 "Photo: Hanlly Sam")
An increase of binge drinking among college students has revealed a dangerous new form of extreme dieting
I’ve attended my fair share of college parties over the years.
I recall searching the sweaty crowds for a face I recognize in small cramped apartments, weaving my way over to the beer taps and watching a few rounds of beer pong.
Attending a real rager is exciting, but a night out on Sixth Street with my closest friends is even better. Our goal for the night is never to get drunk, just to escape everyday stresses and have fun.
While I am all for partying hard occasionally, I’ve come to understand the dangers associated with it. However, a new phenomenon concerning college students, binge drinking and extreme dieting, has emerged throughout colleges nationwide and piqued my interest.
This new trend is called drunkorexia. To be clear, this is not an official medical term, but the phenomenon is becoming more prevalent among college-aged women.
This trend involves individuals who want to lose weight or stay skinny, but still want to partake in drinking and partying. Drunkorexia links binge drinking to other eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa.
As a college-aged woman myself, I am intrigued and stunned that some of my fellow schoolmates could be subjecting themselves to this type of behavior, so I decided to learn more about it.
Basically, partygoers believe that if they refrain from eating then they can drink without worrying about calories and get drunk faster on an empty stomach and stay skinny.
This leads me to believe that drunkorexia is less about wanting to get smashed and more about underlying body image or psychological issues.
Students may be engaging in this behavior for a number of reasons including relieving stress, but there are deeper issues that should be addressed for some students.
At Austin Recovery, a non-profit drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Ochs explained that during treatment sessions “it was not unusual to have young women admit to limiting the amount of calories of food based on the drinks they were consuming.”
Ochs, a licensed chemical dependency counselor, has treated a great number of young women for alcohol-related dependencies, but was not familiar with the term drunkorexia.
“25-30 percent of female patients are involved in eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia,” Ochs said.
Ochs explained that most patients will not designate a food problem or are willing to admit to one. He believes this is because patients feel more shame over food issues than chemical dependency issues.
Being unfamiliar with the details eating disorders, I contacted the Eating Disorder Center of Denver (EDC-D) to understand how drunkorexia and eating disorders are linked.
Over this past summer, the center treated a group of young women for bulimia nervosa and felt the need to inform the public through a press release dated Oct. 1, 2009 about drunkorexia after learning that 75% of college-aged women enrolled at EDC-D met the criteria for alcohol abuse.
“Each of them had discovered that if they went without food during the day, they could then get drunker faster on less alcohol,” Clinical Director Tamara Pryor, Ph.D. said.
“Although this in itself is not new, the manner in which they described using the alcohol is exactly the same way in which they binge on food after going long periods of time restricting their food intake,” Pryor explained.
Upon researching the topic, I first believed that the root of the problem was that young women are constantly exposed to society’s unrealistic views about health and fitness.
However, Pryor explained that there are a number of reasons for young women to try practicing drunkorexia.
Most notably, “more often our patients experience a lack of self-awareness, low self-confidence, anxiety, depression and difficulty with regulating and coping with difficult emotions,” Pryor said referring to individuals diagnosed with a substance abuse and eating disorder.
Since drunkorexia hasn’t been officially classified as a disorder, no formal statistics are available about the topic.
“In the fields of substance abuse and eating disorders, the co-existing presentation of an eating disorder and some form of substance dependence is quite familiar, and the individual is given two separate diagnoses and treated for both conditions,” Pryor said.
Pryor doubts that drunkorexia will be given its own diagnostic category.
Side effects of this phenomenon include academic problems, relationship issues, and significant psychological effects, Pryor said. Also, when under the influence of this type of behavior you are more susceptible to placing yourself in sexually compromising situations, Pryor added.
Whatever the reason for following this trend, the biggest concern is the overall health of women who show signs of drunkorexia I believe.
“When a person takes the majority of their calories in the form of alcohol, they end up nutritionally deprived. This negatively affects mood states, the ability to focus, remember and recall, and impacts sleep states,” Pryor said.
Individuals who engage in drunkorexia need to receive proper treatment and will need to address both the binge drinking and food issues separately.
It’s baffling to me that someone would believe that this was a great way to lose weight. In a fact sheet provided by EDC-D, a patient explained that “it’s another way to just numb out and get rid of this awful stuff in my head,” when asked why she binge drinks in addition to her eating disorder.
As a student myself, I completely sympathize with the patient and others who feel the same way. Sometimes I also feel the need to escape everyday stresses and enjoy a night of debauchery. However, consistently hurting yourself by engaging in this type of behavior is simply damaging yourself physically and emotionally and will only make whatever issue you may have about yourself only worse.
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