Drive down any street in the u.S. and you will pass numerous fast food drive-ins or restaurants. The tantalizing allure of food commercials and advertisements is enough to send even the strongest people running for the refrigerator or pantry.
With food available everywhere we go, it’s no wonder that so many Americans are overweight. Yet movie stars and fashion fanatics tell us that “thin is in.” Trying to reconcile these conflicting messages makes many young women (and these days, men, too) resort to extreme weight loss methods in an effort to be “the ideal.”
As high school girls try to meet unreasonable standards of perfection that they see in the teen magazines, healthy eating can’t resolve the problem quickly enough. Many girls learn in middle school how to “barf away” the calories. And it sounds easy enough – eat whatever you want and never get fat by vomiting it up before you can digest it.
But honestly, this behavior is really an introduction to Bulimia, a serious eating disorder. Those with bulimia get caught up in a vicious cycle of bingeing and purging followed by crushing depression and guilt that causes the cycle to start again.
The amount of food a person with bulimia can consume in one sitting can be staggering. This is where the shame and fear come in. With bulimia, sufferers eat alone, literally shoveling food into their mouths so fast that they don’t realize what they’re doing. But then they see the leftover wrappers or think about what they’ve done – they rush to vomit and redeem themselves from their “horrible” behavior.
Bulimia very quickly stops being about controlling weight and becomes an addiction. And because bingeing and purging are typically done in secret, it may be months or years before anyone realizes what’s going on. By that time, the behavior is well established and harder to control.
Bulimia isn’t about losing a few pounds. Bulimia is about using food as a weapon to harm yourself. And the damage done to teeth, bones, and organs after even a year of bulimia is extreme and often irreversible.
It’s not enough to promise to avoid the bakery or pizza take-out number. This is an emotional problem that needs professional help from a licensed therapist with experience in treating eating disorders. Until you get your thoughts and feelings grounded in reality, food will be your enemy and your emotional self will be trapped in this sad secret.
