Travelling light

Get a diet tour package and enjoy a healthy holiday.

Weight is catching up with the travel sector. After a variety of customised itineraries, although still niche products, have proven to be popular — be they spa vacations, island getaways or out-and-out adventure holidays — here is something for those who want to shed a few kilos, on the move.

If the regular diet and exercise is not working, a holiday combined with weight loss might interest you. New diet tours to destinations like Japan, New Zealand and Australia claim to help you get in shape while you’re on vacation! This may sound like an unlikely exercise at first, but for those who can stick to diets, given the right incentives, it could hold some water.

Here’s how it goes: While diet tours are on offer in a number of countries now, let’s take destination A — Japan. If you hook up with a travel agency for a diet tour, they will plan all your meals for you beforehand, keeping in mind the native flavour as well as your taste buds. So you are not losing out on the good stuff, while being on a healthy, controlled diet.

For the days you will be there, your diet will be planned around your travel schedule in the country, bringing together the best of that particular destination. The Japanese in any case eat smaller meals, so this diet works on similar principles.

A sampling of such a diet reported on the Japan Times’s website suggests that the country’s “premier diet food” will be at your service. So it’s fermented soybeans with rice for breakfast and a choice of meat or fish for lunch and dinner (low-fat variety). For good measure, there are snacks thrown in between big meals (even if they are skewered sparrows). The idea is to give you a slightly disguised version of the best of Japan’s best eats, minus unnecessary calories.

But, of course, no diet works as effectively as when combined with exercise. The diets on tour come with the works to strike the right “balance”. So get ready to sightsee on bicycles and visit some of the mountainous parts of the country, where you trek your way back into shape.