Bulimia symptoms and causes

Bulimia symptoms and causes.

One often hears talking about bulimia, one of the most common eating disorders, but what is it and what are the symptoms and causes?

Bulimia, together with anorexia, falls between those disorders that take the name of Eating Disorders. This type of problem leads the person to have an excessive control and an excessive attention towards food and the whole question of food.

In bulimia unlike anorexia, (in which people have a distorted view of their body), people have a real perception of their body but have a psychological conflict that breaks out with the outside world.

BULIMIA SYMPTOMS AND CAUSES

Nervous Bulimia is a very widespread disorder more than we can think, and now affects about 4-5% of the whole population. Bulimia is most striking in young subjects (especially during adolescence and young adults) with a higher percentage for females rather than males. This does not mean that there aren’t men who suffer from bulimia but at the moment are in minority, therefore do not exclude this hypothesis and always do the right assessments and being this a very serious pathology go immediately to visit a qualified physician.

A Bulimia attack is characterized by uncontrolled food stuffing to which usually follows a strong sense of guilt, embarrassement for not being able to control herself/himself and at this point the person who feels guilty tries to repair the “damage” by vomiting, taking laxatives or undergoing physical exercises to exhaustion.

On one side we have a stuffing with food, which relieves the sense of anxiety and stress due to inner issues or disorders with the outer world and on the other side we have a feeling of unease towards themselves for what has been done.

There are different forms of the disease but the most common is bulimia “nervosa” (nervous bulimia), which very often appears after following a weight loss diet.

Bulimia nervosa is characterized by the fact that the person puts in place all those compensatory mechanisms (vomiting, laxatives, physical exercise) to dispose of the sense of guilt and discomfort felt towards himself/herself.

Then there is another type of bulimia called Binge Eating Disorder (disturbance from uncontrolled eating), it is one of the forms of bulimia (there is also a variation in the anorexia) that involves the typical binge but not vomiting, laxative or anything else to reduce the ” damage”, for which usually the person tends to get fat.

Bulimia symptoms and causes

Attention must therefore be paid towards these types behaviours and also to the symptoms that may appear.

Behaviours:

• Food binges: during the attack of anxiety that usually lasts no more than 30-60 minutes, a person devours a crazy amount of food pushed by an uncontrollable impulse. Usually one looks for foods rich in carbohydrates (pizza, pasta, biscuits, sweets, chocolate);
• Mechanisms to eliminate the ingested food: after the binge comes an unbearable guilty feeling, having a sense of hatred towards herself/himself and hence tries to repair the “damage” done by looking for solutions like; vomiting, assuming laxatives, diuretics or very long and tiring sessions of various physical exercises in order to digest and dispose of the binge.

These two behaviours are associated other as to say “symptoms”:

• Very often the lack of control affects also other areas of their lives by bringing the person to other abuses such as the abuse of alcohol, chain smoking, uncontrolled sexual life and even stealing (kleptomania);
• The physique/body begins to suffer from this malicious mechanism and first damages are visible at the level of the blood. It often happens that the person affected by bulimia has low values of potassium (hypokalemia) due to the assumption of laxatives and vomiting and that an altered value of enzymes is found in the analysis such as amylase, as a consequence of the numerous episodes of vomiting;

We must therefore pay a lot of attention to these behaviours and these symptoms in order to understand the seriousness of the situation and to consult a specialist who will be able to give the best advise.

Take a look at our tried and tested method: Anti-Diet