for me, even though I'm gluten free.

I'm not celiac. So sometimes I forget. And also my sweetie eats breads. So it's like finding that middle ground. If you're not on the same diet as the person that you're traveling with. In a restaurant, also, the other factor to consider is that they want to please you. They want to make you happy. They want to be generous.

So after the meal, they bring you a little plate with usually a shared dessert. There's two pieces for two people or four for four. Often that dessert is homemade halva and that halva is made from semolina, which is wheat. Now that is the worst thing for me. So thankfully I don't like it, because I'm going to be talking about temptation in a minute.

But the other thing that happens in the restaurant, you order your meal when they bring it out, even though it may not say that there's bread included, I have found three times now that there's a pita bread. It's not like the kind you necessarily open up, but it's like a circle and they grill it and they cut it into pieces and they put that on the plate.

And then they put your meat or protein on top. So I'm like, oh no. I said no bread. And then there's my pita bread underneath. Once you try this stuff out, once or twice in a restaurant, you're gonna be like, okay, now I know what to ask for and what to say I don't want. And that leads to temptation because with this dessert that they give you,

or the things that you see on the menu, or if you're walking down the street, there's a bakery, almost every single corner. It's really tempting. So what do you do? I find for myself that I have become able to manage walking by the bakeries. I can manage walking by the coffee shops. They all have displays in their window.

And right now it's April, it's the Easter time. So you've got all kinds of delightful treats. Because I've been used to going to grocery stores for years and seeing all the stuff that they haven't grocery stores. It's like, you know, I become able to compartmentalize that and say, oh, that looks good, but it's not part of my diet. And that can be very tempting.

And also there are places where they have the ice cream counters right at the front where you can walk by and see all the flavors. So there's lots of temptation everywhere. Depending on your ability to manage that, you might want to take that in consideration. You don't want to be hungry when you go out the door and you see all this stuff that's addictive and tempting was sugar and wheat and dairy.

There are cooked food restaurants. The cook food restaurants are for the lunch people. And so what you can do is you can walk by one of these restaurants and you can actually see, they have almost like, it looks like a buffet, but it's, it's not really because it's not all you can eat. You can see all the different foods. And you know that it's a cook food restaurant.

And often if the weather's decent, they have tables outside. So you can eat out there as well. That can be a great option for you as well as a place to just grab something that you want to bring home. You have to look out for them. Because when we first came to Greece, we didn't see them. But once you know your radar on about something,

right? Like you see a red car on the road, that's a certain model. And you're like, oh yeah, that red Toyota and then you notice them everywhere. It's like that with cook food restaurants. So that's a little bit about the culture. I wanted to preface that before I go into those five tips, because that way you have some context for what I'm sharing with you.

So let's dive right into tip number one, tip number one. And I'm just moving around here a little bit because I'm standing up today and I'm realizing that from the walking I'm doing, my legs are a little bit sore right now. So you see me leaning against a wall just to give myself support or somewhere around here, moving around. That's what's happening.

Just like needing to mix it up a little bit. And I have my oops, have my running shoes on, but I can't show you at the camera. So don't worry about that. So let's get going. Tip number one is around your accommodation. You want to have a kitchen. If you were staying for even three or four days or week or more,

you want to have a kitchen and you want that kitchen to be fully equipped. The reason why that's so important is that you don't want to eat all of your meals out. With your breakfast, you don't need to eat that out, right? You can just bring stuff into the house. And I'll talk about where you can find that those kinds of groceries and what the benefits are in a minute or two.

So having a fully equipped kitchen with pots and pans and cutlery. Right now, we have knives, sharp knives, but they're more like a steak knife. And that's what we're using to cut everything. They have dollar stores here. You can go different places and pick up what you need. Sometimes if you're traveling a lot, you'll have insights ahead of time of a few things.

And if you can squeeze a few extra things in your suitcase, you can, you can do that too. I find having a kitchen with a fridge, a stove, an oven to be great. I use the oven a lot to grill the foods that I'm going to eat. And I'll talk about that as I go through the tips. So tip number one is having a fully but kitchen.

It gives you empowerment to make choices that you might not have otherwise. Yes, you're going to have to stock up on a few things, but if you're staying for a week or a couple of weeks, or even in this case, I've been at this location for a month and we're just leaving to go up to Northern Greece in a day or so.

The other thing is, number two, if you don't want to eat at home for your lunch or dinner, or both, then use the cook food restaurants as a way to do that affordably and have more control. Because you can see the food and then you can ask questions about it. What is very important is that you ask about wheat because they put that in their sauces, incorporated into some of their meats.

