How to Travel With an Autoimmune Disease and a Challenging Diet

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How do you travel when you have a very specific diet you’re trying to follow?

Whether you have an autoimmune disease, or any other chronic condition, we’re going to look at some of the things you can do to ensure a happy, stress-free experience.

I’ve just come back from a trip to the Faroe Islands and I want to give you a rundown of some of my experiences as well as some of the things I’ve learned over the years managing my autoimmune condition.

I now manage my autoimmune disease (ankylosing spondylitis) entirely through diet and lifestyle changes so this is a subject close to my heart.

These are my insights about travelling with a very specialised diet.

Preparation and knowing your dietary needs

When you’re at home, everything’s familiar. You know where you can get the food you need and you have the freedom to cook at home.

In general, you tend to have better (or easier) access to ingredients that you know won’t trigger your condition.

Although I’ll frame this article in terms of my particular autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, many of the ideas expressed will apply to a range of conditions. Whether you are managing something like SIBO or irritable bowel disease.

So this guide is for anyone with specific dietary needs, which may not be widely understood or known about abroad, or even in your home country.

As ever, this is based on my personal experience, some trial and error, and specifically a recent trip to a beautiful place which felt a bit like the edge of the world.

I mean that in the most positive way possible. The Faroes Islands, which we recently visited, is a beautiful, stark, fairy tale-like place with landscapes you couldn’t make up (exactly the kind of holiday my partner and I love!)

How to Travel with Autoimmune Disease and a Challenging Diet

The Faroes have a very low population and the islands are hard to get to. As a result, there aren’t as many modern conveniences when it comes to things like shopping or eating out.

It’s actually one of the things we loved about it. We wanted to go somewhere with an interesting community and where people had to work together. And also somewhere less swamped by advertising and the trappings of the modern world.

For many people, going somewhere like this, or anywhere unfamiliar (whether you are an American going to Europe, a European going to Asia or wherever it is in the world) there can be some fear that sets in.

We think, “how am I going to cope?”… “Will I be able to get the foods I need that don’t trigger pain?”… “Will I be okay?”… “Do I need to do an insane amount of planning?”

All of these questions ran through my head when I was relatively new to diagnosis and certainly when I was new to using diet to manage my condition.

There is always a period of adjustment and settling in at home, of figuring out what foods trigger what and working out what works within your current sphere.

So the thought of going away somewhere unfamiliar can spark a lot of questions.

In this article I’m going to talk a little bit about how I prepared, what my experiences were, and how most of us can really thrive and needn’t worry about travelling or going to unfamiliar places when you have specific dietary needs.

If I’m able to make it work somewhere like the Faroe Islands in a camper van for 10 days with ankylosing spondylitis, then you can do this almost anywhere on the planet.

faroes travel autoimmune

The first thing to highlight, upfront, is to make sure you know what you do well with and have a list of the things you don’t do so well with.

That might sound really obvious, but if you go in blind, it doesn’t matter where you are on the planet, you’ll experience the same old problems you have at home.

Make sure you’ve got quite a clear list.

Hopefully, by now you’ll have a clear idea, especially if you have done something like an elimination diet, and you’ve figured out the things that work for you and the things that don’t.

Just make sure you have it written down in black and white in an app or in a document. Be clear about what works for you.

Strategies for packing and storing food while travelling

We knew on this trip we would be renting a camper van. This wasn’t one of those big luxury camper vans or RVs and it didn’t have a special kitchen. This was a small van that you might normally use to transport some furniture. They’d converted the back to have a little bed.

When it came to cooking, we had a camping stove which we balanced on something – normally gravel – outside of the van. There were butane canisters which plugged in and it acted like a gas hob.

We had small saucepans for preparing our food. We did eat out occasionally, but in general that was what we were used to cook.

So before you depart, figure out what kind of resources you’ll have access to.

cooking in the faroes

In our case, we knew occasionally we were going to be in more populous areas where we might be able to go to restaurants and have access to food shops.

However, we knew for a lot of the time we would be out in the wilds.

We had a cooler box in the back of the van to keep things relatively cool, although not frozen or fridge cold. It had a mechanism which meant you could briefly put it on to a cooling mode from time to time which would keep things a bit cooler still for a brief period of time.

Top tip: if you are going somewhere unfamiliar and you happen to be staying in a hotel, more often than not there will be a mini bar in your room.

Mini bars are great because they’re basically tiny fridges. That means if you’ve got a challenging diet where there are only certain things you can have, you can head out and buy goods that need to be chilled or goods you don’t want to go off and then store them here.

