Podcast

127: Stop Trippin’ About How to Eat Plant-Based on Your Next Trip

This episode is a tad sweary.

Clean Food Dirty Girl

00:00 / 00:25:03

Show notes:

March 4, 2025 |

I’ve traveled all over the world, and no matter where I go, I always find a way to stay plant-based. In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how I do it—without stress or drama. I’ll give you my go-to tips for making it work, how I handle restaurants (vegan or not), why local markets are my favorite, and why knowing our food triggers is super important. Plus, I’m keeping it real about the challenges, the wins, and why I believe travel should be about adventure first—food second.

Helpful links

Timestamps
00:00 Traveling Plant-Based: An Introduction
02:57 Flexibility and Creativity in Food Choices
05:53 Experiences in Vegan Restaurants
08:47 Finding Healthy Options Abroad
12:10 The Importance of Local Markets
15:03 Balancing Enjoyment and Dietary Choices
17:58 Setting Boundaries While Traveling
20:51 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Full episode transcript (has not been edited for grammar)
Hey, this is Molly and thanks for listening to this episode of the Clean Food Dirty Girl podcast. Today I am talking with you about traveling and traveling while plant-based and a couple of good reminders for you. So I have been to a lot of places in the world and have kept it plant-based and I’ve never been to anywhere that I could not make that happen. So there’s some places that have been a lot easier than other places.

But I think the bottom line comes down to this. You gotta be a little bit flexible. You have to have low expectations for your food and you gotta get creative. And if you can do all of that stuff and you have to commit to having a good time. So traveling is one of my favorite things ever and…

I encourage people that when they travel, they make it their job to have the best time possible. And so that does not mean stressing about food. So if I had to choose between going on a trip and having my whole trip consumed by stress about what I’m gonna eat or not going on the trip, I don’t think I would go on the trip like that because that I want, when I travel,

I want to see things. I want to see new things. I want to experience a new culture. I want to talk to local people. I want to visit markets and grocery stores and see how other people eat and check out the local fruits and veggies. I want to go on hikes and look at magnificent art and just soak everything up. I don’t want my time to be consumed by being worried about what I’m going to eat.

Whatever you do when you’re traveling, just make it a commitment to first of all, enjoy yourself. And secondly, like do the best you can with your food. And I’ve been talking to the Drop It, our droplets. So our Drop It club is our weight loss program. And it’s been, we opened it on January 6th. It’s still open. You can join any time. And people who join are called Droplets.

So cute. And people in this program, they’re like, okay, how do I do this while I travel? And it’s really important to, whenever you’re adopting a new lifestyle or changing how you eat, it’s important to be able to do this in a way that works with the rest of your life, because otherwise it’s gonna be too much like starting a diet and then stopping a diet. And you want this just to be realistic to be part of your life. so, and traveling is no different because most of us, we travel either, you if it’s for leisure or maybe it’s for work, maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe it’s because you have family in other parts of the world or other states who knows, you know, it doesn’t always have to be global travel. you know, traveling is definitely part of our lives in this day and age. So, you know, how can you do that and still remain true to your values and how you want to eat. And it is, is possible. So I’ve been doing it for a long time. And like I said, I’ve never traveled to a place that I haven’t been able to make it work. And I’ve been to some pretty, you some places that are, you wouldn’t necessarily think are very easy to eat plant-based. So I, this is top of my mind because I just got back from a trip and I visited Florence, Italy, and then Pisa.

Italy, Genoa, Italy, and then Nice, which is in the south of France, and Saint-Tropez in the south of France, Marseille in the south of France, and then back up to Paris. And this part of the world is definitely not challenging to keep it plant-based. Keeping it whole food plant-based is another story. And that’s when the flexibility part kind of has to come in because depending on your style of travel, how you like to travel, what resources you have available, like you could potentially get airbnbs or even get hotels or stay with friends who all have little kitchens and you could cook your all of your own food. Personally, I don’t fuck around with that because I don’t want to spend my time traveling or exploring in that new place. I don’t want to spend all my time cooking.

