When it comes to losing weight, some people are desperate enough to try anything. Even though it’s well-known  that committing to a healthy lifestyle of eating right and exercising will give you slow, but ultimately successful results, it doesn’t stop people from jumping the gun and buying into ridiculous diet fads — most of which are probably more unhealthy than being overweight anyway. Seriously. Some of these are downright disgusting.

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There’s a new buzzword in town: Liarexic. Apparently the dozens of other “exic” expressions just weren’t getting it done, so someone decided to throw this one into the mix. Because what’s an eating disorder without a proper classification?

This “new” disorder is meant to address people who lie about their food intake. Whether they front a healthy diet to friends and secretly deprive themselves in private or pose extreme diets to friends and then proceed to scarf down some oreos when no is around.

Liarexic is just another way of addressing one of the multitudes of eating issues women tend to suffer from. I think lying about food is a very common occurrence among women in college. When girls feel pressure to lose weight but can’t stick to their crazy detox diets, hiding calories can seem easier. I’m just not convinced their phenomena needs it’s own classification.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think this is an issue. I’m just over the phrases. When we start lumping all these terms together—tanorexic, drunkorexic and mommyrexic (had no idea this one even existed until today) it just gets a to be a bit much. Issues, like girls being incredibly shady about their eating habits get lumped together with girls who hit up the tanning beds too much. Dare I say the terms have even gotten a bit cutesy? And anorexia is not something that should be taken lightly.

Also, it seems people are way too quick to call something a disorder or to claim they have discovered a new issue. Girls lie about their food intake sometimes, this isn’t new. It’s sad and true, but we don’t need another fancy-shmancy word to highlight the issue, and at the same time downplay the importance of all of them with this over used cliche.

[Everyone’s got a vice, a bad habit, something they know they need to change. Unfortunately, everyone also has a million excuses why they just can’t do it. Not anymore. Every month we will be following a different CollegeCandy writer as she takes on a personal challenge. Last month, Khalea gave up fried food. This month, Michelle is going to come face to face with stress eating. Can she stop the emotional ice cream binges? We'll find out....]

Ah, June. You have been a month to remember. Between trying to stop stress eating, trying to get back into working out, dealing with entering a long distance relationships and looking for a job, I’ve encountered a lot of pressure from many different directions. Along the way, I’ve written some pretty heavy articles here on CollegeCandy about confronting the reasons for my (and maybe your!) stress eating. Have I always been successful in trying to stop stress eating? Most of the time. Can I claim that I stopped stress eating completely? Not really. Read More »

[Everyone’s got a vice, a bad habit, something they know they need to change. Unfortunately, everyone also has a million excuses why they just can’t do it. Not anymore. Every month we will be following a different CollegeCandy writer as she takes on a personal challenge. Last month, Khalea gave up fried food. This month, Michelle is going to come face to face with stress eating. Can she stop the emotional ice cream binges? We'll find out....]

The first few days

The past weekend was one of the worst weekends I’ve had in a while. I will admit to crying about 75% of the time. Several times, I called my lovely boyfriend on Skype only to immediately start crying at him through my computer. Trust me, crying into a keyboard while your boyfriend stares at your blurry webcam video is the least helpful form of communication for a relationship.

Since I started this challenge, I have struggled with one fundamental question: Why do I eat instead of feel? It’s a good question. Why do some people do drugs, or drink too much? Why do some people compulsively shop? What makes us neurotic?

I enjoy food – I really do. Since I write the Intro to Cooking column here at CollegeCandy, I obviously enjoy food. But sometimes, I use food as a crutch. Anxiety is something I have always dealt with: I feel a great deal of anxiety when it comes to school, but also in relationships and dealing with people. When I e-mail someone and they don’t reply for a few days, I don’t get annoyed with them; I get anxious that they’re mad at me. A lot of this has to do with my own insecurity and my incessant need to receive assurance that I am a good, capable person. But a huge part of it contributes to my stress eating. Instead of asking someone to reply to my e-mail, or telling people, like my boyfriend, that I need more reassurance, I eat.