You might need to take out some of the items in the mini bar temporarily, although make sure you don’t get charged for them!

This is something I use almost every time that I stay in a hotel. It gives you so much freedom because sometimes it gives you that ability to either bring some items from home that you want to keep fresh, or it means you can nip out to a shop or a supermarket and store any purchases in that mini bar fridge.

We knew we weren’t going to be able to access food that readily. The first thing we did was some planning in terms of emergency foods we could take that would just tide us over if we couldn’t get access to food for an extended period.

One of the foods, which I only discovered maybe a year and a bit ago, which just seems to be brilliant for my particular diet is macadamia nuts.

Obviously they may not work for you (it’s something to test) and some people do well on different nuts or foods depending on the condition, but the idea is to pack something that’s easy to store and carry around.

I know I do well on macadamia nuts, and I know they last a long time. They’re also very convenient and you can take them pretty much anywhere.

Macadamia Nuts Ankylosing Spondylitis

Before we were due to fly, I bought a couple of kilograms worth, which works out cheaper. Then we roasted about one and a half packs, so a kilogram and a half.

We all have different hunger levels and appetites and we’re all different sizes, so obviously I’m just giving you an idea of what worked for me.

I roasted the nuts with some salt and a little goat’s butter, then packaged that up into some bags, and put it in my hold luggage. Then I was all set!

It meant whatever happened when we were away, there would always be something I could eat, if for some reason we couldn’t get hold of food or there wasn’t a shop open.

It also meant that when we were doing treks, which was the main point of the holiday, there was always something I could have on the go.

I really recommend trying to find ‘that thing’ that works for you. It needs to be something convenient that you can buy in bulk and have with you on day trips or day hikes when you’re out and about.

So that would be my first tip. Have an emergency food, something that you love and something that’s really convenient for when you’re out and about.

Managing stress and anxiety around food when you’re away from home

The second tip is to not panic. The reason I say this is because it’s easy to get into a bit of a frenzy and think, “help! The shop’s closed… or they don’t sell anything I can have.”

The reality is you’re probably not going to die if you go without food for a day or two.

Jumping in the Faroes

In fact, part of my regular routine in managing my own autoimmune disease is to have a two to three day food fast once a month because I find it cleansing and effectively resets my baseline.

It also makes me aware that when I’m in a situation where maybe I just can’t get hold of the food I would normally eat, or I don’t want to be exposed to a trigger food that can cause me pain, it’s really not the end of the world.

Unless you’ve got a really serious condition you’ll probably be ok (obviously this isn’t medical advice and please do check in with your doctor if you’re unsure) but for the majority of people, if you have to miss a meal or two, it’s not a big deal.

I always remind myself of that. It’s something we encountered on the very first day of the trip, because we arrived on a Saturday night.

We Googled some supermarkets that we’d noted down but none were open on a Sunday where we were located. The earliest food place we could find, which was a cafe, didn’t open until 2 p.m.

There was a bit of mad scrambling where we were thinking, “what are we going to do? How are we going to get food?” And then we just sat down and said to ourselves, “It’s fine. We’ve got our macadamia nuts and snacks if we need them.”

We could definitely go without having breakfast (I do all the time) and it quickly became no issue at all.

Sometimes just taking a step back and moving outside of the modern world narrative of ‘instant fix’ and everything being within arm’s reach 24/7 can be really grounding. More often than not, it’s nothing to get too stressed about.

So that’s my second tip. You’re going to be okay. Try to have some basic preparation in terms of having at least some food with you that you can eat if you get super hungry. But if not, don’t worry, there’s going to be food available at some point. You’ll make it!

Finding suitable foods in unfamiliar locations

The next tip is to have a list of ‘safe’ foods that are generally pretty widely available in most places that are healthy and fill you up.

This sounds absurdly obvious, but you want to avoid doing this on the fly.

You don’t want to be in a situation where you’re in a shop or a supermarket and blindly looking at shelves, panicking and thinking, “I don’t know what I can have”… or “what is this ingredient and so on?”

I’ll talk you through some of the staples I use to manage my ankylosing spondylitis and how brilliantly easy they were to get hold of, even in a place like Faroe Islands, where it can sometimes be harder to get hold of some of the things that you might have at home.

As ever, obviously adapt this according to your condition. I’m talking specifically about AS here.

Red meat is something that never seems to cause me issues but things like steak can sometimes be hard to get hold of (or very expensive). However, minced beef, or ground beef, is often widely available.

