Getting Back on Track After a Trip on a GLP-1

A short routine for the days after you get home. It is deliberately unambitious, which is the point: most of the damage done by a trip happens in the fortnight afterwards, not during it.

1. 1

   Do nothing corrective for the first day

   Unpack, sleep, drink water, eat a normal meal at a normal hour. The instinct to open the first day home with a hard session and a very small dinner is the instinct that turns one week away into a bad month. There is nothing to claw back on day one, and the plan you actually need is the plan you already had.

2. 2

   Leave the scale alone for a few days

   If you weigh yourself the morning you get back, you are measuring travel rather than anything about your body. In a study of free-living adults, around 84% of the small average weight change measured over two weeks was fat-free mass rather than fat — short-term swings are dominated by water and glycogen. Different food, more salt, less sleep and long periods of sitting all move that number, and none of it is the thing you care about. Wait until you have had a few ordinary days, or skip it and use the tape measure and your logged reps instead.

3. 3

   Restock before you need it

   The first day home is the day with nothing in the fridge, which is how the first week home quietly becomes another week of improvised food. Order or shop for the boring staples on the way back or the evening you land: yoghurt, milk, eggs, cheese, chicken, tinned fish, frozen prawns, whatever your usual protein anchors are. Ten minutes here removes most of the decisions from the next five days.

4. 4

   Take the first session at the load you left, not the one you think you should be at

   Start back with the weights you were using before you went, and expect them to feel heavier than they did — that is normal after a week of sitting on planes and in cars, and it is not information about what you have lost. Then let the ordinary rule move it: a long-standing ACSM guideline suggests increasing load by roughly 2–10% once a person can perform the current workload for one to two repetitions beyond the desired number. Two sessions of feeling slightly off is the usual price of a week away.

5. 5

   Go back to your ordinary protein target, not a stricter one

   The target that protects muscle while you are losing weight is the same target it was before you left, and the protein guide has the numbers. Eating less than usual to compensate for a holiday is the version most likely to cost you lean tissue, because a sharper deficit with less protein and less training is exactly the combination that does. Resume, do not punish.

6. 6

   Put the two sessions in the diary before the week fills up

   Write down which days, not that you will fit them in. A week back at work fills from the outside, and the session that exists only as an intention is the one that does not happen. If the week genuinely will not hold two, hold one and keep it — one session kept beats three planned and missed, and it keeps the habit from needing to be restarted from nothing.

7. 7

   Know what is not a training problem

   Some things that follow a trip are not fixed by getting back to the gym: digestion that has not settled, energy that has not come back after a week of normal sleep, a dose missed or delayed while you were away, or anything new that worries you. Those go to your healthcare provider or pharmacist, and they go there sooner rather than after another fortnight of waiting to see. It is not a failure of consistency; it is a different question.