You may love your job. Trucking is a great way to earn money while seeing the country, and you may love
all your alone time listening to music or podcasts.
However, trucking can also wreak havoc on your body. Sitting behind the wheel, sleeping at odd hours, and
eating greasy truck-stop fare are not good for you. If you want to live a long and healthy life, you need to
take steps to avoid these common pitfalls.
This blog will give you some general guidelines for your eating and exercise habits. Follow our advice,
and you’ll be more energetic on the road and at home.
Eat Well on the Go
Unhealthy food is often the most available and the cheapest. With chips, burgers, and desserts featured in
every convenience store and advertised on every billboard, you may sometimes feel like the world is
conspiring against healthy eating habits. But you can still make the necessary changes.
Snacking
Snacking while you drive isn’t really a bad thing. If you let yourself get too hungry during the day,
you’re more likely to binge later, so frequent snacks can be helpful-depending on what you eat.
What you snack on is usually what’s available in your cab. So, make the available options more nutritious.
Instead of stocking up on bags of chips, grab options like baby carrots, apples, bell peppers, celery, and
unsalted nuts. None of these items need to be refrigerated, making them a great choice for keeping in your
cab.
While snacking, make sure to drink plenty of water. Sometimes dehydration feels like hunger. When you have
enough water in your belly, you won’t feel like you have to fill it with food. Additionally, make sure you
really are drinking water: you don’t need the extra calories from sweetened drinks like juice, sports drinks,
and soda.
Meals
Finding the right meals can be trickier. You often eat on a tight schedule, so you have to opt for fast
food, which tends to have fewer nutritious options than a sit-down restaurant. Still, you can find a way to
make things work.
Your goal in changing your eating habits isn’t to become perfect. You just need to improve what you’re
doing. With that in mind, don’t feel like you have to find the perfect healthy meal every day-just something
that you like, you can afford, and that has a reasonable amount of nutrition for the amount of calories
inside it. In other words, focus on finding a good option, not a perfect one.
Start by looking at what’s around in the places you tend to stop at. Look for a place you can buy a meal
with fruits and vegetables. Sandwiches, salads, and soups often have lots of fresh ingredients, but they
aren’t your only options-ethnic foods, such as burritos, may also have loads of good-for-you vegetables. Keep
an open mind as you see what’s around.
If you prefer to stay at the locations you’ve already been eating in, you can often improve your meals by
taking a better look at the menu. If you look the menu up online, you can see the nutritional information for
each item, enabling you to make an informed decision about what to eat there.
Overall, with some planning ahead and research, you should be able to find fast, affordable, nutritious
food that tastes good.
Exercise on the Road
Sitting behind the wheel for hours at a time isn’t great for your body. You need a chance to get your
heart rate up and work your muscles around periods of inactivity. However, you may feel like you don’t have
time.
Many truckers solve this problem by exercising in short bursts. You don’t have to do an entire hour-long
workout at once-you can do four 15-minute workouts instead. Try exercising while you take your mandated
breaks and while you’re filling up with gas. Easy options include:
- Walking
- Jogging or sprinting
- Body weight exercises, like push-ups
- Lifting weights (either exercise products like resistance bands or dumbbells, or whatever heavy objects
you have around, like spare parts or tires)
Since you’re exercising in short bursts, make your workouts intense to make up for lost time. That way,
you’ll get the most improvement for the amount of hours you can put in.
Trucking can be a great career, but if you’re not careful, the food and hours of sitting still can damage
your body. Even if you’re not interested in becoming a fitness expert, you can still care for yourself in
order to be healthier now and in the future. You don’t have to change overnight or do everything perfectly you
just have to make small adjustments to improve from where you are now.
If you’re interested in trucking, Factor Loads can help you out. We specialize in getting trucking startups
off the ground. Contact us to learn more.