Low carb, wheat-free wraps! Whole Foods carries a variety of gluten-free tortillas–we like the almond flour ones (17 carbs in 2 small tortillas). Don’t know if you have WF near you–here’s a list of Canada locations.
Also, our local (Tucson, AZ) WF is happy to order things they don’t normally stock.
Most groceries sell bags of hard-boiled eggs. Also available at salad bars.
You can usually request a mini-fridge for a hotel room.
I often prefer staying at an Air BnB, because it allows me kitchen access.
Just started doing this for work, when I found out the Feds allow this if it saves money compared to a hotel or is under the federal per diem rate for a location. Having a fridge, kitchen, and not being in a hotel have made life much easier for traveling for extended periods.
Plus, my BnB in San Diego next week had to cancel my reservation because of a double booking, so they put me in a beachside condo for the same price per night ($89.00 per person) as the original booking… upgrade!
I like to eat Cheerios and olive or coconut oil several times a day when off-schedule such as when we were moving recently. Or if I get back late at night. It would be a good travel food too. Cheerios are gluten free now.
Cindy
I meant to say that I like to eat the Cheerios together with the olive oil or coconut oil. The oil gives the Cheerios more sustenance and balances my blood sugar. They taste great together, too.
Cindy
Interesting. Do you find they spike you? I spike hugely with any cereal. Some fruit (like apples) seems okay, though. And today I had some tortilla chips and didn’t go high…but I’ve also been running low for the past two days. In the past I’ve always brought high-carb foods like Cheerios and bread travelling, but I got tired of my blood sugar being on a crazy roller coaster; travelling tends to be a time when I want more stability rather than less.
Hi Jen,
Sorry, I haven’t checked my blood sugar afterward but just go by the hypoglycemia that follows later. I am undiagnosed for diabetes. It is not able to be diagnosed because I have reactive hypoglycemia. My blood sugar goes up to as much as 240 and then goes a little too rapidly down to the normal range, giving an effect of hypoglycemia. I don’t test anymore. I just go by the effect.
Yes, I have noticed that a smaller portion of the Cheerios is better for me than a large one. And sometimes my body is less accepting of them than other times. Thank you for your mention of tortilla chips. I have noticed authentic Mexican food has a good effect on my blood sugar. I have narrowed it down to either the chips, beans, salsa, rice, or some combination of them. The tortilla chips from the grocery store don’t seem as helpful to me as the chips from a real Mexican restaurant, but maybe some brands are better.
Cindy
I just came across these bars and thought others who eat low-carb bars when travelling might be interested. So far, I haven’t tried them, but so far I’ve been unable to find any low-carb bars that do not contain milk protein (the lowest I could find were 8-11 grams per bar). I’m not totally sure how you’d bolus for these, since they’re almost all fibre, but if fibre isn’t bolused for at all then they would be pretty low-carb (if fibre is bolused for half, then it wouldn’t be that great).
I know I’m in a different boat since I’m not using exogenous insulin, but I’ve found that some fibers affect my BG (and I presume would be bolused for), and some fibers have zero effect on my BG (and presumably would not). The bar you link has tapioca fiber (and a lot of it!), which I’m not familiar with, but “prebiotic” usually means it is insoluble fiber which is fermented in the gut, in a similar manner to resistant starch. I think personally, I would experiment to see what it did to my BG, since there is only 4g of digestible carbohydrate in that bar.
Some of their “natural fallacy” description gets under my skin, but I can see the appeal of a non-dairy, high-fiber protein bar, and I might even give it a shot! Personally, I’ve found “soluble corn fiber” to be a fantastic dietary supplement, since soluble fiber is magic for helping to keep cholesterol under control and has other benefits as well. Soluble fiber does have some effect on my BG though, and I would likely bolus for it if I were using insulin.
Yep, I screwed up some of my terminology. Really should have talked about “fermentable and non-fermentable,” rather than “soluble and insoluble.” See the discussion, corrections, and links to sources below.
I think you mean soluble fiber (like corn fiber, inulin, and other resistant starches). Insoluble fiber passes through you mostly—it’s good for colon health, but it’s not consumed by the gut bacteria.
Corn fiber definitely increases my blood sugar, but in a relatively slower way—when I eat something like a Quest bar, I bolus for most of the fiber, but I don’t need to pre-bolus. Not sure about other prebiotic/soluble fibers, but I would tend to guess they’d have some impact on blood sugars.