Like I spend plenty of time cooking in my normal day-to-day life. And so, yeah, I might do like very minimal stuff, but I’m not gonna make it a priority to cook every single one of my meals when I travel. I’m just not gonna do that to myself. And that would really be the only way to stick to eating a exclusively whole food plant-based diet, oil-free would be to make your own meals because when you go out to eat pretty much anywhere in the world, plant-based restaurants are not, there’s going to be oil in your food. So if you can be flexible with that, then it’s going to be easier on you. So I stayed in many places during this trip and some of them had little kitchens, some of them didn’t. There were some houses that I was staying in with a friend. I did some Airbnb’s and some hotels, was a combination of things. And so here’s a couple of things. And I was really reminded of this during this trip. There were some awesome vegan plant-based restaurants, vegan slash plant-based restaurants in all of the places I went. However, it’s really interesting how sometimes

When you go to a vegan restaurant, it’s really hard to find healthy food. It’s really hard to find vegetables, for example. A lot of the vegan restaurants that I maybe didn’t go into, but that I stumbled across or I found on Happy Cow and looked at their menu, it was amazing how many restaurants I just couldn’t get veggies. It’s strange because you would think a plant-based restaurant would have veggie options, but a lot of them didn’t in all the places I traveled. And I think that that’s true in the US as well. The one thing that I really loved about staying plant-based in Tokyo, which I did podcasts when I came back from Tokyo as well and talked about this, but one thing I love about the plant based restaurants in Tokyo is that they really offer like their menus are very veggie centric and very plant like whole plant centric.

Like you can get brown rice or quinoa and delicious organic veggies prepared in a way that’s simple but also really delightful. And so I think in all of my travels, Tokyo has the healthiest vegan restaurants. A lot of other places just don’t. It’s a lot of processed stuff. It’s a lot of veggies might be part of it in some ways, but they are not like the star. And so I had this experience in Florence where there were a couple really, really good restaurants. If you’re ever in Florence, I’m gonna tell you the names of my favorites, but who knows if they’re gonna be open, right? If you find yourself in Florence and you look for these, they may or may not be open because restaurants come and go. It’s just the nature of them.

My favorite restaurant in Florence was a restaurant called Ora, O-R-A, it’s all, they use local and organic produce. They had some pretty creative dishes. I had a beet risotto that was really, really good. They have a vegan, like, cheese platter, which I tried, which was amazing. They did all of their own fermented cheeses.

So that was fun. And I went there a couple of times. Their food was really nice. Their service was really nice. It was a really beautiful restaurant. And then there was another very cool restaurant called Osteria Vegetariana. That was pretty good. Again, not like the healthiest. None of these places at the time that I went anyways, I could get a really big, beautiful salad. There was a lot of like pasta or lasagna or like, of course, because it’s a lot of pastas, a lot of bread stuff, but not a lot of really fresh veggies. And I got to the point where I was like, I just want a really big salad. And I wasn’t staying long enough in each of the places I was staying to buy like a head of lettuce or to buy a bunch of veggies because I wouldn’t have had time to eat all of it. So I kind of relied on restaurants for most of my meals except for breakfast. So I always eat breakfast in whenever I’m traveling and I’ll just, just oats and sometimes I’ll, and fruit, right? I’ll load up on fruit and oats in the morning. And then, you know, just do the best I can for the rest of the day. But let’s see. So those were the two, my two favorite restaurants in Florence, there was another, there was a very cool organic raw gluten-free vegan bakery called Cortes Cafe, which was really surprising. And I had a gluten-free vegan croissant that was really, really good. I don’t know how they did it, but I mean, it was not whole food plant-based by any means, but it was, it was delicious. So,

Those were a few of my favorite places, but in, and I ate at more restaurants as well. Some not as good. and on like day two, I think it was, was like, okay, I really need a salad or day three. I really need a salad. So what I did was I did not go to a vegan restaurant. just found a regular Italian restaurant and talked with the server and they were able to do some very simple grilled vegetables for me with very little oil. So like some tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant. And just so I had a big plate of veggies and then a big salad with rocket and arugula and fresh tomatoes and some radicchio, I think. And

