Stressorexia: The case of being "too busy" to eat

Quote of the day~"There's a masochistic pride to overworking. How heavy a workload can I truly handle? How many plates can I keep in the air?"

~"Notes on Work" by Weike Wong

Last Wednesday, I went to get dinner with a friend. We’d texted some during the breaks in my evening Spanish class. After I remarked thoughtlessly that I had only eaten a granola bar in the past nine hours, he said I needed to eat. I promised I would after Spanish. I texted him once my class was done in between a phone call with a student apartment complex in Lexington—I’m desperately searching for a feasible summer sublease agreement for my internship.

Secretly, as I texted him, I contemplated skipping a meal to get all the things I needed to get done before the next day. But he and I had previously plans to meet later that evening, so eating was decidedly inevitable. He asked if I would get Hilltopper Hub with him; I reluctantly said yes. My busy schedule would have to wait.

There aren’t any words I can use to describe the anxiety I had leading up to getting dinner with *Cade (not his real name). When I first saw him at the restaurant, my instinct was to run. I was certain I couldn’t stomach a meal in the midst of the quiet uneasiness that often accompanies me whenever I eat anywhere besides the Student Publications office or my dorm. I swiped my card at the front of the restaurant and headed towards Cade, who was standing at the soda fountain.

“You look nice today,” he said, and I was so distracted by his green eyes and my anxiety that I didn’t even notice. He had to repeat himself.

He wasn’t the first guy to compliment me that day, but he was the only guy whose compliment repeated in my head for hours on end.

He found us a booth to sit in, and I apprehensively followed him to the table and dropped off my stuff before reluctantly heading to the food service area. The food service ladies stared at me, and in my troubled state, I decided that even that was enough to make me not want to eat. Ever so conscious about my body and other people’s reactions to it, I played with my rings and squeezed the skin on my fingers to remind myself to breathe and tried calming down. I knew they weren’t judging me and only doing their job, but their attentiveness made me feel as if they were going to silently criticize me for either choosing to eat too much or choosing to eat too little.

I asked for what I considered the standard amount: a roll, one serving of fries and a piece of chicken. I decided before the chicken thigh plopped on my plate that I wasn’t going to eat it. I wasn’t going to eat anything.

“Thank you,” I said, already feeling as though I was going to vomit from stress.

I sat my plate down and ran to get fill my cup up with a soft drink. Sitting down to eat, the taste of my cherry coke was familiar. I often drink either water, a soft drink or coffee to avoid eating.

A quick drink and a granola bar here and there is better than drinking 50 ounces of hot raspberry, lemon or peppermint tea like I did for months on end from December 2019 until spring of 2021.

I’ve genuinely loved the taste of hot tea since I was a young girl, but as this is an eating disorder blog, I can’t go without acknowledging that drinking tea—usually green—is considered a known “hack” for not eating among those suffering from eating disorders.

For the friends that watch my eating habits closely, like Cade has for the past few months since I admitted to him that I struggle with eating, they notice that a coffee from either Starbucks or Einstein’s is my routine on-the-go substitute for hot tea.

Cade and I sat at the booth, and I watched as he repeatedly got up to get multiple servings of Hilltopper’s dinner for the night. And he watched as I “played” with my food like a child.

The rules to “eating” while also not include drinking several sips of your drink of choice while tearing the food you do decide to eat into pieces. Eat one “piece” of food and take a sip after each bite; you’ll be “full” sooner than you think.

Step two: Throw your “company” off by insisting you really don’t need to eat. Hope they don’t see your nearly full plate. Hope that they haven’t noticed the fact that you’ve barely eaten.

These are the thoughts that run through your mind when you have an eating disorder.

“I’m not hungry,” I told Cade as I pushed my plate towards him in dismissal of its content. “Really.”

I felt his cerulean eyes bore into my brown ones.

“You need to eat,” he said. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

He knew the truth, so I couldn’t lie. There was no denying it.

“I hate chicken,” I said.

This was true. When you live with an eating disorder, you learn to categorize foods into “safe foods”—foods you can eat when you don’t feel like eating—and “bad foods”—foods you steer clear of when eating with friends or family because you know you won’t eat them.

Cade didn’t believe me. He went on a tangent about how I eat Chick-fil-A nearly every day. He doesn’t know that the standard eight-piece-nugget and fries meal is one of my “safe meals.”

