“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays by writer and mom Patty N.  who has been chronicling her first year of sobriety.

by Patty N.

The day after tomorrow, my handy 12-Step iPhone app – the one with the sobriety calculator that I compulsively check every day – will finally read, “You’ve been sober for one year / 12 months / 365 days / 8,760 hours.”  Yes!

Needless to say, I will not be celebrating with champagne, like I did after drying out in 2008.  That was the year I set out to prove to myself that I wasn’t an alcoholic. So I quit drinking – except at my 25th high school reunion when, in my whiskey-impaired state, I got into a car driven by an inebriated classmate and, thankfully, didn’t die on the way to Denny’s.  I also drank on New Year’s Eve and blacked out after only a few glasses of champagne.  Then there were the prescription drugs – which I took not exactly as prescribed but, hey, at least they weren’t alcohol.

After my year “on the wagon,” I bought myself a big bottle of bubbly and picked up where I left off.  But it became very clear, very fast, that I shouldn’t drink and that I couldn’t stop.  Embarrassed and ashamed, I started counting days in AA.  At first, I felt like I was being punished. I’m the good kid, the hard worker, the hands-on mom, I thought to myself.  How did I end up here?  And, every time I said, “My name is Patty and I’m an alcoholic,” I would think to myself, But I quit for a year! I didn’t drink everyday! I was high-functioning! I can’t be an alcoholic!”

Slowly, though, the veil of self-criticism and harsh judgement receded and a gentle, clear-headed, self-compassion took its place.  I started wondering:  Would I hate myself for having asthma?  Would I attack myself if I had diabetes? Would I be terrified of running into someone I knew at the dentist office if I had gingivitis?  No!!  So why didn’t I view my alcoholism in the same, straightforward manner?  As Dr. Drew says (I can’t help it, I love him), alcoholism is about chemistry, not character. So why would I be ashamed about a condition over which I have no control?

Looking back, I’ve spent a lot of time this year regretting the past and, oftentimes, wishing to shut the door on it.  I realize that’s part of the process. But as I mark this significant milestone, I’d like to quit mourning my old life and start celebrating my new one.  On Sunday, I will go to my regular AA meeting and announce that I have one year of continuous sobriety.  I’ll collect my special anniversary coin and an amazing group of people, whose last names I may never know, will greet me with applause and hugs and flowers from the corner deli.  And I will call myself an alcoholic, without reservation, without judgement, without shame, and with enough strength to finally bust through that cocoon of self-hatred and fly like a beautiful liberated butterfly.

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by Katherine, college student

It’s true that alcohol is a part of college for many people.  Whether you attend a wet campus or a dry one, it doesn’t really matter—most students will have had experience with alcohol by the time they graduate. As a college student myself, the thing I look forward to each week is going out on the weekends with my roommates and friends. It’s the social aspect I value, not the alcohol, but alcohol generally accompanies our evenings.

Throughout college, I’ve always considered my immediate group of friends to be a pretty healthy, responsible bunch. We drink socially, but in moderation. We all value our grades, health and jobs, so finding a balance is important. I remember being nervous freshman year about the decision to join a sorority because of the media stereotypes of dumb and skinny “sorority girls” who meticulously count calories and drink heavily. The group of friends I found, however, seemed to be just like me and valued the same things I did.

My senior year of college, I grew closer with a few girls who had previously only been friends of friends. I started to notice some strange behaviors among them. Thursday night was always the big night out, and we would often eat lunch at the sorority house together.  One particular young woman’s eating habits stood out to me. She would nibble on a few fries or maybe a salad, but that’s it. Later at night, while we were all getting ready to go out and eating dinner or munching on snacks to make sure we all had something in our system, she would take four or five shots instead.  By the time she got to the bar, she was wasted because there were no nutrients or calories in her body to sustain her. That didn’t stop her from drinking more. Blacking out seemed to be a typical occurrence for her.  I wasn’t surprised if I heard in the morning that she had lost her wallet, phone or some other valuable.