I just put some balsamic vinegar on top and I was able to just eat a ton of veggies. And that was at a restaurant that was not a vegan restaurant. And none of those items were really on their menu, but they had all of that stuff there. And so the salad was on their menu. And maybe the veggies were too, but I just had to ask for like, okay, go really, really easy on the oil. And I think I had to ask for the salad to be without cheese and maybe there was some meat on it that I had to ask them to just hold off. But it was easy to get a big thing of veggies in a restaurant like that. It was actually easier than in the vegan restaurants. So I just wanted to remind you that when you’re out there traveling the world, don’t forget, vegan restaurants are awesome. And I really love to support vegan restaurants. So it’s important that I eat there. And also just it’s fun and just tastes and I just love eating. But don’t discount other restaurants where you could order like, you know, just a lot of veggies. And I don’t, you know, in the United States, it may not be, I don’t think it’s as like that, especially organic. think it’s hard to find restaurants that have good organic vegetables as a whole. But at least here in Europe, it’s pretty easy to find healthy veggies at most restaurants, even if they’re not vegan. And so I did find that my healthiest meals of the trip were at non-vegan restaurants. There was another restaurant I went to in Nice, and I went to a vegan place, and it was Vegan Pizza, and it was actually an Italian place, but in France, and it was like, it was,

It had so much like cheese and full meats and just really, really rich stuff. just, I looked at the menu and I was like, I don’t want to eat here just because there’s, just felt like it was going to be way too heavy. And so I found another place on Google maps and it was a little. A restaurant that wasn’t necessarily vegan, but they use organic local produce. And so I went in talked with the guys who were working there and they whipped up like one of the most incredible meals on the trip. it was mushrooms. they did like a hummus, a really yummy hummus and a really delicious just veggie soup that was like a squash soup and squash and some other root veggies. And it was creamy and it came with some sprouts and a little bit of like cilantro cream on top. was…

Amazing. And then a huge plate of roasted veggies and like fennel and parsnip and beets and mushrooms and some other kind of potato. Really, really good. And so I was thankful for that. But again, they had things on the menu that weren’t vegan, but I was able to order, you know, a very veggie heavy dinner and I was really, really happy with that. So you know, look around and don’t discount other restaurants just because they aren’t totally vegan. So that’s, that was a little aha moment that I had here. And, and, there were some vegan restaurants that did have really amazing salads and stuff like that, but it just, they were, they were fewer than, you know, most of the restaurants were pretty, like yeah, carb heavy and like fo cheese heavy and pasta heavy and you know fun for sure but like I’m not used to eating out so much so those kind of meals for me are like a once in a while type of thing and when I was eating them kind of day in and day out I was like okay I need I need something lighter and didn’t have know one consistent kitchen the whole time to make some Dirty food which I which I missed. But nonetheless fun and and I know that you know like today I’m back this is my first full day back and for lunch I had a huge salad with organic red leaf lettuce and carrots and red bell peppers and baked tofu and a whole bunch of sauerkraut and some chickpeas.

with a very easy dressing that I whipped together out of tahini and vinegar and soy sauce. And that was an amazing lunch. It felt so, so good. And so I know, and when I get back home to Hawaii, I’m going to be batch cooking again. I’m going to be back in my routine. you know, it’s not this type of eating and this kind of thing is definitely an exception. And so that is, you know, I never stress about it. I never worry about it.

Because it’s fun and I do the best that I can and sometimes that means, you know, going into a restaurant that’s not vegan and just saying, hey, what do you have? You know, can I get a huge bowl of rocket? Can I get a huge arugula? Right? Can I get just some very simple roasted veggies? And so that’s, yeah, that was the reminder that I wanted to share with you. And also bring your own breakfast if you bring just some oats is that’ll save you a ton because I think it’s easier generally to find lunch and dinner than it is breakfast, especially when you’re eating plant-based. having that one meal at home not only saves you money or not home but in the hotel or wherever you’re staying will save you money. And I just love loading up on oats and a bunch of fruit in the morning and that will keep me going to lunch.

And it’s fun because then you can go to the market and pick out whatever fruit looks good. I went to in in Genoa. I went to a market that had the most ridiculously gorgeous fruit and vegetables. I mean, there were some fruit and vegetables, there’s some veggies I had never even seen before. I don’t even know what they were. They were amazing and just so colorful and fresh and it was such a treat and lots of different grains and so many beans and legumes and then fresh flowers. was so much fun to explore the markets. That was one of my favorite things there. Okay, I think that that is what I have. I hope that this was helpful and whatever it is.

Whatever trip you have coming up or if you are wanting to plan a trip but you’re nervous about the eating thing, know, just make a commitment to not stress about the food as much. And I promise you’re gonna have a better time. There was back a long time ago, long, many, many, many years ago, I think it was when I ran the very first reset that we did. There was a woman, and I’ve told this story before, but I don’t know if I’ve told it on the podcast.

