Drunkorexia Starves for a Drink

According to a 2011 study, three times more women engage in drunkorexia. (© Turbo/Corbis)

In January 2013, MTV put out a casting call for its show “True Life: I Have Drunkorexia,” searching for twentysomes who intentionally booze on an empty stomach. Despite the deceptively flip nickname, chronic drunkorexia can become a debilitating disorder, per MTV’s symptom checklist from its casting call:

“Do you regularly skip meals so that you can save your calories for nights of binge drinking? Are you concerned about your weight, but not willing to give up partying to live a healthy lifestyle? Do you frequently black out or get into dangerous situations because of it? Do your finances play a role in your decisions to substitute drinking alcohol for food? Do you feel your drinking and health is slipping out of your control? Are your career goals, studies or relationships suffering because of your behavior?”

Despite the verbal play on anorexia, drunkorexia isn’t a formally recognized eating disorder, either, but it has attracted increasing attention in recent years as a legitimate public health concerns. It first made headlines in 2011 with the publication of a University of Missouri-Columbia study “examined the relationship between alcohol misuse and disordered eating, including calorie restriction and purging.” Among the 16 percent of those who reported “saving” meal calories to spend on partying, three times more women than men copped to drunkorexic patterns. Those health economics didn’t stop with weight concerns, either; students were also motivated to drink on an empty stomach in order to get drunk faster and save cash on alcohol purchases in the process.

When women’s blog The Gloss reported on the Missouri-Columbia study, the author took issue with the empty-stomach-drinking nominal association anorexia nervosa, as “it sort of de-legitimizes actual eating disorders, which should be taken seriously, as they kill people.” More recent research out of the University of Florida, however, suggests that the eating disorder connection made with the “drunkorexia” label is a strong — and possibly life-threatening — one. Not to mention that people starving themselves in order to get drunker faster and cheaper certainly sounds like something that “should be taken seriously,” whatever the name it goes by.

Jacoba Urist at The Atlantic reports that UF health education and behavior professor Adam Berry “has compiled the most comprehensive research to date on drunkorexia,” which was published in 2012 in the Journal of American College Health. Analyzing health data from more than 22,000 students from 40 U.S. colleges, Berry found a statistically significant correlation between physical activity and disordered eating habits and binge drinking. Controlling for factors such as Greek affiliation, age and gender, Berry’s study concluded that “highly active college students are more likely to binge drink than their nonactive peers, and highlight the potential of a drunkorexia perspective in explaining the counterintuitive alcohol–activity association among college students.” In plainer speak, highly weight-conscious students were 20 percent more like to down five or more drinks at a time; those who had induced vomiting or taken laxatives to shed pounds were 76 percent more like to binge. And while it’s common knowledge that drinking on an empty stomach isn’t a wise idea, drunkorexia can have longer-lasting effects than a nasty hangover, including heightened risk of violence, risky sexual behavior, alcohol poisoning, substance abuse and chronic disease.

Worse still, as Urist explains, the alcohol industry appears to be capitalizing on drunkorexia with marketing campaigns emphasizing fitness-friendly, low-calorie options, even going so far as to develop slimmer cans for certain lite beers. And who’s the target demographic of diet alcohol ads? Those female students, of course, who are three times as likely to engage in drunkorexic behaviors. David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Atlantic: “There’s no question that the alcohol industry is presenting their goods to women as though they’re diet products. Because that’s what sells.”