Our friends had hushed conversations about it, because we didn’t really understand what she was doing. Generally, anorexics are so worried about calories that they don’t even drink alcohol. She would eat, technically, but not enough to sustain her for a night of drinking. So what could she be doing? There were also whispers that laxatives were a daily part of her diet. Still, though, no one ever really addressed her about it. Personally, I didn’t feel close enough to her to say anything about it.

Spring break was the point where I realized this was truly disordered eating. Her suitemates and close friends were worried about her because she barely ate anything the whole week. Our resort was all-inclusive, which meant that we had meal service available at almost any time of the day. As hearty eaters and lovers of all things food, my immediate friends and I took full advantage of the all-inclusive dining. However, I rarely saw her sit down to eat a meal. When she did, she would pick at the food on her plate, saying she wasn’t hungry. She did, however, take advantage of the all-inclusive drinking, which was available from morning to night. The only time I really saw her eat anything the whole week was near the pool, where there was a buffet of snack foods for guests.  She would pick at chicken fingers or wings only after she had been drinking heavily all day and didn’t have as much control over her inhibitions.

When I saw a video a few weeks ago on Newsy.com about “drunkorexia,” it was like a light bulb went on. I realized this behavior was exactly what my friend was doing. I find this extremely sad because I have a hard time believing that the behavior will end once she is out of the binge-drinking days of college.  There must be deeper psychological issues rooted in this than just calorie counting. Aside from the mental effects, the combination of drinking and not eating is horrible for your body, stomach and liver.  Not all calories were created equal, and booze calories should not equate the calories you get from food and nutrients.  It’s one thing to skip the extra cookie if you want to have a glass of wine later, but skipping all your meals to make up for all the alcohol you’re planning to drink is a severe problem.

I found the Newsy video to be extremely insightful on what drunkorexia is and what sort of debate surrounds the issue.  It raises the question if swapping food for booze is a reasonable way to count calories, or if this is a serious problem. It includes clips from interviews with students who engage in the behavior as well as experts talking about drunkorexia’s dangerous effects.

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The latest estimates to come out of a survey conducted by the Centers of Disease Control reveal that binge drinking–defined as four or more alcoholic drinks per occasion for women and five or more for men–is highest in wealthier adults (with annual household incomes of $75,000 or more) and among high school students. About 33 million Americans are binge drinkers. Most are not alcoholics.

In an NPR.org piece on these latest findings, Scott Hensley writes, “Now, it’s probably obvious that binge drinking isn’t so good for your health. In the short run drinking like that contributes to accidents and sexual transmission of disease. Keep it up, and there’s liver damage and a higher risk for heart disease and stroke.”

Naturally, these numbers are not to be taken lightly. According to the CDC, binge drinking was the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States and it annually accounted for, on average, approximately 79,000 deaths per year during 2001 and 2005.

The problem, though bad, isn’t much worse than it’s been in recent years. In 1993, the CDC says, about 14 percent of adults had gone on drinking binges. But as Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the CDC put it, “Because binge drinking is not recognized as a problem, it has not decreased in 15 years.”

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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.”

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Quick question: Which would you expect to have the highest binge-drinking rates: dry counties, where you can’t buy alcohol, or “wet” counties, where alcohol is easily accessible? Seems obvious that the wet counties would win, hands-down. Easy access = more drinking. Right?

Whereas I, who grew up in a “health food house,” thought about those “forbidden foods” all the time. When they were offered to me, I took as much as I could, because I didn’t know when I’d get junk food again. I didn’t know how to moderate. Seems it’s the same with drinking.

A new survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that binge drinking is highest in dry Alabama counties.

Why? One reason, according to Peggy Batey, executive director of the Alabama chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is that people in dry counties have to drive long distances to buy booze. When people drive long distances, they tend to buy in bulk. And if you buy in bulk, you’re more likely to binge drink. Another factor is that people in dry counties may be closer to wet states with lower prices. For example, the people in “dry” Cherokee County can take a short drive and save up to 40 percent by buying in Georgia.