Unfortunately soluble fiber defined as “does not dissolve in water” isn’t technically the same as doesn’t get fermented in the gut. Resistant starch and inulin are both fermented in the gut.
Soluble fiber absorbs water and is a prebiotic. Insoluble fiber does not.
Low Carb Grocery has a few brands of vegan protien-bars that do not contain dairy or gluten. (but they contain nuts).
I can’t remember - are you allergic to nuts as well?
Yeah, I almost totally screwed up the soluble vs. insoluble part, although not entirely. Not criticizing you, but in case people are interested, I explain a bit about fiber classification below. As you said, the important thing is to figure out which “fibers” do what for an individual (because it can vary). Cellulose, lignin, and chitins are truly non-reactive for (probably all) humans, but almost all other fibers, whether “soluble or insoluble,” “functional or not,” or “fermentable or not” have some physiological effect (could slightly raise BG, be fermented into usable fatty acids like butyrate, or lower cholesterol). Some corn fiber “products” definitely raise my BG, but other such “added fiber” products don’t.
This is incorrect, but mostly because the terminology is in flux and differs between scientific, medical, and nutritional communities. Soluble vs. insoluble is sort of outdated dietary terminology, and I really shouldn’t have used it. Especially since I was almost entirely wrong (or sloppy) in my usage. As you point out, (most) insoluble fibers are not digested. The big (and important) exceptions are pectin and some of the polysaccharides, which are analytically insoluble but fermented in the gut to form short-chain fatty acids (as with most soluble fibers, resistant starch, and some other random fibery things).
Anyways, Thank you for the correction, since my statement wasn’t right. What I should have said was “fermentable” fiber vs. “non-fermentable” fiber. And even then, some of the “fermentable” fibers can raise some people’s blood glucose to different extents. It’s one of those cases where looking at “total fiber” on the nutritional panel isn’t sufficiently informative to make informed decisions on what to eat (or not eat) and in what quantities.
An exhaustive discussion from a scientific perspective, with links to papers and whatnot, and a history of the confusion around how we talk about fiber, can be found on an Oregon State University public information site.
I just had another very successful trip in terms of eating low-carb. I was attending a ten-day conference in the US staying in dorms with a bunch of other educators. Breakfast and lunch were being provided while dinner was left up to us. On the registration form I noted that I had severe food allergies and ate low-carb to help manage Type 1 diabetes, but planned to bring all my own food as I wasn’t sure they would be able to accommodate six food allergies with two being very sensitive to cross-contamination. I had planned to bring lowish-carb granola bars, some homemade almond flour bread, homemade almond flour crackers, nut butter, and tuna fish and to go shopping for the rest when I arrived. However, a couple of days before leaving we got an e-mail saying that we weren’t allowed to bring nuts or fish due to severe food allergies. We also got the menu, and it was all carbohydrates and included the food I’m most severely allergic to on several days. I freaked out a bit as it meant my entire menu was now out. So I e-mailed them asking if I could be accommodated for breakfast and lunch, and indicated that probably the lowest-risk and best foods for me to eat would be bacon and hardboiled eggs for breakfast (since they don’t touch anything else) and salad for lunch. I was put in touch with the kitchen staff to make those arrangements. There was one close call with sandwich meat containing “modified food starch” (which I avoid because there’s a risk it could be the allergen I have an anaphylactic allergy to), but luckily they caught that and asked me about it before giving it to me.
So every day I ate two hardboiled eggs and several strips of bacon for breakfast and a salad with veggies, chicken, and an egg for lunch. On the second day there I got someone to drive me to a store and picked up hardboiled eggs, lettuce, cucumbers, avocadoes, and salad dressing, and had a salad every night. I also ate some small apples during the day (that each had about 10 grams of carbs—yay for portable pocket-sized scale!) and on a few days had some (non-low-carb but nut-free) granola and granola bars that I’d brought. (Incidentally, in hanging out in allergy Facebook groups, I’m alarmed at how many of the allergy-friendly bars, snacks, recipes, and so on list sugar as the first or second ingredient!) My blood sugar was not perfect—it ranged from 2.2 mmol/L to 14.4 mmol/L—but overall it was about the same control I have when I’m at home
The hardest part of my trip came on the way home when various flights got delayed for over 12 hours. When I was waiting in US airports I found a lot of low-carb options: kale chips (which I bought), “moon cheese”, beef jerky, and nuts at Starbucks, and nuts, low-carb protein bars, beef jerky, Skinny Pop popcorn, and Epic bars at a store. I was excited to find the Epic bars as I’ve never seen them in Canada and am reluctant to order an entire case without trying them, so I bought two. Then I read the ingredients and discovered both bars had “lactic acid” listed, another of those ingredients that could be derived from something I have an anaphylactic allergy to. On the Epic website all I could find was that their lactic acid is derived from vegetables, which didn’t help. If I didn’t eat the bars then I wouldn’t be able to bring them through customs, and I wasn’t about to take a chance and eat one before getting on a plane, so I returned them and thankfully the lady at the checkout was understanding about the allergy explanation.
