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Bulimia Nervosa
The term bulimia is derived from Latin and means “hunger of an ox.” It is commonly known that the Romans engaged in binge eating and vomiting rituals, but it was first described in medical terms in 1903 in Obsessions et la
Psychasthenia, where the author, Pierre Janet, describes Nadia, a woman who engaged in compulsive binges in secret.
It is the bingeing that separates anorexics from bulimics, even though both populations will restrict food consumption and many anorexics also purge. Anorexics who purge and normal-weight individuals who do not binge but vomit whenever they eat food they consider “too fattening” are often improperly diagnosed with bulimia nervosa. Without binge eating, a diagnosis of bulimia is not correct. The disorders do seem to cross over into each other. Most people with bulimia have thought patterns and experience symptoms similar to those of anorexics. The drive for thinness and the fear of being fat appear in both directions, and while body image distortion is present in bulimia, it is usually not to the same degree as in anorexia nervosa.
Bulimic: “I sometimes find myself in the middle of a binge not knowing how I got there. It is like something is in control of me, someone or something I don’t even know.”
(Costin, Pg.
11)
Bulimic: “I have been thinking about it lately in terms of license plates. Seven digits of synopsis; a Reader’s Digest of my soul: and I came up with a few options. Monster, perhaps, will win the day . . Monster for the disgust it inspires. We could fault our narcissistic culture; we could point to a dysfunctional upbringing; and yet none of these alibis could redeem me of my status. To be a bulimic, a dumpster-snacking, bum-rolling, gutter variety bulimic, is to have transposed into such a state of
Monsterdom. Perfect as a license plate, saying as it does all that really needs to e understood of me . . being a Monster is expensive. Monster math looks like this: assume, conservatively speaking, you have purged 5 times a day for the last 4 years. That is 35 times a week, 140 times a month, 1,680 times a year, 6,720 times in the 4 years. At each occasion, you purged 30,000 calories worth of food (sometimes much more, sometimes less) for a total of 20,160,000 calories purged. Here we have a small African village. The experts at UNICEF have agreed that a subsistence diet for each of the villagers would be 1,500 calories a day. One African man, on the 20,160,000 calories I either flushed down the toilet, left in a back alley, or concealed in plastic bags for later dumping, could live for almost 37 years. 500 villagers could eat for 27 days. A new twist on the “starving people in Africa” scenario, for which we clean our plates as children. This is being a Monster.” (The Eating Disorder Resource Book, Carolyn
Costin, 1996, Pg.
11-12).
For more help with eating disorders, just Ask Alice!
By Alice Baland, MA, LPC, RD/LD
Copyright © 1999 Alice Baland. All Rights
Reserved.
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