It’s 2:30 a.m. on Friday at The Green Elephant, a popular 21-and-up bar off upper Greenville Avenue. All of a sudden, Ashley’s intoxicated brain feels a sudden craving for food – fast food. Nothing sounds more heavenly to the senior business major than greasy french fries and a honey butter chicken biscuit from Whataburger; all 610 calories and 1072 milligrams of sodium in it.
“I crave Whataburger when I’ve been out drinking,” Ashley [last name withheld] said.
Students like Ashley may do pilates and go to the gym during the week in order to justify their bad food choices, but the calories they burn during the week are accumulated back on the weekends, and then some. Nutritionists say students do not often realize that all the healthy efforts they put in come back via drinking and late-night binging on unhealthy fast food. This behavior often leads to an intake of hundreds and even thousands of additional calories.
“When you drink, your body takes it in as food. It impairs your brain’s ability to work, so you’re going to drink more,” Dallas nutritionist of WebNutri Shefali Ajmera said. “When you’re drunk, you can’t think about what’s going on. The food is there so you’re going to eat it.”
According to Ajmera, your brain gets dehydrated the more alcohol you consume. This triggers nerves to feel a craving for water, which gets translated into hunger.
Ashley’s late-night Whataburger craving is actually a response to her brain’s lack of fluids. However, students like Carolyn [last name withheld], a senior CCPA major, watch what they eat continuously and still have cravings.
“I usually crave Mexican and sushi, which are the highest in salt and I think that would cause you to drink more because the salt makes you so thirsty. And naturally, when your body is dehydrated, you want to drink more,” Angiolillo said.
When students like Carolyn are eating Mexican food, they may also have a margarita with dinner. The more added salt you have in food and drinks make you not only want to eat more, but drink more, too. Once students are intoxicated, Carolyn thinks they are less likely to pay attention to how much sugar and calories are in their alcoholic drinks.
Ajmera said beer is the lightest drink, with around 100 calories per serving. But be careful. The drink calories tally up quickly. Consuming 10 beers means another 1,000 calories, in addition to calories from the food you may eat.
“After a day of drinking on the Boulevard and watching football games at bars, you’ve consumed 10 beers before you know it. And then you’re like, ‘Oh crap, that’s a thousand calories,'” senior film major Taylor [last name withheld] said.
“I would not suggest drinking and not eating because your body does need food, especially when you have alcohol,” Ajmera said.
Jennifer Ball, who graduated from SMU last year and is now a beverage analyst for Pizza Hut, has been regularly going to her gym and working out ever since high school. But like most college freshman, she gave into the food cravings that came with drinking. Her freshmen year, she admitted to having the Jimmy John’s delivery men waiting outside her dorm with a sandwich when she returned from a night out.
“If it’s sitting out in front of me and I’ve been drinking, then yeah, it’s harder to not eat it,” Ball said.