When I was waiting in Canadian airports, for some reason there were no low-carb options. Nuts was about it, and I don’t like eating nuts before getting on a plane due to people flying with severe allergies, so this is the point I broke and ate some higher-carb food. But, despite this, I covered it all with extra insulin and my blood sugar didn’t seem to spike (hard to tell for sure, because by this point I’d run out of test strips and my month-old Dexcom sensor was sputtering).
All in all, this was a hard trip food-wise (especially the last bit) but a good learning experience. My next “trip” will be a two-month stay in a dorm while I complete an internship, so I’ve got some things I’m planning to purchase and some other ideas for foods that don’t require a lot of cooking that I’m going to try out. Overall, this is all a lot more work for me, but it’s worth it to not worry about blood sugar going crazy or allergic reactions while travelling.
You really are inspiring 
Every time I think about how “difficult” it is for me to travel for work and eat, I think of the absolute heroics you perform and chill out. Seriously, I mean that!
I’ve got about three weeks of travel upcoming in September, then more in October and November (U.S. govt contractor schedule haha). I’m looking forward to implementing some of what I’ve learned from this thread and other of your suggestions.
Cheers!
I’m glad you find it helpful, that’s part of why I post. I found reading Adam Brown’s book Bright Spots and Landmines inspiring because he talks about eating “weird” low-carb foods and getting strange looks and comments from others and just not caring. He also talks about keeping meals as simple as possible. Both of these things have helped me a lot in sticking with this low-carb way of eating. There were also a few other attendees with diabetes who were eating low-carb, so I wasn’t the only one not eating the standard food there. Some poeple skipped the food offered and made their own breakfasts and lunches. Travel has always been the time when I “fall off the wagon” (as well as times I get sick of preparing all my own food from scratch), so finding solutions to both of those are helping me a lot in sticking to this long-term!
I know this sounds truly bizarre to most people, but one of my favorite lunches is just chicken pulled off a Costco rotisserie bird, with some grainy mustard to dip it in. Why bother with everything else if I need protein, and something to make it taste good?
I also tend to fall of the wagon while traveling, partly because I’ve found it difficult to shop (especially when in D.C.). There are few to no groceries near the Capitol, and usually the hotels I stay in don’t have refrigerators. It leaves me mostly with the following travel plan:
I’ve also found a few go-to places I can eat when I travel: Seattle airport has a store where you can buy peeled eggs, cheese, and salami; D.C. has a few “salad restaurants” where you can get a large salad where you pick your own ingredients; there are Nando’s in many East Coast cities, with some excellent low-carb eating options (brussel sprouts, roast veggies, peri peri chicken).
Buying a rotisserie chicken and eating it plain is actually my version of “take out” when I’m feeling too lazy to cook anything. I’m the type of person who, if I like something, I’ll happily eat it every day of the week without getting bored. I didn’t think of dipping the chicken in mustard, but that sounds really good! I’m going to try that the next time I get one (which may be today!).
This would be very challenging. I just bought a Pack It cooler that has built-in ice packs (you just stick it in the freezer overnight and then unfold and put your food in). I haven’t tested it out yet, but it’s supposed to keep food cold for 10 hours or more. I bought it for days when I’m out all day and bring three meals with me, but it might also be useful as a cooler when travelling. I’m not sure how I’d cope in a hotel with no fridge, though. Have you tried requesting a fridge for medical needs (they’ll probably assume you have some medication that needs to be kept cool, even though I’d never put insulin in one of those fridges)? I’ve had times where I’ve shown up to a hotel room with no fridge, but calling the front desk and requesting one has always resulted in one being brought to my room (often I will call ahead and request one as well).