Staying Healthy on the Road as a Developer

Last May in Bangkok I lost a week to a stomach that had decided it was done with me. Three days of not leaving the apartment, two more of moving slowly and rescheduling calls. Lying there, I did the arithmetic on the previous four months: about six kilos gained, and a lower back that had ached so long I'd stopped registering it as a separate fact about my life.

The stomach bug was bad luck. The other two were my own design.

That's the thing nobody writes down: the health risks of being a developer abroad are not exotic. Nobody gets a tropical disease in a coworking space. You get soft, stiff and mildly hungover, slowly, invisibly on any given Tuesday and obviously across a year.

The three things that break when you move every month

Chairs. Café furniture is designed for a forty-minute coffee, not a six-hour session. Wooden stools, low tables, no back support, screen at navel height. I spent most of 2025 in exactly this posture and my back sent the bill in April. This is the single strongest argument for a coworking desk over a café that has nothing to do with wifi.

Gym continuity. Any plan needing the same equipment twelve weeks running dies the moment you fly. I abandoned three programmes this way before accepting the constraint instead of fighting it.

Heat and air. At 34°C with humidity, the rational move at every decision point is to not move. Skip the walk, take the Grab, stay under the aircon. Multiply by ninety days. And during Chiang Mai's burning season outdoor exercise stops being an option at all.

Food, and the risk that isn't where you think

The street food fear is mostly misplaced. Four rules cover nearly all of it: eat where there's a queue of locals, eat things that are hot and cooked in front of you, be careful with ice outside proper restaurants, and be careful with raw greens and unpeeled fruit you didn't wash yourself. High turnover is the whole game. A noodle cart selling three hundred bowls a day is safer than a quiet Western restaurant with a fridge.

The thing that actually damaged me was the opposite of a noodle cart. It was the Western café habit. A flat white and a slice of banana bread is about 500 calories, costs $6, and I was doing it twice a day because cafés are where I work. Add a fruit smoothie that is functionally a milkshake. That's most of a second dinner, every day, on top of eating well otherwise.

Now I get black coffee at the café and eat local food for two of three meals. Vietnamese and Thai food, ordered without the sugary drinks, is genuinely excellent nutrition — grilled protein, herbs, vegetables, rice. It costs $2. The $6 pastry was the problem.

Water, sleep, alcohol

Water. Bottled or filtered, and more than you think. In tropical heat I drink around four litres a day and still under-hydrate. Buy the 20-litre refill jug for the apartment; it's about a dollar.

Sleep. If you work with US clients, timezone drag is the health cost nobody prices in. My rule is that I will take late calls but I will not take them on consecutive nights, and I never let the schedule float. Same wake time regardless. Blackout curtains matter more than the mattress, and a lot of cheap apartments have neither.

Alcohol. This is the silent productivity tax in every nomad hub. Beer is $1.50, everyone is on holiday energy, and four nights a week of "just a couple" is normal and socially frictionless. It doesn't feel like a problem because you're never drunk. It shows up as flat mornings, worse sleep, and skipped training. Cutting to two nights a week did more for my output than any tool I've ever installed.

A routine that survives a monthly move

I gave up on programmes and built a floor instead.

• Bodyweight, three times a week, 25 minutes. Push-ups, squats, lunges, rows on whatever bar exists, planks. Needs a floor. Works in a hotel room in a city I've never been to.
• A cheap gym when there is one. In Da Nang and Chiang Mai you can get a monthly membership for roughly $20–30. It doesn't need to be nice. It needs to be within a ten-minute walk, because at fifteen minutes I stop going.
• Walking as transport. 8,000 steps a day, deliberately chosen over the scooter for anything under 2km. This is the highest-value habit on the list and the easiest to lose.

Sun: I'm outdoors far more than I ever was in Hyderabad, and sunscreen is the cheapest health intervention available. Midday in the tropics is not exercise time. Train at 7am or 7pm.

The medical part, which is duller and more important

• Insurance you actually read. I have travel medical cover and I know the number to call, the claim process, and that it excludes scooter accidents unless you hold a valid licence for the bike. That exclusion is the single most common way nomads discover they aren't covered.
• Private hospitals are good and cheap. In Thailand and Vietnam a private consultation typically runs around $20–40, and Bangkok's private hospitals are excellent by any standard. When my stomach didn't clear I paid out of pocket, got seen in an hour, and it cost less than the insurance excess.
• Vaccinations, done before leaving. Typhoid, hepatitis A and B, tetanus, rabies if you'll be rural. Get this settled at home where it's cheap and unhurried.
• A small kit. Oral rehydration salts, loperamide, paracetamol, antihistamines, antiseptic, plasters, and whatever you personally take. ORS is the one that matters; dehydration is what turns a two-day bug into a week.

What I still get wrong

I don't stretch. I know exactly which muscles are the problem, I've had it explained by a physio, and I do it for four days after each flare-up and then stop. My screen is still too low about half the time because I'm too lazy to unpack the stand. And in a city with a good food scene I will absolutely eat like I'm on holiday for the first two weeks.

The protocol isn't discipline. It's picking the four things that survive contact with a new city and letting the rest go. I got the six kilos off in about five months by changing what I drank at cafés and walking more. Nothing I did was interesting, which is probably why nobody writes about it.