So for example, you can have a stuffed pepper or stuffed zucchini with meat in it, which is very delightful. Or sometimes it will just be rice, but you want to make sure that they have an added flour to that, to thicken something. Also in the meat like hamburgers, there's an option to have little hamburgers with some delicious Greek potatoes. Is there wheat in those hamburgers?

So you want to ask that question. Because it's common with Greek recipes to incorporate flour into their ingredients. The other thing is, if you want to ask about the meat in terms of the hamburger, that's a good question because often they combined more than one type of meat together. So they might include ground pork. They might include ground lamb. They might include ground beef in their burgers or something like that.

So you can ask like what is included in there. And it's a good question to know. So that's number two. If you don't want to cook all the time, you can go to the cook food restaurants, number two, cook food restaurants, and ask about wheat. Number three, number three, where are you going to get your foods?

I would recommend going to the grocery store to get your protein. Most of the grocery stores have a whole fish section with ice and everything's laid out and you can see it all. And they have a squid and octopus and whole fish of all different sizes shapes, you name it. And often there'll be a sale. Last week I bought two types of seafood.

One was some squid. The second was fish and they were both 50% off. It might not be as fresh, great deals. You can get your proteins there. I find that I can get everything I need at the grocery store, from the, also from the butcher department. So seafood department, everything laid on on ice. And, but your department,

you see everything. Some places, grocery stores, they even grind the meat themselves. How fresh is that? If you want ground chicken or ground turkey, which I find is hard to get in certain places I live in Montreal, Canada, they'll do it for you. So they'll take a breast and they'll grind it down.

And that way you can make meatballs or include it into like a vegetable medley or something like that. Or if you just want to like grill it, grilled the chicken breast or turkey breast, you can do that too. So that's fantastic. Right? Also they have gluten-free sausages. How can you go for wrong with that?

You know, if you, if you enjoy that and that's part of your diet and you're, you're willing to have that every once in a while, that's great. In the Best Bet diet, they talk mostly about eating light proteins, like chicken and fish and turkey, and then just having some heavy protein, red meat once a week. And then you've got The Wahls Protocol and that's more meat based. So whatever works for you.

Then on the other side, when you're talking about fruits and vegetables, there are fruit stands, fruit and veggie stands everywhere. Probably almost on one, on a block, again, just like bakeries, but better. There are fresh strawberries in season right now and oranges. It's so delicious. So it's so nice to have these fresh fruits and vegetables. Carrots,

and peppers, greens, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later. All different kinds of greens that you can get. So good. So that's what I recommend. Also, you might be living near a market where you can go there and they will sell everything, which is crazy fun. Maybe you don't want to go through that more than once, because it can get a little busy and you want to make sure from mobility perspective that you can do that,

which is a whole other topic about Greece. The next place that I'll be living. when I come back to Athens in about three weeks from now, will be just around the corner from a huge market that my sweetie and I stumbled across earlier. And it's amazing. So we'll be able to buy all of our stuff there. We just don't know what days it will be open yet.

It has everything. It has meat, seafood, veggies, fruit, you name it, nuts, everything. And that's the other thing is there are stores you can go to, to buy nuts fresh. And also there's a lot of sugary things in those stores. So you have to again, go back to temptation. Can you handle it or not? Right.

So we've covered off the importance of having a kitchen, how cooked food restaurants can supplement your meal and where to get your food grocery stores and marketplaces. Let's talk about tip number four. Tip number four, which is about the meal plan. So if you have a bit of a plan, I would call it a plan and a rhythm. So having that flow of knowing that you want to have some flow with traveling,

but you also want to have a plan around food, because if you do eat a little bit of dairy, like yogurt, you're going to love getting love that Greek yogurt. Oh my gosh. A couple of weeks ago, we were over on one of the little islands and there was a power outage. Some of the food had to be everything that was already prepared because there wasn't any electricity.

And the woman that was feeding us from a little hotel, it's called a pension that we were staying at. She said, oh, would you like some fresh yogurt? I make my own marmalade, three different flavors, one being strawberry. I'm like, I'm going to have that. We'll talk about like, you know, treats a little bit later. That's tip number five.

