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Qu about bulimia...
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Bulimia - not a topic that i know much about, and i know what it obviously is - but why do people do it? i was told ages ago that bulimia doesnt actually make u lose weight so why do people do it?
Bit random i know but my mates recently admitted hes bulimic. and hes getting thinner by the day. but HOW if youre not supposed to lose weight by it :S
Bit random i know but my mates recently admitted hes bulimic. and hes getting thinner by the day. but HOW if youre not supposed to lose weight by it :S
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I don't think I'm spot on this, but here's the drift.
In a way you get 2 kind of bulimea. One where people generally eat reasonably normally, but then binge and make themselves sick to get rid of the binge. That one generally doesn't make you lose weight because you've got the reasonably normal diet keeping you going. The second, which is often tied into annorexia where you don't eat properly, and what you do eat you often throw up. Obviously this makes you lose weight.
That make some sense?
There's a charity called Beat (used to be eda) who have some good info.
:yes: here's the URL - http://www.b-eat.co.uk/Home
:yes:
Bulimics are harder to spot as often they are a normal weight.
It can make you lose a lot of weight, but its obviously not a very good way to do it. There are a lot more efficient ways.
It seems to me that there is a big cross-over area with eating disorders too... Bulimia and Anorexia are different but my eating disorder included both, and in my experience of others with eating disorders, their behaviour also included elements of both disorders.
Thing I found with bulimia was I started to gain weight really, or just maintain the weight I was at. It's only when you start to actually purge EVERYTHING you eat within the hour that you'll loose weight. Binge/purge cycles, in my experiences very rarely change your weight, as behind the binge and purge you still have somewhat normal eating. It varies from person to person though.
Even once you realise you're gaining weight, it becomes addictive, evne more of an obsession to get the food out. Even when your esophagus tears and you're puking up blood, you carry on because of that addiction, the NEED to get the food out of you.
Steriotypical bulimia is normal eating, with binge and purge cycles, usually throwing up afterwards, but sometimes laxatives, or sometimes even just hard exercise or starvation.
But you can get anorexic-bulimia nervosa, and bulimic-anorexia nervosa,.. and then it starts getting complicated!
Is your friend getting help at all? It's always best to get help before it becomes too late... stop it before it becomes an addiction, cause otherwise it's so hard to get out of the cycle. I've been in and out of various shrinks, doctors, hospitals etc for the past 4-5 years and I'm still stuck in the cycles of eating disorders
I think psychologically it can be to do with having perfectionist standards about your own body, coupled with the perception that you are overweight and in bulimia low self-efficacy - so you think you're fat and want to be thinner, but doubt you have the willpower to do anything about it. In some cases as well binge eating occurs as an attempt to regulate negative emotions and aversive self-awareness, so if the person is really upset about something they may divert their behaviour away from their long term goal of losing weight to the short term goal of reducing negative emotion. Since when you're eating you tend to focus on the immediate present and what you're doing, chewing etc. it can help you forget about whatever has upset you, but obviously it isn't a good way to deal with problems.
Also some people might binge because the diet that they try and set themselves is too strict, so their food intake for a few days is so low that they have to binge, then feel guilty about it and purge, etc.
There are a lot more reasons as well but those are some of them, obviously you can still lose weight and be bulimic. Hopefully your friend has taken the first steps in accepting he has a problem by admitting it to you and will get some help.
I think bulimia gets over looked somewhat- people talk about anorexia and the problems and risks of that eating disorder often, but bulimics seem to quite often get branded as people who want to be anorexic but aren't. Bulimia is just as dangerous and unhealthy and pyschologically damaging an illness as anorexia, as is binge-eating disorder for that matter.