Whenever I tell people that I suffered a cycle of binge eating for the better part of my adolescence, there is marked confusion that registers on their faces because my weight never passed the 125 mark and I hovered closer to 118, and there’s a sort of stereotype associated with not only the weight, but also the emotional “stability” of people suffering from binge-eating disorders. I love this list — it shows that the reasons for getting caught in this cycle are manifold, and it’s not a question of trauma or environment… it’s both.

My situation was a combination of 1, 4 and 5. (Perfectionism being by far my worst enemy. It’s an isolating rigidity that was self-imposed and media-induced because I want a body à la Kiera Knightly, but also extends to other areas of my life, like finances or study. It’s also super fragile, so if I ate one chocolate too many, it was like, fuck it, the whole box it is.) I was able to finally escape that cycle by moving to France for a year.

I remember the epic, and last, binge I had the night before boarding the plane. It was around the holiday season and I had a bunch of chocolate-covered almonds, a tin of wafers, ice cream… and the entire time I was feeling embarassed for myself, fearing (as I always had) that someone might catch me. Then I flew, boarded a train from Paris to Pau and things changed dramatically.

While I don’t think that it’s necessary to leave the country to escape a pattern like binge eating, straight up, it helped. The change made me feel powerful enough to take on some more embedded behavoirs that I wanted to be free of, and I found myself in an environment that was super conducive to the project. For one: there was much less in the way of processed foods. I mean, you could still buy processed foods, but the real treats were fresh… fresh produce was cheaper, good food in general was cheaper. For another, I was suddenly confronted with a more complex definition of “sexiness” that incorporated more components than how much I weighed. And most importantly, the immersion into a completely different culture and language tempered my obsession with my own body. My mental energy was being directed to language acquisition.

All this to say: in the same vein there there are many reasons that someone may start to binge eat, and I think that the expectations we and others have of the female form are usually decisive on this point, there are also several ways out, and I think the best strategy gives the mind a project (like learning a language, but whatever really) and constructs an environment where the food is fresh and not processed. (Easier said than done, but you have a certain amount of control of what you purchase and keep in your house at least.)

Thanks for this list. It’s been almost 8 years since that last binge, but what I did to my adolescence is fixed in history. Regrets regrets! I think being open and lucid about binge eating and eating disorders in general is something that we need to strive for, because young girls are constantly bombarded with so much noise about “how to thigh gap” and “how to size 0.”