It’s something that I’ve seen in the vast majority of countries I’ve visited. It’s relatively inexpensive.

Minced beef Faroes

Look for minced beef or minced pork if you’re someone who does better on animal products.

On this trip, it was one of my go to ingredients. We knew it had a relatively decent shelf life (and lasted at least a day or two if we put it straight in the cooler box). Preparation wise it was also really quick to cook up in our little saucepan with our butane canister.

We just added a bit of butter and salt (we brought some goat’s butter with us, although I do fine on cow butter too).

That became the mainstay of what I ate while I was out there, because to be honest, even though these beautiful islands are in the middle of the Atlantic, we found during our relatively short stay that it was quite hard to get a hold of seafood.

The one exception was smoked salmon, which is great because it typically comes in vacuum packed packaging and stays fresh longer. It’s not cheap by any measure but can be helpful for extended stays.

These two items became a stress-free go-to where we could just head to the fridge section in supermarkets and add them to the shopping basket.

The other magic food item for me was eggs. If you tolerate them, eggs are a lifesaver when it comes to travelling. They are versatile, they last ages and you can typically buy them in bulk.

They’re also filling, healthy, easy to transport and you don’t need to keep them chilled. And of course they’re easy to cook.

Eggs were something we could have for breakfast (if we were having breakfast) and it could also work as an emergency lunch or dinner if we were out of other items. And they are typically cheap!

Even somewhere where food prices are more expensive, it can be an affordable thing to have in your armoury of things to eat.

Foods in Faroes

I realise I’ve gone quite heavy on animal products here so far. With my current gut health (and condition), animal products seem to be the thing that doesn’t cause me constant pain.

That’s why they make up a big part of my diet at the moment. That will be different for others and obviously depends on what you’re dealing with.

In terms of vegetables, we managed to find cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage in a few places. These are great ingredients that are easy to cook and transport and are pretty readily available.

We found fresh broccoli in a couple of supermarkets but there was another place where they sold it frozen. And the frozen stuff was great (and much cheaper!).

We put it in our cool box and it actually helped keep the other things a bit cooler until we were ready to eat it.

Embrace local produce (and the frozen foods aisle!)

We encountered a lot of ultra-processed foods while we were away and it makes sense because they are often longer lasting, more convenient and easier to transport. However, UPFs are usually bad news for people with autoimmune or health conditions.

However, there are some great natural frozen foods! Frozen fruits, frozen vegetables and frozen meats.

Don’t forget that frozen aisle because that’s often you’ll find some of the really good stuff you might normally overlook.

It’s a really good place to head for when you’re food shopping and maybe the options are a little bit more limited.

Do see what local delicacies are on offer too.

I was browsing in one of the shops when I saw what looked like natural crisps or potato chips. I looked a little closer and it was a packet of dried fish, a popular and widely available snack in the Faroe Islands.

This is something you just don’t come across in the UK and because I do well on fish I was excited to try it.

I checked the label, with the help of Google Translate, and to my delight there were no dodgy ingredients, just the dried fish and a little oil. While there were other brands which did contain some other (potentially problem causing) ingredients but this one was completely natural.

I tried them and there were absolutely delicious (and filling).

So the next day I bought more and added a little salt to make them even more delicious.

Fish crisps Faroes islands

Be ready to discover exciting new foods.

It might sound strange but that’s one of my favourite things about having autoimmune condition. When you have a more narrow set of foods your body can tolerate you become much more aware of new things and it becomes a voyage of discovery.

The next tip is a little more expensive…

Avocados!

For anyone who does well on this food I cannot recommend them enough.

They’re great for many people using diet to manage a health condition. Of course some people who don’t do so well on them, particularly those struggling with histamine reactions, but personally, they really give me a boost, fill me up and provide loads of energy.

The great thing about avocados is that they are convenient and long lasting.

You can put an avocado in your day pack or even in a jacket pocket. You can have a few harder ones, which will ripen over the course of your trip and some that are ready to go which you can eat straight away. They’re such a versatile food and you can have them with pretty much any meal or on their own as a snack.

When we were going on treks we carried some nuts and some avocados and brought a little teaspoon and a pen knife.

We then cut the top of the avocado, peeled off the skin and then used the spoon to scoop it out. Almost like eating a boiled egg. That was great and these were two of our staple foods on the trip.

It’s something we’ve been able to get hold of in a surprising number of places in the world, actually.

