Get over your nightmare!

Bulimia nervosa can become a nightmare. It is very painful to realize that you are losing control over yourself, over the quantity and quality of food that you greedily eat, when you just can’t reach the feeling of satiety. Dose by dose, portion by portion the bulimic is gobbling food with a complete realization that it’s wrong. The person with bulimia nervosa is not capable to concentrated on work, he can’t think of private life as all his thoughts are focused on meal. He will eat until he fells pain in his stomach, then he can cause vomiting and repeat this nightmare over again…

One girl with bulimia nervosa was afraid even to come back home, while nobody was there. If it happened, she immediately went to the refrigerator with a fair intention to make a family dinner. And unintentionally ate everything that was there inside. Then she ran to the shop to buy more products hoping to be in time before her husband. And again ate everything that has just bought. If there was money left the trip to the shop repeated; if there was no money she just sat and cried thinking in horror that she left her family hungry… She understood everything, she was tormented with shame, but she couldn’t help it. She almost gave up.

But I say, never give up! Bulimia nervosa can be effectively treated and even finally cured. Drug and psychological therapy can reduce the number of bulimic episodes to 2-3 a month and eventually eliminate them. There are no dead cases. You just must believe in yourself and feel the strength that you have buried with your fork and spoon. As it is still there!

Bulimia nervosa and obesity

A person with bulimia nervosa sends in his stomach a great deal of food but doesn't reach the feeling of satiety. By analogy with boozers and hard drinkers bulimics call themselves fooders and hard eaters, what reflects exactly the nature of their disease.

Strange as it may seem, but only half of them have excessive weight. All the others, as we say, keep fit. People with bulimia nervosa manage to keep their figure due to morbid fear of obesity, that is considered to be one of the main symptoms of this eating disorder.

Usually bulimics set for themselves the precise limits of weight (that are sometimes a little bit lower in comparison with normal) and try to stick to them as best as they can. They do all kinds of things to achieve the desirable result: they exhaust themselves with sophisticated diets, have fasting days or starve for several days running, jog in the mornings, go in for shaping and aerobics. To speak the truth, not all of them can bear it for a long time and fairly a large number of girls suffering from bulimia nervosa resort to more simple and reliable methods - they vomit after food and use laxatives. All this constitutes the behavioral pattern of bulimic people.

Symptoms and diagnosis of bulimia nervosa

The symptoms of bulimia nervosa are often quite difficult to spot. Unlike patients with anorexia bulimic sufferers are usually of normal or higher weight, so the physical symptoms are less noticeable. Though internal bodily functions are still suffering. As a matter of fact people with bulimia nervosa try to hide their symptoms from family and friends as they consider their disease to be shameful. Therefore bulimia nervosa is likely to span over a lifetime unnoticed.

Basically the following signs and symptoms are taken into account in diagnosis of bulimia nervosa:

• Rapid consumption of excessive amount of high-calorific food secretly from people around
• Uncontrolled food consumption during period of hyperphagia
• Cessation of ingestion only when stomach aches begin to occur, when sleeping, in case of other people around or after vomiting
• Depression and excessive anxiety about body weight
• Sticking to rigid diets
• More-than-10kg fluctuations of body weight
• Interchange of hyperphagia and starvation periods
  

Gastroenterological manifestations of bulimia nervosa:

• Erosive esophagitis
• Stomach dilation
• Chronic diarrhea (as result of laxative abuse)
• Pancreatitis
• Water-electrolytic balance infringements
• Irritable bowel syndrome
  
• Constipation
• Hemorrhoids
• Ruptire of the gullet or stomach (rarely)
  

To confirm the bulimia nervosa diagnosis the following procedures are carried out:

• Nutritional status estimation
• Endoscopy to reveal esophagitis
• Examination of the electrolyte level and acid-base balance to determine water-electrolytic balance infringements

Bulimia nervosa: a psycologically conditioned abnormality

Bulimia nervosa is a psychologically conditioned abnormality in nutritional behaviour when the subject engages in recurrent uncontrolled binge eating that is followed by certain compensatory actions. Among these actions most often is intentional purging that typically takes the form of vomitting. This is done to compensate for the excessive intake of the food and to prevent weight gain. People who suffer from bulimia nervosa often resort to laxatives, enemas, diuretics or other medication. Because of the fear of weight gain they often do wearisome physical exercise and practise fasting. Bulimia nervosa is also reffered to as addephagia, excessive appetite, cynorexia, bovine hunger, excessive hunger, morbid hunger, hyperorexia, limosis, lycorexia, phagomania, sitomania, hyperphagia or just bulimia.

Most often it is young women aged from 18 to 35 that suffer from bulimia nervosa. Men are subjected to this disease very rarely. Actually women are 90% of patients who suffer from it. Speaking in geographical terms, rates of bulimia nervosa are much more prevalent in western civilizations. Also this eating disorder is much more widespread in the Caucasian race.

The bulimic cycles are quite different. Some may suffer from bulimia nervosa every few months. Others binge and purge several times a day. There's a kind of latent bulimia nervosa when people eat socially but are actually bulimic in private.

Once again, bulimia nervosa is a psychologically conditioned abnormality in nutritional behaviour. It means that it is less about food and more about deep psychological issues and feelings of lack of control. Bulimia nervosa can be severe and can be stopped only when the sufferer is either interrupted by another person or when her/his stomach is full and hurts from over-extension.

Bulimia nervosa: I eat and it's never enough

Who doesn't know the feeling of hunger? Everyone satisfies it his own way. One need a hearty meal of 4 or 5 dishes, some other need just a salad or a cup of coffee to feel full.

Generally speaking, there's a chain "hunger - food - satiety". But sometimes this scheme fails what leads to abnormalities in nutritional behaviour. The last phase in this scheme may be never achieved. In this case people always want to eat something. Having just finished with the meal they are ready to have another one. The feeling of hunger doesn't leave them day and night. Even when they are cram-full they still crave to take a snack. Someone would call it a bad habit. But in fact it's a common eating disorder, a serious illness called bulimia nervosa.