If you can handle a bit of yogurt, that can be great for your breakfast as well. I usually just have fruit. I was having strawberries and oranges and banana just for some substance. But if I go out, I need to have some protein. So I might eat some nuts. Or I was able to find a store that had rice cakes than little rice cakes with very little,

very little salt and put some tahini on. Tahini is an alternative to peanut butter or almond butter, which you can't find here in most places. Or it's very expensive because it's not part of the culture. It's roasted sesame seeds that have been ground up and you just spread it on whatever you're going to eat.

You can even dip carrots in it, even strawberries. I'm sure. And that's a hit of protein. Sometimes all the walnuts, which they have a variety of nuts here that are quite fresh and delicious. So that's a great way to approach it too. Sometimes you can find gluten-free alternatives around here in a big city like this. It's going to be a lot easier.

If you're in a small town, if you are in Europe or not in Europe, it may be difficult for you to find those things. So some of them you might want to carry with you. So for example, I'm going to bring a couple of packages of rice crackers with me because I'm going up in the north of Greece, into Thessaloniki and Edessa, and I don't know if this stuff will be available.

So I just want to have a backup plan in case I need it. Okay. So we've talked about breakfast under the meal plan for tip number four, let's talk about lunch. So for lunch, I like to have salads with a little bit of protein, whether it be pumpkin seeds that I've roasted up that were raw or nuts or a little bit of protein from the night before from dinner,

that kind of thing. So that I can fill up. I have to say the tomatoes here are so delicious and so amazing. If you eat tomatoes or you're willing to eat the little cherry ones every once in a while, it's such a delight, the greens, you can buy in a bag and they're fresh and they're delicious. As long as you're buying them every couple of days and not letting them sit in your fridge for too long.

Carrots, cucumbers, there's cucumbers are also grow here. It just, you can have a delightful lunch and you can even make your own Greek salad without the feta cheese. Actually restaurants that sell Greek salad, which is something that I ate in the past the last time I came, that's what sometimes people have for lunch and then they dip their bread in it. Because I'm not doing dairy and I'm not doing bread,

you can buy Greek salads here without the feta. You have to ask, or sometimes it's on the menu and it's a lot less expensive, which is fantastic. I like to make salads at home. It's quick, it's easy and it's fresh and delicious. Now let's talk about dinner under tip number four, I like to have greens. So there's something here called horta,

and that is a green leafy vegetable. You go to the markets, there's tons of bags of green veggies,of green leafy stuff. You can use the stems of beets. Those are popular or things that look like that. And you just buy a big grocery bag of it. You put it in a pot, boil it up nice for quite a long time.

Like at least 10 minutes till it's really soft, then drain it. Put it in a nice serving dish and pour some olive oil and squeeze some lemon on it. Mix it up. It's delicious, like a warm salad or you can eat it cold too. That is fantastic. It's affordable. And it's amazing, so horta, horta. Then I like to have a protein.

So that might be chicken or fish. Like I said before that you buy the fish whole. It's so great at the grocery store. They clean it for you. The inside of this fish, for you don't have all the guts and everything. You still have the bone. And then I just, I just put a little bit of olive oil on the grilling pan that I put into the oven.

Because I just boil it and then flip it over and maybe a little salt on the outside, some lemon inside or tomatoes inside and let it cook and grill it. It's a whole fish, you know, and you just reel it on each side, really easy to do. Sometimes put grilled vegetables around. That can be delicious and boom, you have like an amazing meal.

Squeeze some lemon on top, you know, pull the fish out, take the bone out of it. It's amazing. Really easy to cook. Often I'll eat roasted vegetables or something, steamed some kind of heavier vegetable, like a yams or steamed potatoes or something like that. That can actually be really delicious to make the horta, the green wild greens

and then just put potatoes around the side. Now you might say, okay, potatoes. Aren't part of my diet. They convert to sugar easily. Well, when I'm traveling, if I need that little bit of starch, I'm going to eat potatoes over bread and they're roasted potatoes, oven potatoes are amazing. Here cooked with lemon and olive oil.

They are so delicious. So I'm willing to compromise in that way. And in another way that I wouldn't otherwise. Also, if you want to follow the Mediterranean diet and you have no problem, digesting beans, which is a difficulty for me, there's all different kinds of beans that you can enjoy and eat here. That's part of your diet, which is amazing.

And you can buy those at the cooked food restaurants and bring them home. So that's tip number four is around being in a rhythm and having a plan. So what is tip number five? Tip number five is about treats. What kind of treats are you going to let yourself have? Now I believe when I'm traveling that I want to have enjoyment in my life,

but I also want to manage my health and my energy and my stomach, my gut. And that's a balancing act. So it's like, what are you going to concede on? And what are you not going to concede on? Matt Embry from MS Hope, he talks about the no cheat. Well, I'm sorry when I'm traveling, I'm going to cheat a little bit.

