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