For plenty of artists, eating healthy is a challenge while on the road. But for Runaway June, the trio made up of Hannah Mulholland, Jennifer Wayne and Naomi Cooke, opening up for Carrie Underwood on her upcoming Cry Pretty Tour 360 is a chance for them to maintain their healthy lifestyles, thanks to their tour boss.
“Carrie is super healthy, so catering will be really nice,” Cooke told PopCulture.com. “And she’s almost fully vegan, or she is vegan.”
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“I think she’s mostly vegan,” Mulholland interjected.
“She said she’s like, 98% vegan,” continued Cooke. “Which means, she said, if there’s butter in a muffin or something, I won’t freak out.”
Mulholland is vegan, with both Cooke and Wayne also choosing healthy diets, which became easier to maintain once they graduated to their own tour bus.
“Bringing healthy food out is something that we definitely try to do,” Mulholland said. “Having a bus makes it a lot easier to do that because if you’re stuck at airports or the middle of nowhere, you don’t necessarily get things with specific dietary restrictions that we all have. So when we have our bus, it’s a lot easier to be healthy. You can kind of bring your own stuff and have your own routine. So that’s really helpful.”
Still, even Mulholland acknowledges her diet isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to one now-forbidden food.
“The cheese is the thing that people relapse on, for sure,” she acknowledged. “‘I’ll just have a little bit.’ And then you realize, for me, I’m so used to vegan cheese. If I were to have real cheese, I think it would just like, I would have to readjust my entire palate.”
Mulholland married her longtime boyfriend, Ian Jay, in a surprise ceremony in October, before the couple went on a romantic honeymoon in Italy, where Mulholland didn’t struggle nearly as much as she thought she might with her vegan diet.
“They actually, surprisingly in Italy, they have pretty much one or two vegan gelato flavors at every single place,” Mulholland recalled. “It’s not even intentional, but they just make it so rich where it’s not even, like, it’s just cacao and whatever. Surprisingly, I was able to eat gelato almost every day that was vegan.”
Runaway June will soon start tour rehearsals for the Cry Pretty Tour 360, which is especially important since the rotating stage will be brand-new for the threesome.
“We’ll start rehearsing on it. It’s gonna require a different show for us. So we’re designing that. Getting our band guys in shape,” Cooke said, adding with a laugh, “We make them do push-ups all day long.”
Find a list of all of Runaway June’s upcoming shows, including their dates with Underwood, on their website.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Rick Diamond
