How Travel Abroad Brought Me Home To My Own Body

Being stuck in the cycle of bingeing and restricting is all-consuming. I was so concerned about how many calories my allocated eleven grapes contained, and how many minutes I had to run to burn it off. There’s not a lot of time left to think about anything else. Binge eating, like any eating disorder behaviour engulfs your whole world, tramples on your spirit until all that’s left is an empty husk of a shell.

If you struggle with binge eating right now, I bet that you don’t have any hobbies or interests that don’t revolve around food, calories or exercise. You’re only interested in watching Netflix documentaries about food; you know, the ones that strip away any semblance of nuance and complexity and leave you with a clear take-home message: JUST EAT VEGAN. You love a bit of youtube-rabit-holing, but lately you have noticed that you gravitate towards ‘what I eat in a day to lose weight videos’, and ‘how to drop 10lbs this week’.

You have probably asked Google the question ‘how to stop binge eating’, scrolling through pages and pages, eagerly anticipating a ‘hot tip’ to spark a lightbulb moment that will finally ignite your willpower to just. resist. the. binge.

When I was deep in my own struggles with binge eating, I was just the same as you. For the first couple of years there was simply no way I would let myself indulge in a ‘hobby’ that wasn’t related to food or weight loss. But then something happened, I got  bored of it the binge/restrict cycle. It was all-consuming. It was overwhelming. And it was bloody never-ending.

But I grew bored of it. It had sunk it’s teeth right in, I knew it was going to take a momentous amount of work to release myself from it’s grasp. But recovery is made up of baby steps, not great leaps and so it was the boredom of the same routine of binge-restrict-hate myself-binge-restrict that pushed me forward an inch

I asked myself, who will I be when I am recovered? What will I enjoy doing? I fantasised over that question and one thing jumped out at me. Travel. I loved any bit of travelling I had done at that point and adding in more of it, whenever and wherever I could was bound to help me escape the binges.

For the most part, it was wonderful. I was living within an hours drive from Dublin airport at the time, and being in my early twenties with no responsibilities meant I could finish work on a Friday at 4pm and be in the airport ready to jet off for a European city break by 5pm. In 2016 I travelled to 8 different countries, all as a way to escape the reality of my binge eating disorder. And it was so, so effective. Travel gives you the most unique kind of perspective on the world, you get out of your own head. Sitting on a beach in Barcelona you’ll see hundreds of body types living out their weekends without overthinking every single lump and bump.

When your world is consumed by an eating disorder, travel gives you a hundred more things to be interested in, and as a result, you become more interesting too. Weight loss and binge-dieting is one part of you, but for once, it’s not the only part. Don’t get me wrong, I binged while travelling at times too, but I didn’t let it dictate the entire trip.

So when you’re back in raining Ireland or UK (where I live now), and a colleague asks you what you got up to at the weekend, you can smile and share ‘I had the best weekend enjoying tapas and sunsets in Barcelona, thank you 😊’

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