But why don’t I allow myself to feel real emotions?

Whenever I have a crying spell, I usually end it by putting in on of my favorite movies and eating something with carbs (a sandwich, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, garlic bread…) I don’t really allow myself to just cry. Eating forces me to use my mouth in a way other than contorting into “ugly cry face” (I am a victim, kids). A movie draws my attention away from my feelings and into a different world.

On Monday, I found myself standing in my parents’ kitchen holding three graham crackers coated in a generous layer of Nutella. I ate all three in about two minutes. I didn’t even give myself a chance to think about it. It was my first “cheat” – my first crack. I started to wonder if I could ever stop stress eating.

Immediately, I sat down to work on this article. I began to wonder, again, why I don’t allow myself to fully feel my emotions. Being emotional – that is, really feeling emotions fully – is uncomfortable and generally not very fun. Can I help myself to stop stress eating… by forcing myself to feel uncomfortable? Will it make me happier to stop stress eating… or will it make me unhappy?

What Works?

⦁       Talk it out. It really helps to have someone to talk to. Recently, this has been my boyfriend. Hearing his voice when I’m having a crying spell, or having him reassure me that I will get a job and that I’ve always made the right choices when it comes to my career, is the greatest comfort ever. Being able to tell him exactly why I’m upset forces me to really, really feel my feelings – rather than hide in my bedroom and eat them away.

⦁       Yoga? Okay, I’m gonna shatter some worlds here. Yoga is nice. It’s a nice way for me to start my morning. After my incident with the graham crackers Monday, I tried to do some yoga… and I ended up just getting really cranky about it. The last thing I wanted to see was a woman in a pink spandex jumpsuit doing yoga on the beach. It helps to relax me in the morning and generally keeps me relaxed… but if I’m already stressed, I want nothing to do with it. So yoga is a mixed bag for me right now.

⦁       Staying conscious. I got this idea from a friend. How often do I realize that I am eating due to stress versus actual hunger? Do I sometimes confuse my anxiety with hunger (or, do I justify my stress eating as legitimate hunger)? Society teaches us that we should keep our emotions in check – how many books have been written about women crying in the workplace? – so it has become easy for us all to hide our real emotions. Staying conscious of how we really feel about things can help us stop stress eating, seems to be my logical thought. Part of this, for me, is journaling. Writing down what I feel, when I feel it, and potential reasons for it, helps me get back in tune with my real emotions… so I can feel them, rather than eat four pieces of peanut butter toast.

Final Thoughts

A huge part of this challenge for me is increasing my self-awareness. As a writer, I tend to be very observant of others and the environment around me, but not necessarily of myself. It is difficult to re-learn how to look at yourself, and how you feel and think, all in one month. This isn’t going to be a month-long process, just a one-month glimpse of a longer battle.

For the past week, I have been on edge – without my regular stress eating sprees, I’ve been forcing myself to actually feel, or to at least think things through thoroughly. But I don’t want to just force myself to feel, I want to address what it is that makes me choose food rather than my own thoughts. By confronting what it is about really feeling that I want to avoid, I will be able to more easily stop stress eating, because I’ll be addressing the larger, underlying issue. What is it about feeling emotions that makes us uncomfortable? And how can we change it?

If you’re taking on this challenge with me, how’s it going for you? What has been your greatest difficulty? How have to dealt with the temptation to stress eat? 

The average woman sees 400-600 advertisements per day. By the time she is 17 years old, she has seen over 250,000 commercials. With the constant message of beauty and perfection reminding women every day of their flaws, many girls are self-conscious about their appearance, especially their weight. Unfortunately for some, that concern can grow into an obsession, and turn into an eating disorder.

In the U.S. one or two out of every 100 students will have an eating disorder. The most common of these are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Sadly, we usually aren’t aware that someone we know has one until it is too late. My friend Tina (not her real name, obviously) suffered alternatively from anorexia and bulimia for years and she agreed to share her story.