Since I was a little girl, I’ve always eaten each part of a meal one at a time. If I’m eating curry chicken and rice, I’ll eat the chicken first and the rice second. The same applied here. I ate the roll first, which I considered to be the safest of all the foods, and then moved to the fries.

“I want coffee,” I said.

“You should try eating your food first,” Cade said.

He lectured me like a child, so I whined like a baby in protest of his suggestion. According to my parents, this is a trait I carried with me from infancy into my adult years.

Like a parent, Cade got sterner with his words.

“We’re not leaving until you eat,” he said next.

He stared deeply into my eyes and once again my anxiety took hold.

I stuffed a single fry into my mouth and bit my lip.

“We’ll be here all night,” I said. “You have to help me pick out a dress for the dinner tomorrow. We have to go.”

He wasn’t backing down, so I had to explain that my nerves were the real reason I wasn’t eating.

Cade said most people binge when they’re anxious instead of not eating. He said he couldn’t find the right word to describe my behavior but joked that I was strange.

“I take my emotions out on food,” I said, nervously pinching my fingers.

I left out the part that I found him too attractive to eat. But I did admit that with all the fear I had about my interview to be the Talisman’s next executive editor and the fancy dinner before the annual John B. Gaines Lecture Series panel the next day, I was too worried to eat. In fact, I hadn’t eaten thoroughly since Monday.

Whenever I’ve been asked whether I struggle with an eating disorder, I have cautiously answered yes. Sometimes, if I am too scared to answer transparently, I will simply say that I often find myself thinking that I’m “too busy” to eat. I’m so busy with classes, my tutoring job, my responsibilities as a Talisman editor and life to eat. So busy that I often forget. The campus dietician encouraged me last year to make timers and alarms to remind myself to eat. It is true that I make timers—and time for that matter—for everything else.

The condition with which I can most identify my disordered eating habits is called “stressorexia.” While not an official illness, it is noted to be a part of the list of “Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified,”which includes unofficial disorders marked by disordered eating habits but not entirely ascribing to the diagnostic criteria required for formal eating disorders.

Simply put, it is a condition that causes people to not eat for prolonged periods because they find themselves too stressed to eat or too preoccupied with all other responsibilities and endeavors. Being busy trumps hunger, and the desire to complete a to-do list ceases your appetite.

The condition is considered to be “a phenomenon affecting busy, stressed-out women, causing them to lose their appetites through stress” according to “Women on the edge." Stressorexia symptoms are said to be most prevalent among women, who “are trying to be sexy, fashionable and slim, have a career and be perfect mothers and wives."

According to "Women on the edge," effects of the condition include “drastic weight loss” and the potential to “slip into an anorexic-type situation."

How does this relate to college women experiencing eating disorders?

College comes with the stress of excelling academically, progressing professionally, completing constant, tedious and weekly tasks like laundry and cooking, participating in extra-curricular activities and balancing a personal life.

Sometimes the weight of all these responsibilities seems impossible to bear.

Stressorexia behaviors complemented by a disquieting environment results in a situation like the one that occurred when I got dinner with Cade last week.

He finally backed down, accepted that I was not going to eat and walked with me to Starbucks like I’d requested.

The truth is that I was starving that Wednesday evening, and while Cade ate comfortably and went for seconds and thirds (while encouraging me to do the same), I sat miserably with envy at the easiness at which he was able to eat.

Cade said I ate a roll and “four fries”—he’d counted.

He also told my best friend, *Jane (not her real name), when the two of them were in my room later that night how I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

“And now you’re not eating dinner,” he said.

It was around nine o’clock. His tone was beyond critical. He seemed genuinely upset with me for not eating. He even threw back at me that he believed my mother was correct in her suspicions—“She’s right,” he said. “You need to eat more.”

His words stung, but I couldn’t deny them.

I ate a granola bar the next morning but didn’t eat again thoroughly until 3:45 pm that day after I’d endured three back-to-back classes and completed my interview with the Student Publications Committee. I was elected to be the Talisman editor, and I will likely hold this position for the next two years until I graduate from college.

I finally ate but only before I’d nearly fallen to the floor from hunger. I succeeded in becoming the next executive editor while also attending all three of my classes for Thursday and an evening dinner at the School of Media. But could I have done all this while also eating?

Unequivocally, the answer is yes.

Was it worth it? Is skipping meals worth the distress I cause my parents, my closest friends and everyone else who witnesses my destructive, disordered eating habits in action?

No.

If you find yourself identifying with anything I’ve said here, you should ask yourself the same questions before contemplating skipping a meal.

I’ll try and do the same.