Finally, dry counties with military bases have higher rates of drinking, perhaps because of all the young men, crammed into one area.

State by state results of binge-drinking were not so surprising. As expected, Utah ranked lowest in national binge-drinking rates. Wisconsin, a known party state, ranked highest (See the chart below).

And on a more global scale, according to the Social Issues Research Center: “Societies with generally positive beliefs and expectancies about alcohol (variously defined as ‘non-Temperance’, ‘wet’, ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘integrated’ drinking-cultures) experience significantly fewer alcohol-related problems; negative or inconsistent beliefs and expectancies (found mainly in ‘Temperance’, ‘dry’, ‘Nordic’ or ‘ambivalent’ drinking-cultures) are associated with higher levels of alcohol-related problems.”

On the morning after that spectacular Yankees World Series win (sorry, Phillies fans), I was wondering: Do sports fans, in general, drink more than non sports fans?

Apparently, college sports fans do. A Harvard study from several years ago – the first national study of the drinking habits of college sports fans — says that more college student sports fans binge drink and have alcohol-related problems than non-fan students, and that targeted marketing and advertising by the alcohol industry is a huge influence. The study also concluded that schools with higher proportions of fans are more likely to have high rates of binge drinking.

The study, which appeared in the 2003 journal Addictive Behaviors, compared the responses of nearly 3,500 student sports fans (those who indicated in a survey that attending sports events was “important” or “very important” to them) to those of over 8,000 non-fan students. “We know that student athletes binge drink more than non-athletes…it turns out that fans are similar to athletes in their extreme drinking behavior,” said Toben Nelson, the study’s lead author.

So what about you? Does rooting for a team inspire you to drink, and drink more? Does watching a sporting event live make you drink more than you would if you watched it on TV?

P.S. A random twitter search of Yankees and drinking returned plenty of women drinking something (free beers, wine, etc.) while watching last night’s game, though some were just drinking lattes!

Like it or not, college life and drinking often go hand in hand. So what do you do, or think, or say when your own baby is soon to enter that four-year phase of alcohol meets academia? I guess I’ve got a year and a half to come up with answers before my daughter leaves our cozy nest.

When I think back to my own college experience, the images that come to mind include lush green quads and the boundless energy of the students walking across them, the classes filled with youthful, eager faces (okay, not all were so eager) and most certainly, the rousing football games with pitchers of bloody marys, the games of quarters and cheap beer, and the colorful jello shots that were a main attraction at many a late-night party.

Do I tell my daughter that nearly every night of the week, starting on tuesday, my crew of friends and I had a different bar we’d frequent once our studies were put to bed?

Times are different now. The legal drinking age isn’t 18, like it was when I was in college, and it seems that any level of moderation went out the window with the younger drinking age. Binge drinking is up. So are incidents of sexual abuse, drunk driving, assault and death. (For a more elaborate list, check out A Snapshot of Annual High-Risk College Drinking Consequences.)

“On average, college students in the U.S. purchase an estimated 430 million gallons of alcoholic beverages, including 4 billion cans of beer annually,” reports an article titled, How Much Drinking is too Much for Students? in Marshall University’s newspaper.

Those are pretty astounding numbers.

So I’ll just have to hope that when my kid goes off to school, she’ll use her brain both in class and at parties. It’d be naive to think that her college experience will be alcohol-free. And that’s okay. I hope.

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

1. Start drinking early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Come out of the bedroom in a Santa Claus bikini at midnight. After you pass out, forget Santa. Send the kids back into their rooms until noon and tell them Santa was hung over. Laugh. When the kids beg you to stop, tell them to grow up.

2. Pretend it never happened. None of it – the weeping-clown eyes, the shouts and fights, the makeout sessions on the coats in the bedroom with the lady from down the street – never happened. At all.

3. Go out on New Year’s Eve – for three days. There are plenty of Good Humor bars in the refrigerator. And Grandma and Grandpa didn’t leave for Florida yet? Or did they?