Okay. I did have ice cream once gelato and it was delicious. It was when I was on the island of Aegina and everything there is about pistachios. So I had pistachio ice cream and it was very tasty. One of the things that I was recommended by a naturopath who used to be a doctor and I'm sorry, I can't remember his name in this moment. Is taking an allergy pill before you have something that your body might have a reaction to it,

especially if it's not regularly a part of your diet. So if you're going to have a little bit a wheat, because you want to try out the bread which I did when I was here, take an allergy pill before you do it. If you're going to have an ice cream, take an allergy pill so that your system can have a little layer of protection.

As long as you're not celiac, of course, or lactose intolerant. So decide what is it that you're going to allow yourself to have? And if you are tempted by things, how are you going to protect yourself by not bending on that temptation? One of the things you can do is not bring things into your place that you're staying, because I know for myself,

when it's around, I really, really struggle. It's different walking by a storefront, like a bakery or an ice cream shop and just passing by. But if it's in my home, even when I'm traveling, when it's in the kitchen or in the cupboards, I really struggle with that. And I know that about myself. So setting yourself up for success.

So I know probably once a month, I'm going to enjoy ice cream and I'm going to be okay about it. I did try the bread in the beginning just to see how it was and be a part of it. And now I'm over that, right? I'm over it. I'm done. And then was sugar. That's the tricky one sugar. There's halva here,

which is roasted sesame seeds that have been ground up and mixed with some kind of sugar kind of content. So it's a bit sweet, but it's high in protein and filled with nuts. I like to have that occasionally. It's a nice thing to have. It gives me a little bit of energy. Let me be crashed later. And that's what I'm allowing myself to have.

So decide for yourself. What is that going to look like for you? Because travelling is about enjoying yourself. It's about giving yourself some pleasure. Food, food is very much acquainted with everything to do with celebration and connecting with other people and you know, just living life. And this is the challenge when it comes to being on a certain diet, especially if your spouse or partner or friend or travel companion is not on the same diet.

It's like, how do you manage that? So having a plan and having that rhythm and, and also experiencing the fresh food, if you are traveling to a place that produces certain foods or farm certain foods that are fresh, and then when you have that experience of enjoying those foods. Then you might be like, okay, I can go without the ice cream and the wheat because,

oh my gosh, these strawberries are amazing and I'm just going to enjoy them. And they're like a really healthy food to eat. So decide that for yourself. So let me just do a recap of a few things here. We'll go through the tips. Number one, make sure you have your own kitchen. Ideally, even if it's a small kitchen that you can make your breakfast,

so you have more control over what you eat. Secondly, if you're going to restaurants that have cooked food already prepared and ready to go, or a restaurant where you can buy something to take home for dinner later, then you have more control over what you're eating, as opposed to going out to a restaurant. Now, if you have upset over the environment and plastic containers,

I can totally get that. This is something that claws on my mind. When I bring cook food home in my particular situation or leftovers home from restaurant, I try and reuse those containers as much as possible and recycle all the time. So that's number two, cooked food as your tip. Number three, and that's pertaining to Greece. I can't say what that's like in

other places in Europe. Number three, get your groceries fresh, enjoy whatever's fresh in the place that you're traveling to. Even if you're and you live in the us or Canada, and you're traveling to someplace else, go to a place where you can buy the freshest food possible so that you can enjoy it. So you're not feeling left out from not going to restaurants all the time.

Because there's nothing like fresh food, fruit and vegetables. Wow. Like I just live for that. Number four, number four, have a plan, have a rhythm and a plan with your food. For lunch, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, very important. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Have a plan, have a plan. Even if you're just planning on the day of know what you're doing.

Get into that rhythm with it. And number five is treats. Know what you can tolerate. No, you can't allow yourself to have what you feel is going to be okay for your body. Use the allergy pills. Some people like to drink wine. That's not something that I can handle. For you, then take an allergy pill, before you do that. Manage it the best you can.

So there you go. That's the five tips and I'm Jen, DeTracey the founder of Women Thriving with MS. If you haven't already subscribed below by clicking that button, click the bell for the notification and check out the goodness. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, if you want to join the Facebook group or the page, if you want to check out the website and all the goodness, that's there, check out those links below and I will see you soon.

I'll be keeping you posted on my journey as a woman who lives with MS.