Two, four, six, eight, Donna Martin graduate!

It's Saturday night. You're getting ready to hit the town with your girls in a few hours. Music is blasting as you do your makeup and your try not to smear your eyeliner as you sing along with Beyonce. You're feeling good from your afternoon workout and are hot to trot.

Then the question arises: What to eat for dinner?

If you eat too much, you'll feel overly full and bloated. If you don't eat enough, that margarita is going to hit your bloodstream faster than news of Jamie-Lynn's pregnancy hit the internet. What to do, what to do. Great taste or less fill?

If you opt to skip dinner entirely, and do so on a regular basis, you may suffer from...DRUNKOREXIA. (Not a DSM IV diagnosis, so don't even try for insurance coverage). The buzzword is all the rage these days and means that you purposefully cut back on calories so you can can drink more without gaining weight. A recent episode of The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet cited a report that shows 30% of women ages 18-23 hold off on the chicken breast and pasghetti so they can down lemon drops later on.

And all I have to say is, "Duh."

My friends and I totally did this in college - we considered it to be financially beneficial as well as calorically. I mean, an empty stomach means a faster buzz from that disgusting Long Island Iced Tea crap juice we used to guzzle (once we hit age 21, obviously), and a faster buzz meant less money spent on more drinks. We were, like, SO SMART! But we weren't considering the fact that booze is jacked up with empty calories (Everclear isn't exactly like red wine when it comes to antioxidants or heart health protection) and then, without fail, we would end up dialing Gumby's Pizza ... from a pay phone ... and ordering cheesy pepperoni rolls and garlic- and oil-slicked Pokey Sticks. Or we'd scarf down late-night Chinese food. Or, on especially ill-fated nights, we'd stop at a local chain known for "burritos as big as your head." That catchphrase doesn't exactly scream "Diet," does it?

Popular celeb drunkorexics seem to include Tara Reid, LiLo, and who can forget the infamous Beverly Hills 90210 episode when Donna Martin starved herself all day to squeeze into her mermaid-like prom dress, only to swizzle champagne at a preparty and get totally trashed in the limo. Aaron Spelling was really ahead of his time on this one.

Now that I'm older and anything more than a single stiff martini consitutes binge drinking for me, I admit that I still am cognizant of mixing grub with hooch. I don't carboload prior to heading out but I also don't hit the road on an empty tummy. Usually a can of soup and a wrap with melted cheese or something like that is the perfect amount. Also, I'm not big on drinking during meals, as it leaves me sleepy and prone to licking food off of stranger's plates, so if I'm out at a nice meal, I'll abstain.

I'll point out an oft-cited 2003 study in The Journal of Nutrition which showed that individuals who drink an average of a single drink per day have the lowest levels of abdominal fat. Those men and women who drank occasionally - but when they did, had four or more drinks in one sitting - had the greatest levels of tummy pudge. Now, I'm not telling y'all this as an excuse to start imbibing as sport. Just an interesting finding. But there's a very fine line between a lil tipple and boozing it up to the point where your inhibitions sink...and a beer gut, as the Skinny Bitches tell us, is disgusting, nasty, vile proof of our lack of willpower, charm and intelligence. So I say, if you drink a small glass of Merlot with dinner and that's it, good for you, oeniphile! If you've been posting pics on "Am I Wasted?" stop and take a look at yourself. You don't/shouldn't live life according to the Girls Gone Wild rulebook.

And remember - friends don't let friends drink and diet!

PS This is catty and wrong but I'd love to hear any stories you have of drunkarexia-gone-insane, maybe from your college days. I'm assuming if you're here and reading this blog, you made it through and lived to tell the story of that night you downed six Jello shots before a frat party and wound up puking lime green. Not that that happened to me or anything.

