College campuses face new problem: the high-risk drinking and eating disorder known as ‘drunkorexia’
- We all know the dangers of drinking alcohol on an empty stomach, but some students are taking it to extremes
- In a bid to get drunk quicker, some exercise on an empty stomach then drink heavily
My college experience included this life skills lesson: drink alcohol on a full stomach, so you don’t get inebriated too quickly. Of course, most college students shouldn’t be drinking at all, but we know from the United States’ National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that close to 60 per cent of college students ages 18 to 22 do consume alcohol, which makes harm reducing approaches important.
Unfortunately, campus authorities and researchers are reporting a practice that turns the full-stomach drinking strategy on its head: rather than filling up before a night of partying, significant numbers of students refuse to eat all day before consuming alcohol.
This is a high-risk behaviour colloquially called “drunkorexia,” which is one part eating disorder, one part alcoholism – a very dangerous combination for college-age students. The term drunkorexia, which can also include excessive exercise or purging before consuming alcohol, was coined about 10 years ago, and it started showing up in medical research around 2012.
Drunkorexia addresses the need to be the life of the party while staying extremely thin, pointing to a flawed mindset about body image and alcoholism among college students, mostly women.
Imagine this scenario: a female college student doesn’t eat anything all day, exercises on an empty stomach, then downs five shots of tequila in less than two hours. Because there’s no food in her system to help slow the absorption of alcohol, those shots affect her rapidly, leading to inebriation and possibly passing out, vomiting or suffering alcohol poisoning. That’s drunkorexia.
