Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder. In the mind of a person with this condition, being fat is something to be afraid of. What a bulimic does is “binge and purge.” He or she eats a huge amount of food within a short span of time. This type of eating behavior is called binge eating. After a bulimic binges, he immediately purges himself of the food that he has just taken in. In purging, he could use different methods like take laxatives or other drugs. However, for most people with this disorder, vomiting is induced.

Since bulimics are afraid to get fat, they resort to other measures to keep the extra weight off. Exercise is one strategy of a bulimic to attain a certain body image.

It is true that exercise is a good way to keep the heart and muscles functioning properly. It is also an effective way to target unwanted fat in the body because of increased cardiovascular activity and sweating. The effects of such physical activity have led bulimics to the conclusion that purging and exercise is an effective way to stay thin.

Most people who fall for the dangerous combination of exercise and bulimia are often those who believe that maintaining a certain body shape is the same as being healthy. They have the feeling that doing a lot of exercise is good for the body because it helps burn calories faster. However, bulimics try to do too much even if their bodies are too weak from the lack of nutrition. Sometimes, in their obsession with a harmful amount of exercise, they overexert themselves.

This type of bulimia is often difficult to trace and difficult to keep in check. Talking with professionals could help a lot.

By: Thomas Morva

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If you have always wanted to know more about bulimia, I’m going to explain it here and report on the most effective natural ways to get rid of this eating disorder for good.

Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder that involves recurring and very frequent episodes of eating huge amounts of food (this is binge-eating). Feeling a complete lack of control over eating. It’s followed by a type of behavior that is meant to correct the binge, such as purging, which is vomiting or the overuse of laxatives and/or diuretics, fasting and/or an excessive amount of exercise. People with bulimia differ from people with anorexia because they usually fall within the normal range for their age and weight.

Although someone with bulimia can fall within the normal range of weight for their age, they usually fear gaining weight, want to desperately lose weight, and are very unhappy with their body shape and size. Bulimic behavior is generally done in secret. Often feelings of disgust or shame go with it. A binging and purging cycle develops and usually it’s repeated a few times a week. Bulimics often have co-existing illnesses, such as anxiety, depression and/or one or more substance abuse problems. Purging causes many physical conditions including imbalance of electrolytes, gastrointestinal issues, and oral, gum and tooth-related problems.

There are many other bulimia symptoms or side effects: they include: a chronically inflamed or sore throat, swollen lymph glands in the neck and under the jaw, tooth enamel that is eroded, teeth that become sensitive and tooth decay for repeated exposure to stomach acids, acid reflux problems, colon distress and irritation from overuse of laxatives, kidney issues from excessive use of diuretics and serious dehydration from purging fluids.

The best cure or treatment for bulimia is a combination of treatment plans and needs to be tailored to the individual. It can be treated in an eating disorder treatment center. Or one can work in a clinic with a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist. The treatment would be designed to help reduce or completely eliminate the binge and purge behavior. It would start with nutritional counseling with an emphasis on living foods to provide the best nutrients to help the body heal faster. It would be combined with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help the patient understand why the condition exists. CBT that has been designed specifically to help bulimics has been very effective in changing the binging and purging behaviors and eating attitudes and help get to the cause. This can be done individually or in group settings.

These combined approaches should help the bulimic recover and heal and prevent it from recurring. Natural methods are best to treat anxiety and depression if they are part of the problem.

The combined bulimia treatment approach for this eating disorder should help reduce binge-eating and purging behavior, reduce the chance of a relapse and improve attitudes about eating. This natural eating disorder treatment has helped many bulimics recover.

By: Helen Hecker

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Bulimia is one of the most rapidly increasing psychological problems around nowadays. But what causes bulimia? Is it an extreme response to Western society’s pressure on young girls and women to be slim?

Or are there other factors contributing to the problem?

Can we influence these factors and change their effects on people?

Genetic, environmental, biological are all common factors that have to be looked at when we talk about the causes of any diseases or disorders.

