In health class, the teacher always recommended that you should eat a big meal before a night of drinking so that it would slow your metabolism and you wouldn’t get drunk as quickly. It turns out, some women are taking this advice the opposite way.

Women are not eating because they want to save their calories for drinking, referred to as drunkorexia, in this New York Times article. If the women do eat, they use alcohol to purge the calories they consumed. Anorexic women used to loathe drinking because of the extra calories and social, peer-pressured atmosphere is could bring. But with this new strategy, a host of new problems arise. Substance abuse and eating disorders have common threads throughout them both. They both can be used to numb emotional pain. Eating disorders do so by controlling a basic part of their lives and drinking does so with its hallucinogenic effects.

So take the advice of your health teacher: eat a big meal before drinking, and drink in moderation. Purging and alcohol are not effective ways to deal with problems.