Away From Home

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The fourteen days are easy in your own kitchen. They are difficult everywhere else, and that is where most attempts come apart.

The real problem

Restaurant food is where the sodium lives. So is airport food, hotel breakfast, and almost anything handed to you at a conference. You can eat carefully at home for six days and undo a good part of it in one lunch out.

The standard advice is to prepare everything on Sunday. That works until Wednesday, when the containers run out and you are hungry in a building with no kitchen.

At work

A small air fryer is the single most useful thing you can keep at a desk or in an office kitchen. Bring plain chicken, steak, or fish and cook it in twenty minutes with no stove, no oil, and no pan to wash.

How I use mine →

Steamed eggs travel well. Make five ramekins on Sunday and they hold in the fridge through Thursday.

Keep the constants in a drawer: lemons, black pepper, a salt-free seasoning blend, and a bag of almonds. Most of the difficulty is being caught without options.

Travelling

Coconut water is available almost everywhere, which is convenient because it is the item doing the most work. Fresh fruit is available everywhere. Between those two you can hold the potassium side of the ratio in almost any city.

The sodium side is harder. In restaurants, ask for food prepared without salt, and expect that to work about half the time. Grilled fish or chicken with steamed vegetables is the order most kitchens can handle plainly.

Avoid anything described as marinated, brined, glazed, cured, or served with a sauce. That list covers most menus, which tells you something about restaurant food.

The honest version

You will not run a perfect fourteen days if you travel through the middle of them. That is fine. The palate recalibration, which is the most durable thing the fortnight gives you, survives an imperfect meal. It does not survive two weeks of eating out.

If you have a trip booked, start the reset after it. The fourteen days are worth doing properly once rather than badly twice.