Let’s look at these things in the case of Bulimia.

Scientific research recently has shown that people are born with an inherited predisposition towards developing bulimia, particularly where susceptibility to addiction is in the genes.

It reveals that bulimics inherit a gene responsible for the addiction from their ancestors. This addiction can appear in different forms: alcohol addiction, drug addiction, food addiction, nicotine and the like. That’s why many bulimics also suffer from addictions to other substances also, making recovery difficult.

So a genetic predisposition to bulimia may be there but it is not a single bulimia gene itself that is the culprit but a general addiction gene. And in many bulimic families we can trace backwards to past members of the family who suffered from other kinds of addiction in their lives.

But on the other hand not all people who get an addiction gene suffer from bulimia or other addictions. So we have to look at other things like environmental factors.

Environmental factors can contribute to triggering the onset of bulimia. These include peer pressures, family attitudes, the influence of the media creating a need for thinness, poor self-esteem and a lack of acceptance of self and body shape.

Bulimia often begins with a dissatisfaction of the person’s body. The individual may actually be underweight, but when that person looks in a mirror they see a distorted image and feel heavier than they really are. At first, this distorted body image leads to dieting.

As the body image in the mirror continues to be seen as larger than it actually is, the dieting escalates and leads to bulimia. The bottom line however, is that bulimia is the misuse of food to try to resolve emotional problems.

When a person is unable to face their feelings, define problems, and resolves them effectively, that person is more prone to become susceptible to the onset of bulimia.

A significant correlation between the development of clinical bulimia nervosa and sexual abuse has also been proven. Other forms of abuse (physical, emotional or combination of both of them) also link to developing of dissatisfaction with the person’s body that can lead to bulimia any time in the future.

Strict and cold parental attitude and luck of showing love to children from parents can become a trigger for developing a wrong body image in children that can turn into bulimia in susceptible people. That is why you should never tease your child if they are a little bit over weight as this could just be a normal growing process for that child’s body shape. But a wrong word from a parent or family member may inadvertently send that person down the track to bulimia.

The next factor which can cause bulimia is biological or biochemical factor. This happens when one or a few biological processes in the human body have gone off track. Some research has shown that an insufficiency of a special hormone in the brain called serotonin can cause depression and bulimia at the same time. This is probably why many bulimics also suffer from depression.

Some antidepressants that work on restoring the level of serotonin in the brain can help some sufferers stop their binges while taking them. This could also mean that many sufferers, who manage to stop their bulimia for a short while, go back to binging again when they stop the antidepressants.

Anyone who has been on antidepressants and has stopped should look for other supplements where they can substitute the loss of serotonin; I believe you can get serotonin in the health food stores in capsules form. Although taking serotonin on its own will not automatically stop your bulimia, as it is a much deeper psychological problem that a single chemical imbalance: but it would not hurt either.

As you can see, many factors can contribute to the development of bulimia. For some sufferers it is the environmental factors that come into play, like desire to be thin, peer pressure to be thin or influence from the media to be thin. Some people may have a strong genetic influence that can be traced to past relatives who may have suffered from bulimia or other addictions.

Depressed sufferers will blame their low serotonin level in the brain for their bulimia. But the majority of people probably have a combination of factors that has caused their bulimia.

In conclusion, the causes of bulimia could be many: genetic, biological and environmental. So far we can’t change the genes we are born with but we can manage to control certain behaviors brought on by defective genes, with the correct methods.

To change biological factors like low serotonin levels in the brain, it is possible with certain drugs or supplementation, but it does not work for everyone. The only bulimia factor we can change easily is the environmental factor. This includes changing our attitude to body image, our perception of real beauty and our eating habits.

By promoting a healthy environment we can eradicate or significantly diminish one of the main causes of bulimia – the environmental factor. The other causes can also be controlled if we are aware of their existence.

To see how some other people have managed, go to www.mom-please-help.com



By: Dr Irina Webster

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