Her anorexia began when she was around eleven years old, and continued on and off. When she began to suffer from bulimia, she was fifteen. She used to throw up after every meal, no matter how small it was. On average, that was about three to five times a day. All of this was so that she would reach her ideal weight of eighty to eighty-five pounds, which is the weight she was in 7^th and 8^th grade.

Tina said that before eating a meal, regardless of how hungry she was, she would feel guilty for eating. She would tell herself to go ahead and consume the food, as long as she threw it up afterward. While eating she would feel “disgusted and bloated,” and regret eating at all as soon as she finished. Because of this Tina says, “sometimes I had to force myself to eat.” Read More »

So maybe you’ve never gone more than 24 hours without food. Maybe you’ve never taken a laxative or made yourself throw up after eating too much. You don’t have an Eating Disorder. But how much of your day is spent thinking about food?

When you are out with friends, are you comparing what everyone else is eating to what you are eating, figuring out the calories instead of enjoying their company? Have you ever doubled your workouts to compensate for splurging on a slice of pizza? Can you barely even remember a time when you weren’t trying out the latest diet?

You don’t have to have an eating disorder to have an unhealthy relationship with food. It’s called Disordered Eating and it can be emotionally draining, physically exhausting or even lead to a full blown Eating Disorder.

Disordered Eating starts with a mentality rather than a behavior. If you are lucky to eat one real meal a day during finals week because you are so crazed trying to cram everything in, it’s not good for you, but it’s not a symptom of Disordered Eating. If you only eat one meal a day during finals week so you can at least be in control of your diet since everything else is so hectic, that’s Disordered Eating. It can present itself in many ways, but here are a few of the most common. Read More »

There have been countless instances where I’ve found myself shoveling nachos, ice cream or third helpings of dessert into my mouth. Realizing my own utter gluttony, I’ll drop the spoon or the cheesey chip and think, “What in god’s name am I doing?” Because the truth is I’m not even hungry. I’m bored or annoyed or just craving something that has nothing to do with food.

It took me years to identify any of this as emotional eating. I think because almost all of my girlfriends experienced the exact same thing. We’d even declare Sunday as the “Day of Eating” which made it OK to binge on the “bad stuff,” i.e. s’mores, pizza, bagels with cream cheese, to list a few. And the next day, of course, we’d all be at the gym, furiously working off the excess calories.

Looking back, I see how incredibly unhealthy and unbalanced this was. Yet, so many people turn to food to comfort themselves. In order to forget feelings from sadness, anxiety, loneliness or boredom, they reach for high-calorie, sweet, salty and fatty foods. And usually, they wind up eating way too much, which of course contributes to weight gain and guilt.

The good news is, all of us can regain control of these habits and get back on the healthy path. Read More »

The mission of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week is to facilitate open, honest preventive communication about the attitudes, perceptions, and pressures that shape eating disorders and body image issues. An eating disorder is not a choice, it is a life-threatening illness. In light of the fact that 91% of women on college campuses have attempted to control their weight through dieting and that 1 in 3 of those dieters develop compulsive eating and/or exercising behaviors, it is crucial that those of us who have overcome the frightening, destructive grasp of an eating disorder open up and share our story of hope.

My personal fight with an eating disorder started innocently as a goal to get fit and healthy as a freshman in college. I was never overweight, but I suddenly became very self-conscious in a dorm room filled with girls who were prettier and thinner. I began joining in on the nightly runs and workouts with the other girls – not only were helping me lose weight and get in shape, but I was making new friends as well. It was very difficult for me to be in a new place with no one I knew. I had grown up in a small Christian high school where everyone knew my name, where it was easy to be popular and liked, and where I identified my worth with the achievements, awards, and titles that I held. Now, as I began to compare myself with my new friends, I suddenly felt insecure and as if I had lost my worth. With the praise that I began to receive about how great I looked, I started to believe that being skinny would be what could make me happy and feel self-worth. Read More »