4. Nuzzle a waitress’ boobs, even after your friend, the owner of the place, asks you to stop, until your wife and kids get up and walk home. Six miles.

5. Tell your kid he better start on the team. When he does, show up for one game.

6. Talk about how much you drank on vacation the way other people talk about vacation.

7. When your son asks what you’re going to do tonight , say, “I’m going to drink. And you’re going to stay home.”

8. When your daughter, who’s 11, calls you at a dinner party from home to say that someone has broken into the apartment building, tell her to call the cops.

9. When your best friend suggests you slow down, on the night of your birthday, wait until he’s facing the other way and kick him through the TV.

10. Show up at eighth grade graduation, drunk. Show up at high school graduation drunk. Explain that you can’t make it to college graduation.

11. Shout out your requests for Trini Lopez songs so loudly that the bandleader refers to you as “Lawrence Welk and Mrs. Robinson.”

12. When one of the kids is seventeen and gets drunk for the first of three times in her life, throwing up until she’s weak and sobbing, tell her not to worry – everyone feels this way.

13. Be beautiful and charming and funny and complex and inquisitive when you’re sober. Be diminishing, surly, humiliating and cruel when you’re drunk.

14. Die young.

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen as the first book for Oprah’s Book Club and named by USA Today the second most influential novel of the past 25 years. She has written four other bestsellers and is a contributing editor for Wondertime magazine as well as the author of four novels for young adults. Her new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye, comes out this week.

Welcome to the DRINKING DIARIES.

Whether we are drinking it or not, alcohol remains a potent part of our lives. Our culture is saturated with it, steeped in it. We confront alcohol everywhere we go—from the home to the office party, date night to ladies’ night, happy hour to super bowl. Every season has its own liquor—there’s the champagne at New Year’s, beer on St. Patty’s Day, summer’s mojitos, autumn’s new vintage of velvety red wine, and winter’s warming brandy. Each religion has its prescribed ritual, from egg nog at Christmas to Manischevitz at Passover. Every culture has its signature drinks, from ouzo to sake and rum to Aquavit. Skol! Kampai! Cin cin! Salud!

Ask anyone you know to scratch the surface and she will find a drinking story. Maybe it’s the night she got smashed and so belligerent she spat in the bartender’s face. Or the time her alcoholic mother poured wine into a Sprite bottle so she could ride an Amtrak train, her self-medicating uninterrupted. It may be that her teenage daughter’s scar—from the time her beer-drinking boyfriend crashed the car—is healing, while hers is not. That the deepest philosophical question the stressed-out mom ponders is: “How big the glass?” Or the eyebrow-raising looks she gets when she mentions she doesn’t touch the stuff.

Here you can read other women’s drinking stories and/or spill your own. The Drinking Diaries will have guest posts and interviews, as well as links to articles, studies, and just about anything that has to do with women and alcohol.

For the two of us, alcohol is a loaded topic.

Leah: For my first grade school photo, my alcoholic mother put my sailor dress on inside out. My mother stopped drinking when I was nine years old, but by the time I hit fourteen, my older sister was sent to rehab. I spent half my adolescence at self-help meetings, and although I would rather have been hanging out with my friends, I found the personal narratives of fall and redemption riveting. From high school to college student, writer to stay-at-home mom, I have run the gamut from abstainer to binge drinker.

Caren: I grew up in a home where wine was always around. My European parents drank every night with dinner, and my mother–a French hidden child survivor of the Holocaust–often bragged about how she’d corrupted her American friends with the joys of a late afternoon glass of wine. But later in life, my mother’s wartime demons came back to haunt her and her social drinking morphed into need. Since then, I—a lover of wine in moderation—have been wrestling with what drinking means to me.

We want to reach out to women, like us, for whom alcohol—for whatever reason—is also a loaded topic. And so, we started THE DRINKING DIARIES…

Please check back on MONDAYS and THURSDAYS for the latest round of new posts!