It’s a short one, but there was a woman who was in the reset and she was super stressed about a trip to New York that she had planned with her daughters. And she got some coaching from me and she was like, I just don’t know. I’ve been researching all the places I’ve been. Like I got a place that has like a little fridge, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to cook anything. And I just, I, I need to pack. need to get ready, but I can’t, you I just don’t know what I’m going to do about the food. And I was like, just.

Just go have a good time. Forget about the food. Just do the best you can. Forget about it. Don’t try to cook even. If there’s a healthy grocery store and if there’s a few places where you can get a decent meal, then that’s good enough. Just go enjoy your trip. That is your job too. Enjoy your trip. Have fun with your daughters. Explore New York City and fuck being nervous and worried about the food.

And she just was like, that’s an option. And she went and she had the best time. And then she got home and continued on. And so with the Drop It Club (our plant-based weight loss program), I talk about exception eating and exception meals and having that be part of your life. Having meals that you normally might not eat in your day to day, but that you allow because life.

Right? And then planning those out and giving yourself a pass to do that. It can be such a blessing to have that flexibility. And it can really, really make the difference between being caught in the all or nothing perfectionist zone and not really going anywhere and, you know, having this versus having this be really sustainable and just eating the best you can.

Most of the time because what really matters the most is what you eat the majority of your time of your life over the months and over the years. If I was traveling for a living and that was my full-time job and I was doing that most days out of the month and most months out of the year I would be adapting things. I would be cooking more. I would find ways to have more dirty food in my life but because this was you know a

two week period in my life, I’m not gonna worry about it so much. And what really matters most is what I’m eating the majority of the time, month over month, year after year. And so that’s what you need to really keep in mind and that will help you kind of allow yourself to not stress as much. And I will say this though, as like a little caveat, when like I do have boundaries for myself and whether it is like you’re a droplet and you’re thinking about your exception eating or whether you are just traveling and deciding that like, yeah, okay, I’m not gonna be so, I’m gonna give myself a little bit of wiggle room. Know your limits and set your boundaries beforehand. So for example, I know that when I go travel, I’m not gonna eat whole food plant based all of the time.

But there are gonna be things that I’m not gonna eat. I’m not gonna eat meat, I’m not gonna eat dairy, and I’m gonna do my very best to avoid all egg products. And so know I really like, I am going to keep it vegan. Okay, so within that, have some, you know, I have some room because there’s a lot of vegan options and that leaves enough options so that I will have stuff to eat, but I’m not gonna just.

Say, okay, now this is a free pass to eat literally whatever I want because I don’t want to eat all of that stuff. Like I don’t want to, maybe you do and that’s okay, right? There’s nothing wrong with that but this is a good opportunity to tap in with yourself and to question and to decide, okay, well, what do I want to have this mean? Do I just want to stick to eating vegan? Do I want to have cheese like twice during my vacation?

You may want to stay away from your for any foods that are triggering for you. For example, for me, cheese is very triggering. If I start eating cheese, I’m going to think about it. Right. And I haven’t had cheese in like over a decade, but it was one of those foods that was very addictive for me. So it’s easier to just avoid cheese. So I’m not going to have, you know, I’m not going to like, well, I’m traveling, so I’m eating whatever. Okay. I’m traveling, so I’m going to eat vegan.

And then within that, it’s whatever, right? But it’s not outside of it, it’s boundaries. If sugar is a trigger for you and you know that as soon as you start eating sugar, you go down a rabbit hole and it’s really hard for you to stop and you’re constantly thinking about it, then okay, don’t worry about your food as much and give yourself wiggle room, but do whatever you can to stay away from sugar because you know that that is gonna be easier for you in the long run. (If you want to stop eating sugar, this post is for you.)

And so it has to be a little like, think that having some balance with that is important and it’s up to you to decide what boundaries you want to give yourself. And boundaries can be very helpful. it’s a, you know, boundaries are something that, that help us and that, and that work for us when we have them. So keep that in mind too. And then, you know, kind of come up with what that looks like for you. It’s going to be different for everybody and decide from there.

Okay, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. If you could rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, that would be amazing. That really helps us and it helps people find us. So I appreciate that. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and it is filled with lots and lots of yummy plants. Bye.