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Causes of Bulimia

What causes bulimia?

Bulimia typically begins between the ages of 12 and 21 years. It occurs in both sexes, but most often in women.

The effect of the media
Our society puts enormous strain on people to be slim, the word ‘diet’ is continually bombarded through every magazine and newspaper to TV adverts. There is no denying that you are more susceptible to a lot of things when you are this age, dieting is very frequent among teenagers and young adults.
 

Bulimia and dieting
Bulimia often starts with a diet, every diet is usually a form of deprivation. This deprivation can lead to hunger and very powerful food cravings, which, in turn can lead to binge eating.

It has been shown that people who diet are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, however those who diet frequently are eighteen times more likely to develop an eating disorder such as bulimia or anorexia.

When a diet fails many people binge on the foods they have deprived themselves of, this is usually associated with great feelings of guilt. Many therefore become very anxious and seek out to remove calories from their body through purging, with self induced vomiting, laxatives, duirectics, over exercising or fasting.

This can ends up as a vicious cycle and can continue for years.

It is not surprising that the number of bulmic cases are dramatically rising as our weight obsessed society becomes more fixated with dieting.

Bulimia combines physical and mental attributes.
 

PHYSICAL:
When you diet, your body goes into starvation mode. This sends out very powerful food messages to eat, research has shown that people can become obsessed with food when they diet. Your body is designed to survive and you are born with very powerful natural instincts to do so.

Trying to override these will not work, the urges will take over at some point. Many people cannot understand where these urges are coming from and believe they lack willpower to stick with a diet. Because willpower can only word for us long failure is inevitable this puts tremendous pressure on people and can lead to dieting, binging, purging and back to dieting again.
 

MENTAL:
Bulimia can also incorporate emotional and habitual aspects, when this behavior is continually repeated people can use it as some form of coping mechanism to temporarily blank out problems in their life.

Many report that it helps them escape from particular feelings and situations at certain times in their life. Many people also develop irrational beliefs as their bulimia develops.

There is a deep fear of giving up this eating behavior, after a long time of binging and purging this behavior can become habitual and it is easy to forget life before the binge and how to eat normally again.

Trying to find the cause of YOUR bulimia?
It is difficult to find the actual cause of bulmia because everyone is different. Many bulimics rattle their brain everyday to find what caused their bulimia in the first case. Some believe they must have deep rooted problems, so wreck their brain and find every bad situation that has taken place in their life to blame, when in fact the bulimia may have just been triggered by a diet. Others have got deep rooted emotional issues and use food to block them out or to deal with difficult situation, everyone is different.

Focus on recovery
It is therefore more productive to focus on recovery than the cause, many bulimics have had bulimia for years, they will never know the true the cause, but they can learn how to stop.

If you developed bulimia 25 years ago, then back then you were in a different state of mind, it is impossible to go back 25 years to assess what triggered you to binge and purge. The new focus must be on recovery.