It’s no secret that the general population of college students in our society depends on alcohol abuse for social enjoyment.
In general, alcohol abuse is the consumption of alcohol to the extent that it impairs the mental, physical, social and emotional capacity of the user.
Whether it’s to forget our problems, feel happy or decrease our social inhibitions, we abuse alcohol in order to temporarily enter a mindset that dismisses our concern for how others view us.
Senior Brent Dicken admitted that becoming drunk is a confidence booster, saying that it “makes people feel more comfortable around people they don’t know.”
However, decreased inhibitions are not always a good thing. They often lead to decisions that impact or ruin the rest of our lives.
Perhaps the most common and dreaded result of drunkenness is the pounding in our heads when we wake up.
Hangovers. They’re a little like an incurable STD. You can’t repair; you can only prevent. Drink plenty of water, pace yourself, and of course, eat enough or else alcohol is going to swim solo through our veins and conquer us before we even have a chance to enjoy a little buzz.
The result?
Our starving bodies are deprived of the fuel that healthy foods provide so they are left with no choice but to make due with what we give them and cruelly punish us for it the next morning.
So none of us would purposefully not eat enough before drinking, would we? Actually, we would. Known as drunkorexics, their goal is to reduce their calorie intake by only providing their bodies the calories contained in alcohol.
While it is important to be sympathetic to individuals who suffer from eating disorders, this one strikes a different chord.
Those of us who fall under this category appear to possess so little self-respect that we not only starve our bodies to avoid weight gain, but we are also willing and eager to get drunk as fast as possible and avoid the pressure of sober socialization.
Perhaps the irony of this disorder should provoke even more pity than anorexia or bulimia because it represents the pressure we are under to not only look but also act a very specific way.
A New York Times article, “Starving Themselves, Cocktail in Hand,” by Sarah Kershaw verifies that drunkorexics often violate their own weight loss objective by going on eating binges as a result of their bodies’ starvation.
Additionally, as mentioned before, they are unlikely to escape their body’s wrathful hangover due to functioning on nothing but alcohol. Usually, alcohol abuse is not seen as a problem for us since we generally incorporate it into the majority of our social plans.
Drunkorexia, however, demonstrates a different and more serious perspective on drinking. It proves the power it has over some of us who give more preference to being socially accepted than to our own health.
Regardless, we will continue to abuse alcohol and take great pleasure in it despite the consequences.
But it is still important to consider the underlying reasons for this and to recognize that a habit that seems customary and harmless to some of us is actually a source of painful disease for drunkorexics; individuals who somehow reason that ingesting alcohol, or appearing to ingest alcohol, is more important than taking care of their bodies.
Their habit does seem to make sense though, since their rigid refusal to risk consuming too many calories indicates that they really don’t like their bodies anyway.
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