Bulimia Nervosa Not just enjoying or hating food , it ’ s an addictive behaviour !
By Abdallah Fahmy
Bulimia Nervosa comes from a Greek word which means " ravenous hunger ", described by the British psychiatrist " Gerald Russell " in 1979 . It ’ s a psychiatric eating disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of overeating " binging ", and inappropriate compensatory conducts to get rid of the ingested extra food in an unhealthy way " purging ".
Binge-eating involves eating large amounts of calorie-rich foods ( over 3000 calories ) in a short period , when patients start with the binge-eating it becomes really difficult to stop , that they can hardly taste the large amounts of food they are consuming . It starts as a way of coping with emotional problems , but soon becomes an obsession that the patient is unable to control . And this lack of self-control is felt by the afflicted individual . The binge is usually followed by a series of emotions like shame and guilt , and it even gets worse with the fear of gaining weight , that sometimes the patients imagine that they can already feel the extra weight . This often ends in purging by several ways like : self-induced vomiting , overusing diuretics , enemas and even using laxatives . Patients also diet , fast for long periods of time , over exercise , and take amphetamines or other illegal drugs to lose the weight . Those strict methods are hard to fulfill continuously , so the patient gives up and starts to eat everything that wasn ' t allowed , and so , there is a continuous vicious circle of guilt , which becomes compulsive over time , and is similar to that of addiction . BN ( Bulimia Nervosa ) emerges during adolescence , and is more common in women ( 80 %), but children may also suffer from it . It ’ s a life-threatening disorder , as about 3.9 % of the people with BN die prematurely from the disorder , and it ’ s the 2nd highest cause of death among adolescent girls . Boston Children ' s Hospital states that ( 1-5 %) of adolescents , and ( 1.1-4.2 %) of females in the U . S . have BN , and up to 8 % of females probably have had or will have Bulimia Nervosa at some time in their lives according to The National Health Service , U . K . To discover why women are so liable to eating disorders more than men , Dr . Catherine Preston — a lecturer at The Department of Psychology in York University — and her
8 colleagues made an experiment on healthy individuals ( both men and women ) who had no history of any eating disorders . They had them wear a virtual reality headset through which they will see their own body , but at an obese form . During the experiment , their brain activity was monitored by magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI ). When they looked at their obese bodies , there was a direct link between the activity in the parietal lobe ( associated with body perception ) and in the anterior cingulate cortex ( associated with processing subjective emotions like anger and fear ). This brain activity was more prominent in women .
Scientists do not yet know the exact cause behind Bulimia but assume that its rate is higher in people with a history of physical or sexual abuse , experiences of being bullied at school , and traumatic life events such as divorce or switching homes . As we mentioned that females are much more likely to have BN , young girls are much more vulnerable , and this is probably because of the media they are exposed to these days , which adjusts their definition of beauty and perfection according to the pictures of slim models all over the internet . These pictures kill their self-confidence , and they end up developing eating disorders , and what we don ' t know is that 20-40 % of these models suffer from eating disorders themselves , and BN is even the most common one . Hormonal changes may also be responsible , as the onset of BN in most cases coincides with puberty , as it is a period in life in which teenagers become more aware of their own bodies . 30 % of females with Bulimia Nervosa may be suffering from an imbalance of sex hormones according to the scientists at the " Karolinska Institute " in Sweden . It ’ s also associated with other psychological