Sad but true. A growing number of college-age women are starving themselves, not necessarily to lose weight, but to save calories for drinking alcohol and beer.
According to a recent article on HerCampus.com, a website started by three female Harvard students, the trend of late is Drunkorexia– a hybrid between anorexia, bulimia, and alcoholism. It was only a matter of time, say experts, before substance abuse and eating disorders merged.
Statistics from the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) suggest that 30 percent of women ages 18-24 skip meals in order to drink more, while an estimated up to 10 percent of college women suffer from some form of an eating disorder. And a 2002 study from the Journal of Studies on Alcohol suggested that 31 percent of college students met criteria for alcohol abuse, while another 6 percent met the criteria for alcohol dependence.
In the HerCampus.com piece, Nancy Mucciarone gets the inside scoop from a variety of college students who are on the front lines of the Drunkorexia craze.
One student described it like this: “One of my friends wouldn’t eat at all before she went out, then would get super drunk, and drunk eat a lot—pizza, macaroni and cheese, whatever she could get her hands on and would make herself throw it up. She’d claim she was so drunk and didn’t mean to throw up but it was clearly intentional.”
