3 tips on eating well and staying healthy while overlanding
2 Okt., 2025
– with Ashley Saylor
Rooftop tent camping and overlanding are about freedom, challenge, and connection with nature, but they don’t have to come at the expense of your wellbeing. This guide shares how Ashley keeps healthy, cooks creative meals, and recharge her energy while travelling. Plus you get some extra gear and product ideas to help you do the same.
We’ve all experienced some form of post vacation hangover. You’re on the way home, and you’re trying to avoid the feelings of guilt over the chores and work building up in your absence. When you compound that anxiety with less than restful sleep, eating on-the-go, and hours or days on the road, you might feel physically and mentally less well than you did when you left for your much awaited vacation.
Vacations should be a well-deserved reset, leaving you feeling refreshed and energized. Sure, this might be easily attained by flying into a resort and disassociating in a beach chair for a week. But we are overlanders, adventure seekers, and camping enthusiasts. We like things to be just a little harder and off-the-beaten-path. We seek out destinations that require a good bit of research, equipment, and sometimes pure luck to find. Getting to the destination is half the fun, but planned incorrectly, and the whole trip can just feel chaotic.
My free time is, more often than not, spent exploring out of my vehicle – whether it’s for a weekend, evening date night, or a two week vacation. I find it can be challenging (not to mention expensive) to eat the same kind of fresh, healthy meals that I enjoy at home. A lot of the remote locations we find ourselves rarely have grocery stores, let alone healthy eating options. But with a little planning and the right equipment, I have found it IS possible to maintain a healthy lifestyle on the road, helping you return truly refreshed and dwelling on rad, new memories made instead of how sluggish you’re feeling.
Gatekeeping is only for a handful of my favorite secret locations, not food and wellness! So I’m here to share some of the tips that I’ve learned over the last five plus years of overlanding, and some of my favorite camping meals. For context, I am vegetarian, but my travel and life partner, Mack, fortunately eats EVERYTHING (but pickles). Mack loves to cook, and he’s quite famous within our circle for some of his camp recipes. I started to appreciate cooking more when I became vegetarian about 6 or so years ago, but I like to keep it pretty simple. So don’t worry – all of these ideas can be easily modified to include meat options, and you won’t find any suggestions requiring a bunch of rare ingredients.
1 – Make a meal plan
Create a meal plan that uses the same ingredients across more than one meal. Our camp grocery staples include shredded cheese, eggs, tortillas, rice, mushrooms, bell peppers, and onions. This gives us a good base for dinner options such as stir fry, stuffed peppers, quesadillas, or a “bowl”, and we can use the leftovers in breakfast as well, such as a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs or mixed in with hashbrowns.
Consider meals you can cook ahead of time and reheat. Chili is an easy meal to make extras at home and freeze. There’s nothing better than eating chili by a campfire, and chili leftovers always taste better as the flavors deepen! You can also consider prepping ahead some of the items you’ll use in camp meals. If you’re going on a short trip, you can wash and chop vegetables ahead of time, which cuts down prep time at camp and perhaps enables you to pack fewer kitchen utensils.
Is it just me, or do sometimes snacks feel like one of the best parts of a road trip? Fruit, nuts, veggies, yogurt, and hummus or other healthy dips are good alternatives to gas station food, and will keep for a few days. Bring a box of salad greens with you, and you can also use these ingredients to make a yummy and quick salad at camp. We also like to use fruit and nuts to spice up a plain bowl of oatmeal for those mornings we’re trying to pack up camp early.
2 – Choose your cooking gear wisely
If this all seems overwhelming and you’re thinking, ok, but HOW do I cook all this on the go? Trust me when I say – I am a pretty straight forward recipe person. If it has more than 8-10 ingredients (and that’s pushing it!) or I have to go to a specialty store to purchase something, I am moving on to the next recipe. And the same with cookware. When camping, we have to be intentional about what we bring. Mack and I make everything with a few simple items. The most versatile thing that has worked for us is Blackstone’s Camping Griddle, available for about $160 at Walmart. It’s a flat top grill, but we are able to cook anything from soup to rice on it using collapsible pots from GSI Outdoors.
I keep some collapsible bowls, and a collapsible strainer on hand for washing and prepping vegetables, as well as a cutting board and good cutting knife set. I also keep small bottles of olive oil, Tajin, and Mack’s favorite grilling seasoning with our camping essentials.
3 – Stay hydrated and rested
Summer camping can make it hard to stay on top of your hydration goals. Be sure to plan ahead and bring plenty of drinking water with you. We aim to bring a gallon of water per day for two people, in addition to a flavored drink or two each. We like to bring natural seltzers with us (Coconut LaCroix and Waterloo Orange Vanilla are my current favorites) as a good alternative to buying sodas or other sugary and high calorie drinks at the gas station.
Set yourself up for success with a good night’s sleep. James Baroud’s high quality tents are equipped with the best memory foam mattress on the market (that’s my non-professional, but experienced opinion!) ensure the night’s sleep you’re getting is as restful as the scenery you’re enjoying during the day.
Ever since I got my Evasion tent, gone are the days of tossing and turning from pressure points every hour or so, and waking up feeling like I just napped all night long. And the tent opens and packs away so quickly and easily that I can spend more time enjoying the scenery when I arrive, and sleeping in in the morning.
Extra tip
Easy On-the-Go Meals and Snacks we love
This list is in no way exhaustive, but our staples, and will hopefully inspire you to get creative with your own meals!
Breakfast
Lunch and Snacks
Dinner Options
I hope that these ideas have inspired ideas of your own that make your next vacation seem less rushed, more relaxed, and helped create fun memories cooking delicious meals in awe-inspiring scenery!
Ashley is an avid overlander and James Baroud ambassador who recently moved from Georgia to the outdoor paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah. Raised by adventure-loving parents who taught her never to live in fear, she’s embraced a life of travel, endurance sports, and exploring off-the-beaten-path destinations.
After completing multiple Ironman triathlons and ultramarathons, a battle with long-COVID shifted her focus from trail running to overland camping in her Toyota 4Runner. Through solo road trips and backcountry campouts, Ashley rediscovered her strength and resilience in nature.
Now settled in Utah with her partner (whom she met camping) and their three rescue bunnies, she spends her free time planning new routes, finding remote campsites, and soaking in the freedom of the trails. If you see her out there in the wild, be sure to say hello and share a bit of that trail magic!
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