Comments

This isn't my story per se, but I bore witness to it and it still causes me to shutter.
I was home visiting for a weekend and had planned a Girls Night Out with two friends, one of whom I spent the afternoon shopping with. Jane and I ate lunch at Taco Bell at one, went on with our shopping, and then parted ways until she'd pick me up for our night out, as Jane had VOLUNTEERED to be the designated driver that night.
My second friend, Joan, called and asked if it'd be okay if her friends Vince and Scott tagged along. No big deal for Jane and I and we said sure. So we all arranged to meet at the bar at nine.
After two JUMBO glasses of wine, Jane has surpassed Joan and I as the designated drunk and confesses she had skipped dinner. A third drink, this time a Cosmo, now has her asking Joan's friends if she can perform fellatio on them as "she's really good at it." When they turned her down, she then took to standing outside the men's room and making the same offer to anyone walking in or out.

But wait, there's more(a contination of the above nightmare)....
Both Joan and I were terribly drunk as well, and between the three of us, no one was able to drive. Scott and Vince (Joan's friends) were so uncomfortable, they couldn't leave fast enough. By this time Jane felt ill, and asked Scott and Vince to drive her home. While Joan discussed options with Vince, Jane confessed to me that this is her ploy to get either guy in bed with her, and who it is makes no difference.
Long story short... Joan and Jane left with Scott and Vince, and Joan managed to thwart Jane's attempts at getting one of the two in bed. I was left to sober up at the bar for the next hour and a half and then drive myself home. Which I somehow, by the grace of God, managed to do.
Sadly, we were 28 at the time, and Joan and Jane are no longer friends because of this incident. When confronted about it months later, Jane's response? "I was drunk. Get over it."
I'm still friends with Jane, but haven't stepped foot in a bar with her since.

Wow, I didn't know skipping food for booze had a name! I must admit, I have fallen victim to drunkorexia. Every time I have, it was after a 90 minute Friday spin class that left me feeling amazing and thin and ready to have fun with friends. I am a college student and I see this kind of stuff every weekend. Last Christmas I was asking my dad how one of my friends could go out every night and manage to drop a pant size in one semester (yet she still maintains a large gut? this probably falls into your statistic about people who drink 4 or more beverages in one sitting). He basically said the same thing as your post: she replaced meals with alcohol. Even though I know it's definitely not good for me, it can be convienent (and I detest myself for thinking that!)

Guilty, guilty, guilty! Did this every week in my early 20s, & it frequently resulted in humiliating & dangerous behavior. One night, after many shots & a nutritious meal of about 2 dozen marchiano cherries at a bar, my friend mike called 911 because he thought I was vomiting blood (the paramedics had a good laugh when they found out it was the bar cherries I had devoured). I stopped this practice all together when I started blacking out at the end of the night. Binge drinking on an empty stomach was the dumbest college "fad" I participated in, I'm just thankful that I never got into deeper trouble.

I think I had some problems around this too. I recently had a breakthrough moment though and, yes, I'm too old to have had it only now.

I was over at a friend's house for some casual hanging out and was probably on my 4th or 5th cocktail as I was describing to a friend how I had been unable to eat anything earlier in the afternoon as all the options that had been available were way too high in calories that I couldn't really justify.
He was kind enough to do the calorie math for my 5 coktails, and compare that to whatever would have been in half a tuna sandwich (albeit full of mayo)...And somehow that realization hit me like a wall of bricks.

It's not that I didn't know that, but somehow i managed to never think about it...

I am definitely a drunkorexic. I'm actually a freshman in college so I'm getting better and better at honing these skills. It seems like half the time I don't eat much at dinner, or it doesn't matter much because I'll go out about 5 hours after dinner, giving me plenty of time to digest. I don't consider myself a light weight, but one night at a Halloween frat party, it only took me four beers to get drunk, and I was VERY drunk. My best story however, was puking red jungle juice in the back of a bus at U of I after a frat party and my friends forcing me to get off the bus and walk with them.

I support drunkorexia only because it definitely takes less alcohol (therefore less calories) to get me drunk, and it's not that bad because I don't usually pig out on Pokey sticks (soo good!) after drinking.