Understanding Your Food and Body Image Impulses While Traveling and What To Do About Them
After traveling to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands for almost 2 weeks, many of you requested that I share some tips on how to navigate food fears and body image concerns while traveling.
Travel provides so many health benefits in that it can decrease stress, improve mental health, increase physical activity, stimulate your mind, strengthen your heart and immune system, increase life satisfaction, increase your contact with nature that can lower cortisol, strengthen bonds with those you travel with, and increase tolerance, empathy, and cultural understanding. That all being said, travel can also trigger your sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight response.
Your sympathetic nervous system is activated through:
1. Increased stress
Traveling often involves navigating stressors such as crowded airports, arriving places at specific times, managing luggage, encountering unfamiliar environments, and dealing with potential delays. All of this can activate your fight or flight response preparing you for action if things go awry.
2. Environmental Changes
When you travel, your body is exposed to tons of different environmental changes. This can include changes in temperature, altitude, humidity, air quality, and different rooms, objects, colors, textures, and smells. Your body is doing the best it can to accommodate these changes by activating your sympathetic nervous system so that if any of these are experienced as threatening you're prepped and ready to defend yourself.
3. Physical Exertion
Depending on how you're traveling, your physical activity can change in regards to walking through airports, carrying luggage, packing your car, climbing stairs, and while you're in travel you might be hiking, exploring, and swimming. This physical exertion can stimulate the sympathetic nervous system to support your body's energy demands.
4. Circadian Rhythm Disruption
If you're traversing across different time zones, this can disrupt your body's circadian rhythm. The change in sleep-wake cycles can affect a myriad of physiological processes that are regulated by the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system.
5. Novelty and Excitement
The sympathetic nervous system is not just the system of fight or flight. It's the system of mobilization. This also includes the mobilizing effects of feeling excitement, awe, or anticipation. When you travel, you're exploring new places and engaging in novel experiences that can evoke strong emotional reactions that change your heart rate, blood pressure, and breath.
6. Social Interactions
Traveling often involves interacting with new people. If meeting new people, engaging in conversation, and speaking up for yourself when needed have felt difficult, your sympathetic nervous system can get triggered by the stress of all of these new encounters.
This was a particularly poignant trip for me as this was the most chewing and swallowing of food I've done since I lost my ability to swallow from long covid almost two years ago. I was prepared and knew that along with the excitement of getting back out in the world, I would also be navigating some anxiety. As we've explored together here, when your sympathetic nervous system is activated, it's difficult to hear your hunger and satiation cues, your cravings for carbohydrates will increase, and your desire to eat in general can grow.
You may find yourself overeating, restricting, or worrying about your body’s appearance before or during travel to experience a perceived sense of safety and control. Your food and body image impulses are not the problem, they’re the answer, and your body’s way of communicating it needs extra support. Think of how many times you have listened to that inner voice that says you should go on a diet, or try to lose weight, or eat in a certain way. Your body and parts of you have learned that they will get the attention they need through food and body image concerns. Since travel can activate your sympathetic nervous system, you may find yourself relying on familiar behaviors such as overeating, undereating, overexercising, or going on a diet to try to cultivate some security to experience less internal distress.
With spring break and summer travels coming up, here are some food or body image concerns that may arise before traveling and how you may somatically explore them…
1. Eating foods you don't normally eat.
Perhaps there are some foods that because of diet culture you've stayed away from. These foods can now be interpreted by your body as a threat. You've told your body over and over again that you can't have these foods, that these foods are bad, and that horrible things will happen if you eat these foods. Now, you go on vacation and you're face to face with all of these foods. Your bodily response of fear and anxiety is not about the food, but how your body is interpreting these foods. And if you tell yourself that this is silly, you shouldn't be reacting this way, that's only invalidating your experience. It's ok that you feel anxious around these foods. Your work is to acknowledge the anxiety, welcome it, and get curious about what your body needs to know that it's safe. This may be eating the food to show your body there's nothing to fear and this may be empowering yourself to say no to the food and create a boundary that you don't have to interact with that food if you're not ready yet.
2. Fear of gaining weight.
I often find that the fight or flight response is activated by the fear of what food is going to do to your body rather than the food itself. It's completely normal to feel terrified to gain weight. Look at the society we're living in right now where Ozempic is being pushed as the ultimate weight loss solution. Look at social media where people feel justified in shaming others for living in larger bodies. Look at your past with the messages you received from your family, from your mom or dad who put you on a diet, from your grandparents who constantly made comments about other's bodies. It IS terrifying to have your body change when it's been connected to feeling like you belong and that you'll be safe and respected.
