The idea of forgoing food in favor of alcohol isn’t new. Dieters everywhere cower in fear of carbs; but alcohol, gram for gram, has even more calories than carbohydrates do. For many people, this creates a dilemma: If you want to restrict calories, you have to cut back on either food or booze. For a college student or twenty-something, who wants to party and have a good time yet still have a bikini body, the choice is obvious.
The result is a trend among young people, particularly young women, called drunkorexia—restricting food calories to make room for drink calories. The practice is widespread: 30 percent of women between 18 and 23 diet so they can drink, according to one study.
The problem is that, in practice, many drunkorexics don’t drink in moderation. Some skip meals entirely then binge on alcohol. Some women say: “I just won’t eat on the day I drink.” When taken to such an extreme, drunkorexia becomes a combination of alcohol abuse and an eating disorder. Binge drinking is on the rise among women, studies show—and women are also more prone to eating disorders.
“People end up drinking more alcohol than they anticipate, adding more calories that way,” explains Carrie Wilkens, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Motivation and Change. “Because they are disinhibited from drinking, they end up actually binging on food. The problem is, they aren’t thinking: ‘OK, what happens when I lose control later in the night?’” That’s the problematic paradox of drunkorexia: Drinking on an empty stomach reduces your self-control and predisposes you to make bad decisions. In the eyes of many health professionals, it’s a balancing act that’s not worth the risks.
