Food and drink. It’s basic. What could be simpler? Except that it’s not. We know from digging through the data, and from sitting and listening to people with alcohol misuse problems and people with eating disorders, that there’s a complicated relationship between alcohol use and disordered eating. And that relationship can be very different for different people.
As part of our recent research we found that people who are dependent on alcohol, or in early recovery from very heavy drinking, often report unhealthy eating behaviours – particularly undereating. Dependent drinkers often say that they find food to be less important to them than alcohol. They don’t set out to avoid food; it just becomes less of a priority. They might deem spending money on food less important to keeping it to buy alcohol. They might also see their interest in food declining, or not feel the need to eat. For some, food exists in their minds as a component of loving and social relationships. If those relationships aren’t there – and they often aren’t for dependent drinkers – eating on their own can feel pointless and miserable. On a more positive note, drinkers told us that renewing caring social relationships around eating could well help them to eat much more healthily – that finding a new relationship with food, through sociable eating, could help to fill the void left when they decided to stop drinking.
