Drunkorexia: a bizarre (and dangerous) trend
Drinking beer or wine on a (nearly) empty stomach? Bad idea. Not only because you’ll be rolling around on the floor slurring your words after just two drinks, but your brain is also affected by the alcohol more quickly this way. Yet deliberately eating very little before drinking alcohol turns out to be a new (and dangerous!) phenomenon: drunkorexia.
Life-threatening
Drunkorexia means eating hardly anything during the day because you’re going to drink wine or something else containing alcohol in the evening. Because you count those calories, you tell yourself not to eat anything during the day. So you starve yourself because you want to drink (a lot of) alcohol, and on an empty stomach it hits you extra hard. People do it to become thinner and therefore eat nothing so they can still party, but they also do it to get drunk quickly and avoid having to spend as much money on drinks. Either way: an incredibly bad plan.
Common phenomenon
Research shows that it is fairly common, although you might not expect it: at least 12 percent of adolescents aged 16–21 have, at some point in the past month, ‘eaten a little less and watched their calorie intake because they were going to drink alcoholic beverages’. According to some researchers, it occurs to some degree in as many as half of female students. Feeling guilty about all those calories you’ve consumed and scheduling a spinning class in the middle of the night to burn them off is also drunkorexia. Research involving more than 25,000 young people shows that those who engage in a lot of binge drinking also exercise excessively more often. In short, drunkorexia is life-threatening and hopefully a phenomenon that will soon disappear again.
Also read:
- 8 myths about alcohol (stop believing them!)
- Is non-alcoholic wine really wine? And does it taste good?
- These are the favorite non-alcoholic wines of top sommeliers
