Menu
Read the latest and greatest from our team
of incredible specialists.
Using drugs or alcohol to shed a few pounds can be medically risky. Whether it’s drinking, smoking or taking Adderall to lose weight, the risk factors far outweigh the body-trimming benefits. Find out the very real health dangers here:
Drug or alcohol abuse and addiction often can begin as an effort to lose weight, and there is a high co-occurrence of substance abuse among people with eating disorders, according to accumulated research. Affecting nearly 50 percent of people with eating disorders, substance abuse reportedly occurs at a rate five times greater than its rate of occurrence among the general population. This article will discuss the risk factors of using drugs or alcohol to lose weight, including what substances are often misused towards this end, the physical dangers of this unhealthy form of dieting, and who tends to be more at risk.
The link between dieting and substance abuse is especially apparent among younger populations and women:
Three common forms of substance abuse for weight loss purposes involve drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and taking stimulant drugs. In the first case, the notion of using alcohol to lose weight may sound counter-intuitive. (Alcohol tends to be highly caloric.) However, many bulimics reportedly drink alcohol as a way to purge. For this population, drinking apparently feeds a cycle of regurgitation and dehydration. Eating disorder experts have explained this phenomenon on the basis of the fact that purging liquid (alcohol) is easier than purging solid food.
In addition, heavy or binge drinking reduces the appetite and speeds up the body’s metabolism, because the liver has to work extra hard to break down alcohol and remove it from the body.
Smoking can also, not uncommonly, be motivated by the aim to lose weight. Nicotine is a stimulant that suppresses appetite, after all. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found, for example, that smoking was more prevalent among adolescent girls who either were overweight, trying to lose weight, or saw themselves as overweight.
Taking prescription stimulant drugs is another common form of weight loss-inducing substance abuse, the idea being that stimulants suppress appetite. Psycho-stimulants (also known as “smart drugs”) like Ritalin and Adderall don’t just decrease appetite. They also increase the pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine (one reason they can be highly addictive). That in turn speeds up the nervous system and metabolism, boosts energy levels, and can trigger the body’s “fight or flight” response mechanisms (which also reduce food intake), thereby leading to weight loss.
Smart drugs and alcohol are not the only substances that people turn to in order to lose weight. Other illicit, prescription and over-the counter drugs that reportedly have been misused for weight loss purposes include the following substances:
There are serious health dangers to drinking alcohol in order to lose weight. For one thing, alcohol is a toxin, especially to the liver, and is devoid of any nutritional value. The empty calories spent on drinking only succeed in both depriving and depleting the body of essential vitamins and minerals found in nutrient-rich foods.
Excess alcohol also prevents the absorption of key amino acids that are critical to healthy organ functioning, by damaging the intestinal tract, which then reduces the body’s capacity to absorb these nutrients and reallocating precious cellular resources to the sole function of removing alcohol from the system. The body cannot store alcohol, after all.
Poor diet and nutrition due to excess alcohol can lead to major organ failure, cancer and other serious and life-threatening conditions.
Smoking to lose weight can be very bad for you. The undisputed takeaway from 50-70 years of research into the health effects of cigarettes is that smoking raises the risks of lung cancer and many other cancers, and can also lead to Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In fact, smoking causes more deaths each year, according to an estimate by the Centers for Disease Control, than the following causes combined:
Short or long-term smart drug use for the purpose of losing weight also can pose serious health risks. These include the following:
If you have been using any of the above drugs in order to lose weight, help and treatment are available.
Beach House Center for Recovery’s Learning Center also contains more detailed information related to the risk factors of using alcohol to lose weight, including the health dangers of alcohol, the long-term effects of alcohol on the kidneys, and the long-term effects of too much alcohol.
