Drunkorexia: A New Label for an Old Habit
By Anne Keehn
A “new” eating disorder is on the scene: drunkorexia. This is the trend of (mostly) women who starve themselves to offset the caloric intake of binge drinking at night. Or, the practice of drinking to ease the anxiety of consuming food. It’s not a medical term, just a popularized phrase—made all the more prevalent last week, when The New York Times ran a feature on it in their Style section. The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet and CBS News covered it a few months ago, and the topic has been posted in countless blogs, including the Huffington Post and the gossip site, Jezebel.
But this is hardly new—Jacqueline Susann wrote about this type of behavior over 40 years ago in Valley of the Dolls—and psychologist and addiction expert Carrie Wilkins, on CBS News said, “30 percent of young women with alcohol problems also have some form of eating disorder.”