Avocados for autoimmune

(We found avocados in the wilds of Patagonia on a previous trip)

You’ll pay wildly different prices for avacadoes according to where you are. But the way I like to frame it is this…

When you’re away, a specific ingredient might be much more expensive in the supermarket than you’re used to but frame it in terms of what you would spend if you were eating out.

You might spend like £30 or $30 just for lunch, just for one person.

While you might spend $2 – $3 on an avocado, which is expensive by even London prices, when you put it into the context of what you’re saving on going out for a meal, it can put things into perspective.

It was the same with the minced beef we were buying. Typically it was 20% or 30% more expensive than it would be at home… but at least six or seven cheaper than if we had gone out for a meal.

If foods have had to travel a long way or if they are harder to grow (maybe they are grown in greenhouses because of the weather) the reality is you might pay a premium.

On one occasion we paid around $6 for a small punnet of strawberries, which we wouldn’t dream of doing in the UK… but we were on holiday and we were saving money by not eating out, so we treated ourselves and it was absolutely amazing. It was honestly one of the best puddings I’ve ever had.

Travelling with autoimmune disease

Know where the main supermarkets are, in advance

If at any point you’re going to be in a populous area, for example a decent sized town or city, stock up on some things that are going to last you a few days which are easy to store.

That will really help tide you over.

If you’re in a camper van, cool boxes are your friend. If you’re in a hotel, the mini bar fridge. Outside of that you can also bring tupperware which will help keep things a little bit more fresh than if you just kept them out.

Tinned food is also your friend!

It lasts AGES. Just make sure you have a tin opener with you because it’s one of the most frustrating things in the world if you have access to really nice tin food but can’t open it.

I do really well on pears and luckily one of the supermarkets we went to sold them so we bought a few tins.

It was just a really great way of having readily accessible food that we didn’t have to store in a particularly special way.

So to recap…

Tinned food, frozen food and have an idea and a list of things you can bring.

If possible, bring a snack type food that’s long lasting, convenient, and that you can carry anywhere and take on day trips.

How to navigate restaurants and menus with confidence

Eating out with autoimmune disease

Eating out is something that used to really panic me when I first learned about using diet to manage my health.

It’s one of those environments where you’re often in a social situation, such as a group of friends or work colleagues.

That can be quite stressful if you don’t know what’s going to be on the menu.

You’re suddenly confronted with the menu, while also trying to hold a conversation and thinking, “I don’t know what I can have! How am I going to figure out what’s in what? Is this going to be okay?”

The best tip I can give on that is to do some brief research in advance as well as having a general list of things that you do well on and things that you don’t. Then when it comes to ordering, you’ll be confident and easygoing about asking for substitutions.

Go online, type in the name of the place that you’re going to (or expect to be going to) and look at their menu. Usually the menu will be on the Google Maps for that particular restaurant and they normally have a link to the menu, or a link to their website.

Sometimes it’s on an Instagram account that the restaurant has. Just click and see what the options are.

In another language?

Don’t worry, go into Google Translate.

Even if it’s on Instagram just screenshot it. Go into Google Translate and then upload that photo.

There’s an option to access your images and then it will detect and translate it for you so that you’ll be able to see exactly what’s on the menu.

Likewise, if there’s an impulse meal and you’re feeling stuck, there’s also a camera button within Google Translate where you can hover your phone camera over the menu and it will translate it in real time in your language.

I actually really enjoy the research process and think: “Wow, this is great, I’m going to go for a nice meal, let’s see what I can have”.

Typically there might only be a handful of things I can have, and that’s wonderful. It takes away that paralysis of choice we often find in the modern world where we’re confronted with sort of 9,000 different options.

Either I look at it and go, “Great, that’s something I can have without making any substitutions” or maybe I think “I can have that dish and ask to swap over X ingredient.”

That’s the second key point.

Sometimes there might be one or two ingredients which you don’t react well to.

Don’t be afraid of talking to the wait staff and saying, “I’m going to have XYZ and I’m just going to substitute this for that.”

The worst they can do is say, “I’ll have to ask the chef about that.”

I’ve rarely encountered a time where they’ve said they can’t make alterations, especially if you pick something they already have on the menu.

When we were in Argentina, for example, some places you offered steak with chips.

Potatoes are starchy, so that was a no-go for me. But if I saw in the menu that they had broccoli as a side dish, I’d just say, “I’ll have the steak please, and broccoli instead of chips”, and it was never a problem. People usually want to help.

Conversely, I’ve found restaurants often panic if you put the responsibility for your diet on them.