So when you notice the fear of gaining weight arise before or during your travels, validate it. Don't try to make it better. Practice not judging yourself for not being over this yet. Regulating your nervous system is connecting with what is. If you fear your body changing, name it, be with the fear, and get curious about what your fear needs. I saw a picture of myself on this trip and my first reaction to it was that I didn't like the way I looked. And I stated it just like that. Alright, so what? There's a single picture that I didn't like the way I looked and that doesn't have to mean anything. It doesn't mean I have to change my body or that I need to go on some crazy diet or start exercising more when I got home. What can often happen is you see a picture of yourself and your fight or flight response gets triggered and you feel like you need to DO something about this.
The practice can be to stay with yourself in this experience and bring in a lot of curiosity around what meaning you're making out of not liking the way you look in a picture. Let's say your inner child, who learned that they needed to be slim and fit to feel safe in the world, chimes in and tells you that you look awful and how could you let yourself look like that. You might practice detaching from the story and get curious about how a person would be feeling if they thought they looked awful. They might be feeling scared and anxious. Now you get to practice showing up for your felt sense instead of the story. How would you show up for someone who is feeling scared and anxious? You might listen to them. You might hug them. You might let them know it's normal to feel how they feel. This is how you get to practice showing up for yourself when fears about your body changing arise during your travels.
3. Overeating.
Since you might ebb and flow in and out of sympathetic activation during your travels, you might end up overeating. Sometimes, that overeating might be because you're eating food in a different part of the world that you don't know if you're ever going to get to try again and it tastes so good that you don't want to stop eating. Again, overeating is not the problem. It's how your body is perceiving the sensations of feeling overly full that makes you start to spiral. Attending to these sensations in the moment might feel like too much. These sensations might push you outside your window of tolerance and it's not possible to be with them. In these moments, you'll want to look around your room and go through your senses to show your body that even in this overly full experience, you're safe. You can start to identify the difference between threat and discomfort. It may feel uncomfortable, but you are not in danger. You can keep looking out for cues of safety as your body continues to do its internal work of digesting that meal. You can also reflect on past situations where you felt overly full and how you didn't feel overly full forever. You have lived experiences that show you that you have gotten through this and you will again.
4. Anxiety around your nutritional needs getting met.
This was one I had to navigate so I'm throwing it in here for anyone who might resonate with this. As many of you know, I have a sensitive digestive tract. While I've done a ton of digestive healing and I'm rarely in pain anymore, some foods just don't resonate with my body and I'm careful around them in my everyday life. When you travel, there's a lot that's not in your control. Sometimes you're at a restaurant and you just do the best you can and that might mean navigating some digestive pain afterward. Additionally, while I had practiced eating meals before this trip, it still takes me a decent amount of time to chew and swallow my meals after not being able to do this for the past 2 years. There was nervousness that I would not be done with my meal and would need to just stop eating because we had to move on to the next activity.
Now, you may not be navigating troubles with swallowing, but you may have some fears around something not digesting smoothly or what's in your food, or getting sick from food you've never tried. Here, you get to slow down with your body before you eat, look at the menu, reference your body, and notice responses of relaxation or contraction. While it can be supportive at times to go toward the contraction to expand your capacity around what feels comfortable to your body, you're already navigating so much when traveling that you also get to choose the food or meal that brings in a relaxation response. This might be a meal with foods you know digest smoothly, that you know you enjoy, and that you know you typically feel satiated and safe after that eating experience.
Additionally, you can play with bringing snacks with you on your travels that are experienced as safe to your body. This might be trail mixes, bars, or cereals, I brought an entire bag of protein powder with me just in case there was a protein I was having a hard time swallowing. You can check out the link in the show notes for my favorite protein powder called Equip. It was incredibly supportive and easy to mix into water when I needed it. This is an added extra buffer that if you come across a meal that feels activating, you can remind yourself that you have food with you that can facilitate safety in your body and that you will get your nutritional needs met.
I could go on and on about travel suggestions as I truly love to travel and have experimented a lot with what supports regulation around food and body image. If there's something specific you'd like me to explore around traveling while healing your relationship with food, please email me at support@stephaniemara.com and I'm happy to do a part 2 on this episode.
Lastly, if you have upcoming travels, you can play with remembering why you're going on this adventure.
Food and how you look will play a very very small part of your journey. This body that you're living in right now is capable of the travel you're about to embark on and will experience so much awe when encountering new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that you've never experienced before. Because your body is so good at looking out for potential danger, you might forget to reflect on what might go well. This trip went better with being able to eat and swallow than I could have anticipated and I'm so glad I faced the fear to be able to go on such an amazing trip where I got to see hummingbirds, toucans, penguins, turtles, and so much more. Your travel fears are completely valid and as always, I'm here for you in these explorations!