You may be planning to travel or vacation this summer, especially after not being able to go anywhere last summer. If you are trying to recover from binge eating, you may be wondering how to handle this. You may be concerned that being out of your normal routine, and eating foods you don’t usually eat will interfere with your efforts to become and stay binge-free. Also, summer vacations often involve wearing swim suits or other clothes that bring up some body image concerns or desires to lose weight.

I want to give you some simple ideas to stay on track in recovery during travel, so that you can enjoy your vacation experience, and stay committed to ending the habit—no matter where you are or what you are doing. It’s important to learn to deal with variations in your routine, because the point of recovering is so that you can live your life without feeling held back by the eating disorder. You definitely don’t want to have to always keep one set routine in order to avoid binges, because that’s very limiting and it doesn’t give you the freedom that you want.

Simplify: Focus on the Two Recovery Goals

My first tip for vacation or travel is to remember that regardless of your location or situation, all you have to do for recovery is two things: 1. Dismiss the urges to binge, and 2. Eat adequately. If you’ve followed my podcast, blog, or read the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide, you know that those are the two goals of the brain over binge approach. Those two recovery goals do not change when you’re away from home or when you’re engaging in activities that you don’t normally do. You may think that you need to do something special for different situations, and there is definitely value in being prepared (which I’ll talk about next), but know that you are ultimately just trying to not binge and to eat enough to support your efforts to not binge. You don’t need to make things overly complicated.

You can prepare to stay on track in recovery during vacation by making plans that will help you with both recovery goals. This is especially helpful when it comes to eating adequately while you are out of your normal routine. If you can generally plan (in a flexible way) for where and when you’ll have your meals and snacks, it can allow you to you feel more secure knowing that you aren’t going to let yourself get too hungry, which can be a setup for that survival drive to binge. If you’re going to be with others and therefore not in full control of when and where you’ll be eating, then it can be helpful to have some food on hand that you can eat if you’ll be waiting a long time between meals.

For the recovery goal of dismissing urges, there isn’t anything specific you need to do, but you can take a look at your patterns and determine when urges may be likely to come up on your vacation, and then develop plans to support yourself in dismissing them. For example, if you tend to have urges after meals and you find that it helps you to get out of the eating environment, you can plan to go for walks after you eat. Keep in mind that the activities you choose to do while you are experiencing urges aren’t meant to take the urges away, but doing something else can give you the time and space you need to connect with your higher brain and dismiss the urges. If you are new to dismissing urges to binge, you can learn the basics in my free PDF.

Don’t Let Negative Body Thoughts Lead to Binge Eating

If you travel in warm weather, or vacation at the beach, you may be concerned about what you’ll wear and how you’ll look. Even if you know rationally that you can enjoy yourself regardless of your weight or body size, you may have habitual negative body thoughts that pop up when you step out of your comfort zone with what you wear. It’s important to remember that it’s these body thoughts that you need to learn to manage, and your weight will take care of itself as you stay consistent with the two recovery goals. When you try to do the opposite—and attempt to manage your weight (with a restrictive diet), in order to get your body thoughts to go away—it has the unintended effect of making your binge eating worse, and making it harder to reach your natural healthy weight over time. (For thorough discussions about many weight-related topics, go to BrainoverBinge.com/Weight/)

No matter how you’re feeling about the way you look, and no matter if you’re comparing yourself to others, you can continue to eat enough food to support your recovery and to let your body heal. That doesn’t mean you should just let negative thoughts take over, because it’s definitely helpful to learn to stop being so critical of your own body. Being comfortable and confident does help you enjoy experiences more, but it’s not something that happens overnight; so for now, you can learn to enjoy experiences while having some automatic, habitual, negative body thoughts. You can dismiss and disregard the thoughts as much as you can, and you will get more skilled at this over time as the thoughts fade away. (Listen to Episode 40: Body Image and Binge Eating for more help with body image issues).

You also don’t have to feel great about your body to avoid binge eating. It’s possible you have a pattern right now of feeling unhappy with your body, and then having thoughts like, “I’ll never look the way I want, so I might as well binge.” When you learn to recognize thoughts like this as neurological junk, and when you don’t let those thoughts drive your actions, you are well on your way to a binge-free vacation, and a binge-free life.

Visualize Your Vacation Success

My next tip for you is to visualize or mentally rehearse how you’ll successfully handle challenging situations while you are out of your normal routine. For example, if you know that binge urges tend to arise when you feel negatively about your body, you can try to imagine having those body image concerns, and mentally rehearse what the thoughts urging you to binge might say. Then, you can see yourself (in your mind) not giving those binge thoughts any attention and refocusing on your vacation. If you’re someone who feels tempted to engage in restrictive dieting, you can also visualize yourself being successful at eating adequately in situations where you may be tempted to under-eat.

If you need a little extra help with this, I’ve created a recording to guide you in visualizing your success in dismissing urges (coaching track 4) and another one to help you imagine being successful at eating adequately (coaching track 11), and if you are a course member, I recommend that you listen to these two tracks prior to and during your trip, as well as other coaching tracks that help you stay on the path to recovery. If you are not a member, know that the course now includes an app that makes it convenient to listen on the go, and it’s only $10.99 per month for the coaching tracks plus over 100 other course resources to guide you toward freedom from binge eating. There is no long-term commitment, so you can get the course just for extra help on your trip and then cancel when you’re ready.

Allow for Flexibility

My final tip is to allow for flexibility and know that you do not have to be perfect on this vacation—or ever—and you can still avoid binge eating. This doesn’t mean you’ll give yourself excuses to overindulge in a problematic way on vacation, it means you need to realize that no one eats perfectly, and especially on vacation when you’re often eating out a lot. Your eating will be different than it is at home, and that’s okay. You can see this as an opportunity to learn that you can eat normally in any situation and eat normal amounts of any food.

If you’re used to eating healthy most of the time, and you won’t have the ability to cook or have access to your regular nutritious foods, this may bring up some anxiety. But, this is a great chance to teach yourself that you can be successful regardless of the types of foods you are eating. Eating in a way that’s less healthy than usual does not mean you’re binge eating or that you’re doing something wrong in recovery. It gives you so much freedom to know that you are capable of eating fast food, or convenience food, or delicious food at a restaurant, and still avoid going into an out-of-control binge. It’s impossible to eat in a perfect way your whole life, and vacation is a great opportunity to practice imperfection and still stay on track in recovery.

Focus on Living!

My last simple tip is the most important, and that’s to enjoy your vacation! Each time your brain tries to habitually pull your focus toward food, weight, or bingeing, you can consciously redirect your focus toward what truly matters to you. Focus on the people you are with, the sights you are seeing, the activities you are engaged in, and the pleasure of a break from your normal daily schedule. You deserve to live free of this habit, and you can start stepping into that binge-free version of yourself right now.

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If you need personalized help and support as you learn to stay binge free on vacation and every day, know that we now offer Brain over Binge one-on-one coaching.