Drunkorexia: crash diet, binge drinking

More and more students suffer from ‘drunkorexia’. To compensate for the intake of calories from alcohol, they starve themselves for a few days. Volkskrant magazine wrote about it this weekend.

In The Netherlands, drunkorexia is categorized as an unspecified eating disorder. According to numbers from the Dutch health institute, 150.000 people have such a disorder.

In truth, the group of people who periodically battles with an undiagnosed eating disorder is bigger and still growing, says Elske van den Berg, psychologist at Novarum. At the treatment and research center for eating disorders and obesitas, a thousand women between 18 and 25 ask for treatment on an annual basis. They all get their calories almost exclusively from alcohol. Not because they are addicted, but because they want to go out without gaining weight.

In America, this problem also exists. A quarter of the students there is ‘drunkorectic’, according to research. The results were published in the Journal of American College Health.