to the anxiety, and she began to cry, too hungry and panicked to choose. She dropped to the kitchen floor, barely left with enough energy to hold her face in her skeleton hands as tears fell to the linoleum. Carrie’s case is not rare. Millions of Americans suffering from eating disorders stare into pantries, mirrors and toilets every day, gripped by the fear of weight gain. The positive and negative effects of caffeine and coffee, more specifically, are manipulated by people with eating disorders in order to control yet another aspect of their bodies. Although people with eating disorders don’t drink more caffeine than the average person, their motivation and mentality behind drinking coffee is completely different.
Disordered eating
Eight to 11 million Americans suffer from anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association will add binge eating disorder as a new classification in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as DSM-5. Including binge eating disorder, the most common disorder in America, nearly 24 million Americans suffer from eating disorders, according to a study by the Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders, which has locations nationwide but first opened in Philadelphia in 1985. Carrie is still recovering from anorexia nervosa after 10 years. Anorexia is characterized by an extreme fear of weight gain, an underweight body mass index, and a refusal to gain weight, says Antonia Hartley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Campus Health clinical nutrition specialist. Bulimia nervosa is also characterized by an extreme fear of weight gain, but bulimics engage in
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“As bizarre as my symptoms were, I didn’t find them disgusting. I thought it was good to work out for hours each day and that it was fine to eat only apples and lettuce.” a cycle of bingeing, or eating large calorie amounts at one time, and purging, or getting rid of the food by methods such as vomiting or using laxatives. Binge eating disorder is compulsive overeating without purging. Hartley says that people with disordered eating look to control their out-of-control environment with a variety of mechanisms such as purging. Marlena Moore is a UNC-Chapel Hill junior majoring in psychology and currently researching binge eating among Latin and African American women. She says many suffering from eating disorders want to substitute inner emotional pains with the pain from starving, overexercising or other means of control. “Many think that all they have is their own body,” says Moore. “They say, ‘Why can’t I control what I have?’” Carrie, who grew up outside of Detroit, says that her perfectionist attitude and fear of failure, which are characteristics of anorexics, resulted in high stress and anxiety. She picked up extreme exercising during her junior year of college, which worked so well as a stress management technique that she began to develop an eating disorder.
Why coffee?
“I was a workaholic, and I was chugging coffee trying to make it through the day,” says Carrie. She also used coffee to manage her stress, but soon it began to control more than that. When Carrie felt hungry, she assumed she needed more coffee. When she felt tired, she began to rely on coffee to pick her up as a calorie-free energy source. Cynthia Bulik, director of the
UNC Eating Disorders Program, says that coffee overuse among eating disorder patients is a real problem because it gives the illusion of energy to someone who doesn’t have any because he or she is starving. Coffee seems to be the Holy Grail for people with disordered eating. It’s an appetite suppressant that expands and fills the stomach, but not for long because it is also a diuretic. Coffee is also an energy booster that can be packed with artificial sweeteners to quench a sweet tooth and fuel hours of exercise despite a deficiency of natural caloric energy. Carrie used to steal her mom’s coffee-flavored yogurts as a child, and she began drinking coffee in high school, which she says became necessary with her eating disorder because it kept her warm. Two effects of an eating disorder are low body temperature and oversensitivity to the cold. While caffeine has its benefits, Hartley says that if you drink more than one to two 8-ounce cups a day, the negatives start to outweigh any positives. While Carrie spent years addicted to coffee, there was a time she was scared to drink water. She buckled with fear at the thought of anything being in her stomach. This phobia led to many trips to the emergency room due to dehydration and malnutrition, and in 2005, she began a residential treatment program. Carrie was discharged after seven months, and shortly after she relapsed into anorexic habits. “As bizarre as my symptoms were, I didn’t find them disgusting,” she