All about Bulimia
Being fat was never a problem, but being excessively obese may pose as one.
Bulimia Nervosa is an illness that is most commonly found in girls of later adolescence and early adulthood. It is very rarely found in men. Characterized by episodes of binge eating; eating large quantities of food in a short time. This behavior may be very severe with enormous quantities of food, most typically carbohydrates being consumed. To prevent the otherwise inevitable consequence of weight gain there are periods of food restriction and often vomiting, laxative abuse or excessive exercising.
When vomiting is used as a method to get rid of the problem, the binges may become multiple with repeating cycles over several hours in which the sufferer eats until full, then vomits and eats again. With increasing severity the girls' lives become more chaotic with the focus increasingly on the bulimic behavior. Such is the drive to eat that they may scavenge leftovers from a dustbin or steal in order to feed the compulsion. Some of us may treat this as a psychic problem, but it is not so. Girls generally find their own behavior disgusting and are deeply ashamed of it so that it almost always occurs in secret and never gets out of the closet.
Signs that may indicate that there is a problem include a tendency to leave the table immediately after a meal. This often causes a chronic blister just below the knuckle where it rubs on the upper teeth. Perhaps this remains as one of the best-known symptoms seen in these cases. They will be discussed below under three different headings; Simple, Anorexic, and Multi-impulsive Bulimia Nervosa. There is quite a lot of overlap between them so that there are a number of sufferers who show characteristics that belong midway between these subgroups.
Simple Bulimia Nervosa is an illness that begins most commonly when the girls are about 18 yrs of age. They are a fairly normal group before the illness. They tend to have been mildly under confident and unassertive but come from a broad range of unexceptional family backgrounds. They have probably made friends in a normal way at school and are often fairly popular. Most artists in heir young age might go through a whiff of this ailment, as they are known to be loners.
The illness is frequently triggered by a period of unhappiness and this is often caused by a destructive relationship with a boyfriend. The feeling of self-dislike focuses on appearance and dieting is begun in an attempt to improve self-esteem. In contrast to an anorexic the diet is not very successful with the rigid control needed breaking down into bouts of cheating. Vomiting is used as part of increased efforts to achieve the weight loss and so the cycle of binging and vomiting begins. There is more loss of control as the body's normal mechanisms of appetite control are over ridden and confused.
The weight will remain close to normal but the eating pattern becomes gradually worse. This form of bulimia is the least severe but the severity varies considerably. It is likely that there are large numbers of girls with fairly mild symptoms that never come to medical help but there is a significant risk that it will slowly get worse with time. A common time for sufferers to seek help is when they are planning to start a family in their early twenties and are concerned about possible effects on having babies.
Sad but true, but an ailment like this one does exist! It's not only confined to text-book knowledge.
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