Alcorexia

I've been on a diet recently - (WHAT ELSE IS NEW??!!) - and beginning about 2 weeks ago I started diligently counting calories again because that really is the only thing that ever works. So anyhoo, Friday evening, knowing I'd be meeting my friend Julie later, I thought I'd be ultra responsible and save calories for the drinks. So I ate 300 calories and figured I'd have 700 calories worth of beer.

Clever, huh?

So as I'm sitting there at the bar I thought, OK, 700 calories is really only about 3 1/2 beers to be fair, so if I want to get the most out of my drinking experience I should drink the highest alcohol content available. I was forgetting two very important facts:

1) I have no tolerance for beer even when I'm not on an empty stomach.

and...

2) I live in Belgium where they mean what they say when they say, "strong beer".

So basically what I drank was equivalent in alcohol content to about 8 beers in a country where sadistic monks aren't in charge of brewing everything.

On an empty stomach.

Crazy? Hmmm. Yes, perhaps a tad. Needless to say I got quite sick. And when I say I got sick I mean that I spent the next DAY AND A HALF throwing up so much that stuff I ate in previous lifetimes was coming up. ("Where did all this barley pottage come from?", quoth I.) And as I was laying there in agony all I could think was, "I purposely drank on an empty stomach! What the hell was I thinking of???!!!" ....But it turns out there's a name for this syndrome: Alcorexia. Yup. In America where they can turn anything into a syndrome (that eventually there will be a pill for), the act of a person substituting alcoholic calories for food is dubbed Alcorexia.




But here's the kicker: like the syndromes' more sensible sisters Anorexia and Bulimia, Alcorexia does in fact work. Scarily so as a matter of fact. First of all, I was violently ill so whatever calories I'd had before The Event are now somewhere in the Atlantic; and secondly, I couldn't eat at all for a day and a half. I was pretty much guaranteed to lose weight - and don't think I wasn't cognizant of that particular silver lining even while my head was in the toilet. Healthy? No. But beauty hurts.

And here's the best part: Now that I've been purged I am starting from a totally clean slate. So starting yesterday (Monday) I've been eating the fresh-fruit-and-vegetable diet I've always been meaning to eat but could never quite bring myself to, and I'm not even hungry!!! That's right, I successfully kick-started my diet with an alcoholic binge! Woo hoo!

So if my success continues - and I have no reason to doubt that it will - I shall pen my own self-help diet book, tentatively titled, Drink yourself to a Size 4, projected release Spring 2011 (when I shall look fabulous in all the "after" pictures).

Tacky? Un-"PC"? Offensive? Hell yes. But can you name anything successful that isn't?
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