Bulimia is a disease that is easy to keep hidden, which is precisely why it is so dangerous. The binge eating you can get from bulimia is dangerous to your stomach because you can put too much food in it. Again, throwing up that much food is not good for your teeth, nor is it good for your stomach and esophagus.
To overcome bulimia, in this article I will discuss what bulimia is now, what causes it may have and provide tips for treatment.
Bulimia nervosa
Bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating. After binge eating, many bulimia patients engage in vomiting to stay slim despite the binge eating. In some cases, laxatives or excessive exercise are also used.
Vomiting can cause you to develop thicker skin on the knuckles of the fingers, as you use them to vomit after which the skin is damaged by stomach acid. Also, this stomach acid damages the teeth, causing them to wear down faster. This is not a pretty sight.
Bulimia is also often associated with other disorders, such as depression or anxiety. Alcohol and drug use also occur in people with bulimia. In addition, there is a higher risk for the urge to commit suicide.
Bulimia causes
Bulimia is more common in people who have someone close to them who also suffers from this disorder. Genetic factors can influence the development of this disorder. Parents can also influence it if they are concerned about their or your weight.
Other causes are more psychological such as psychological stress, cultural pressure to conform to a certain body type, low self-esteem and obesity.
Bulimia Features
There are a number of symptoms for bulimia that are typical. In bulimia, you suffer from rapid binge eating that stops only when you are disturbed by another person or when your stomach hurts because of stretching of the stomach wall. So this is followed by either vomiting and laxation to keep the food from actually being absorbed into your body.
In serious cases, this can occur daily. There are also people with bulimia who do this "only" a few times a week.
Other features include:
- Chronic reflux after eating a normal meal.
- Dehydration from excessive vomiting.
- Cardiac arrhythmias due to electrolyte deficiency. (This can even be fatal)
- Inflamed esophagus
- Hemorrhage at the connection of the esophagus to the stomach (seen with endoscopy)
- Cuts in the mouth due to vomiting.
- Tooth decay.
- Thicker skin on the knuckles.
- Swollen salivary glands.
- Acid Burn.
- The stomach takes a long time to pass food through to the intestines.
- Constipation.
- Stomach ulcer.
- Infertility.
- Constantly fluctuating weight.
Not all characteristics can be seen from the outside, and so some only emerge after medical examination. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult for the layperson to determine if you suffer from bulimia. But I think if you start vomiting after eating food you should seek help anyway.
That's why I've come up with a short test for you.
Bulimia test
There are also other things you can tell for yourself that you suffer from an eating disorder. Check with yourself if you suffer from these characteristics:
- You control the number of calories you eat.
- You are extremely aware of your weight.
- You are uncertain.
- You have low blood pressure (you can measure this at home with a blood pressure monitor).
- Irregular menstrual cycle.
- You constantly have to go to the bathroom.
- You have depressed feelings.
- You regularly eat abnormal amounts of food.
- You have a belief not shared by others.
- You are no longer concerned with anything but nutrition.
Bulimia tips
There are a number of things you can do if you suffer from bulimia to reduce it.
Tip 1: Establish a good diet
Scientific research in 2016 showed that people who suffer from bulimia benefit from a good dinner and a set eating pattern. This makes you suffer less from binge eating and, as a result, you also vomit and laxate less.
Tip 2: Relax
Stress can be an enabler of bulimia. To reduce stress, it is important to relax regularly. One way to do this is through meditation and self-hypnosis. The trick of meditation is that you focus on your breathing for a few minutes, which brings you to complete peace. Research shows that meditating for 10 minutes a day already helps reduce your stress.
In this relaxed state, you can also perform self-hypnosis exercises given to you by your hypnotherapist to further deepen the relaxation.
Tip 3: Recognize your triggers
It often takes certain moments or cues before you binge eat. Perhaps for you this is at the stroke of 4 a.m., or after you experience a certain emotion. By keeping a journal about your binge eating and what preceded it, you can determine what your triggers are. Then you can figure out how to deal with this differently. For example, if it is a time of day, you can also choose to then read a few pages from a nice book.
Are you struggling to determine and stick with new behaviors or recognize your triggers? If so, a hypnotherapist can help you with this.
Bulimia treatment
It is very difficult to get rid of bulimia on your own, so it is not at all crazy to mention to your doctor that you have a problem.
Bulimia is usually treated with psychotherapy. Treatments that are effective in adults consist mainly of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT works in 30% to 50% of participants with bulimia to stop the disease.
CBT is known to work better if the therapy takes place while the patient is under hypnosis.
So the percentages can be higher then.
Beliefs and patterns under the microscope
During such therapy, your beliefs and thought patterns about your body and diet are examined. It then examines whether those beliefs are correct. If not, the cause of the belief can be examined and you can be helped to develop a new belief that is correct and reduces binge eating.
For example, a belief might be: "Eating carbs makes me fat." Of course, none of this is true. Eating a little carbohydrate won't hurt you and then there are different types of carbohydrates that have different effects on your body so this statement is not true. The therapist can help you find the cause of this belief through regression, for example .
During such a session, you may find out that that belief was placed there, for example, by a classmate who once said such a thing. Really, the strangest causes can emerge during regression. In another article I describe the cause of someone who could not lose weight which could be traced back to something very illogical that had occurred in her childhood.
Other thought patterns may include "I feel fat, therefore I am fat." Again, in many cases, none of this is true. If your BMI is between 20 and 25 you are normal and up to 30 you are even slightly overweight. Only at a BMI higher than 30 is there obesity or very overweight. Moreover, even BMI is not always a good tool to check if you are "overweight," because muscle is heavier than fat you can be mistaken as "fat" according to BMI when in fact you are just very muscular.
A hypnotherapist can help you break down and revise beliefs and thought processes that lead to binge eating and vomiting.
Seeing bulimia as another
Another technique to stop bulimia is to see bulimia as something that is not your own. Part of you does bulimia, but another part does not. You can get those two parts to argue with each other, under the guidance of a therapist. The therapist makes sure you can engage in discussion with the bulimia part of you and not suffer from feeling split. In an experiment in which bulimia patients participated, it was found that this technique combined with self-hypnosis made them suffer much less from binge eating followed by vomiting.
Empowering Ego
Bulimia can stem from insecure feelings. A therapist may therefore ask you to describe your feelings before, during and after eating to see if, in your case, they are the triggering factor for your binge. In a case study with a 17-year-old girl, it was revealed that during one particular binge eating her entire handwriting had changed. While questioning further, the hypnotherapist found out that her bulimia was caused by feelings of failure that she had disappointed herself. During the hypnosis session, the therapist interacted with her to figure out those emotions and find the underlying beliefs and give her the tools to better deal with them. This allowed her to do something other than "eat" to better and healthier process a moment of self-failure.
Want to learn more about what hypnosis can do for you? Then be sure to check out the seminars and trainings offered by the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.
Sources:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471015315300234
http://www.londonhypnotherapyuk.com/publications/Gestalt-Therapy-Paper.pdf
