"Drunkorexia: refer to condition of binge drinking combined with the typical self-imposed starvation seen with anorexia nervosa.” Over the passed year and a half the term drunkorexia has become the most publicized new disorder that is impacting today's college students.
The conditions of drunkorexia vary; many people that have tumbled upon the term have dismissed it has a trend, while researchers and doctors have taken it into consideration that it is seemingly an increasing phenomenon across campuses. Like anorexia, drunkorexia involves a lack of calorie intake to the body while mass volumes of alcohol are consumed. This can occur for numerous reasons. In many females we see the disease occur due to the fact they see themselves gaining weight in the time of binge drinking. Instead of maintaining a healthy diet and decreasing the amount of alcohol intake, they see their eating habits as the problem and refuse to eat and, more than likely, will spend their evening drinking once again. For many males, however, drunkorexia occurs because they see themselves getting drunker more quickly than if they had eaten something hours before. Of course the main reason above all others, college students typically find themselves drinking all night just to sleep all day and repeat. Obviously between planning your outfit for the night, pre-gaming, and trying to figure out who your floor-mate hooked up with last night, it's seemingly impossible to find time for a well balanced meal. Am I right?! Do we really want to be known as the class that doesn't know how to balance putting the bottle down and picking up a sandwich. We're in college; obviously, we're all smart enough to know how our bodies function, and running on liquor can be fatal no matter how invincible we may think we are.
Before you think this article is just another source of irrelevant words mashed together to describe the daily life of a college student and why they're living their life wrong:
Various universities have gone over the newest "fad" and through subsequent amounts of research have come to the connections and conclusions of the following ideas. The University of Missouri determined “one in six students said they restricted food in order to consume alcohol within the last year.” The University of Pennsylvania conducted their own research which further explained how it centered on students “bingeing or skipping meals in order to either compensate for alcohol calories consumed later at night, or to get drunk faster. At its most severe, it is a combination of an eating disorder and alcohol dependency.” The Calgary Herald has even confirmed, “They say they’re aiming to get drunk faster, they want to save food money for booze, and they want to keep their weight down.”
Given society is faced with many problems and maybe drunkorexia isn't in the top 10, but as a college student taking notice to this issue, perhaps it's time to enlighten the newest disorder before it becomes an epidemic? Because it seems like we do really well at putting our problems on the back burner until we are harmed, out of control, or dead.
All sources used for this article are as follows:
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=87994