So for example, if you say, “I can’t have dairy and starch,” they then have to try and figure out, on the spot, what it is you can eat or can’t eat. That means they usually have to get the chef involved too and everyone gets stressed.

The staff are stressed because they don’t want to give you something that’s going to be harmful or land them, or the restaurant, in trouble.

They will also likely be unfamiliar with your diet. Who on earth knows all the foods that contain starch unless you’re intimately acquainted with a diet like this? Most people don’t. It’s taken me years to become good at figuring this out.

The best thing to do, in my experience, is to take the responsibility off them. You know best what’s going to work for you. So say something like, “I’ll have X and swap out Y for Z please”

I don’t even tell people that I’ve got a dietary requirement anymore. I just say this is what I’m doing in a friendly, polite way.

If they say something like, “sorry we can’t do broccoli” I’ve found they normally follow up with: “But we can do this”. If they don’t, just say “Okay, what else could I have instead?”.

If you’re calm, polite and confident you’ll get a good response.

To give another example from Argentina, fried egg was a really popular side dish. If any of the mains were listed with a starchy side it wasn’t a problem because I could say, “I’ll have a fried egg instead.” No problem at all.

My biggest tip on eating out is to just try and build up confidence. At the start of the diet I always felt like I was putting people out and awkward. I felt anxious and nervous. I didn’t know what to say.

We used to contact restaurants in advance and say: “I’ve got this thing, and I’m having to avoid this and that.”

I’ve found that doing this can set off this looping, snowballing spiral of panic among everyone.

The people who are unfamiliar with your diet suddenly have to figure out something that would normally take months of learning. It’s an impossible ask. You’re also stressed because you’re worried that they won’t get it quite right.

It also has the potential to become a conversation that dominates at your table, especially if you’re with people you don’t know well.

“Why can’t you have that? Why are you not having this?”

I never mind explaining my diet and my health protocol to people but at the same time I don’t want to feel like a circus act.

That’s why keeping things really simple. “I’m just going to have this instead of that”, saves a lot of hassle.

(And honestly, most of the time no one even notices).

The last tip is to have a list of staple things that most places will offer that can work with your diet.

For example in the UK, much of the US and Europe and Australia, something like a chicken Caesar salad is pretty common.

In the UK you find it on most pub menus and also find it in a lot of cafes. That is something that I can have as long as I don’t have the croutons in it and these are easy enough to pick out if I have to.

I don’t particularly love it, but it’s nice to have something to have as a backup.

Have in the back of your mind a selection of popular dishes that can work with your diet. It makes it so much less stressful when you’re put on the spot.

Those are my top tips. I hope you find them helpful.

Rediscovering natural flavours

Often we can frame using diet and food to stay healthy as being a negative, restrictive ‘missing out’ type thing.

It feels the opposite to me. I was in crippling pain previously, taking medication all the time, never feeling myself, always on the edge of mood and totally inflamed.

Finding out what my genetics and microbiome seem best attuned to through research and trial and error seems a pretty amazing trade off to me.

As you progress you get to dive into more of what works and simply ignore what doesn’t. Eventually over time, you really don’t miss that other stuff and you don’t feel like you’re being deprived.

You get to become a connoisseur of all the things you can have. Your taste buds explode with joy when you have those ingredients that you know you thrive on.

That’s something that I found really interesting with AS and diet. When you’re not having processed sauces packed full of sugars, salts and flavourings you recalibrate your taste buds.

Real ingredients, like a berry, or a beautiful piece of fish taste amazing and complete. Your taste buds explode because the food itself is delicious, on the thing slathered on top.

You’re no longer desensitised by lab-concocted flavourings designed to set your taste buds on fire.

You’re more attuned to the natural flavours and it becomes a whole exciting new journey in of itself.

On our recent trip to the edge of the world I didn’t have any health issues. I had lots of energy, I slept well (something that was unimaginable years ago) even on a terrible, miserable, thin campervan mattress, absolutely.

If I can do it, you definitely can too.

Please do share any tips that you found useful when you’ve been away. Any little hacks you’ve found, foods that were good go tos. I’d love to hear some of your tips and strategies.

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2 Comments

  1. Eileen

    You did such a great job of explaining how to navigate a special diet while traveling and in restaurants. I don’t have AS, but I do have other diet needs. Thank you for your article.

    Reply
    • Gut Heroes

      Hi Eileen, that’s wonderful! I’m so glad you found it helpful.

      Reply

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