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As many of us know, it seems that binge drinking has severely increased within the last few decades of college students. A 125-pound friend of mine who is a female sophomore at CU stated, “When I go out, I rage hard, drinking anywhere between five and nine drinks within a period of usually around four hours.”
Now, in addition to this extreme binge drinking, many college students are choosing not to eat during the day so they can drink their calories at night. The thought process is to switch the calories from food to alcohol, instead of consuming both and then gaining weight.
The Diet blog online has statistics that suggest 30 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds skip food in order to drink more on the weekends. According to the same article this trend is largely popular among females because they are trying to keep up with the expected stick-thin figure they see in the media.
Getting drunk is now a necessity to go to a party on the weekend, instead of just going to a party and socially having a drink there. CNN’s special on “Drunkorexia” stated that “just looking at college students, only over 1,400 18 to 24-year-olds lose their lives each year due to alcohol-related injuries.” Binge drinking is not only dangerous but hard on your body in the long run because without food in your stomach, you may have a higher chance of blacking out and getting severely injured.
Trying to keep up with the binge drinking is becoming not only excessive, but deadly.
“Last year I took about seven shots in probably a span of two hours and then blacked out,” said a 105-pound female friend when describing one of her nights last year as a freshman at CU. “I was trying to find my purse when I fell down a flight of stairs and got taken to the emergency room where I learned that I had sprained my nose and gotten 17 stitches – along with an MIP.”
In a CBS article on “Drunkorexia,” Becky Flood, an addiction expert and executive director of New Directions for Women, estimated that two years of women’s drinking equals nearly 10 years of a man’s!
This shocking news should get college students, especially women, to think about the true consequences of their actions. By thinking you are just trying to cut back on calories and eat less the day you are going to rage, you could just be one of those 1,400 college students who gets injured each year. I know I don’t want to make that trip to the emergency room!
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Alexia Bouttier at Alexia.bouttier@colorado.edu.
