Appetizing tragedy

The fact that delicious food improves mood and helps, if not forget about troubles, then at least push them into the background, is well known. The remedy is simple, like aspirin: ate it – and brought down the degree of adversity. It is also obvious that excessive enthusiasm for various delicacies is not recommended: you will get better, you will not like yourself or others. But few people know that this innocent licentiousness, this inability to resist temptations can turn out to be really dangerous – develop into a disease with monstrous attacks. When you don’t remember yourself, when there is only one desire – to eat to the full, to disgust, to a pig’s squeal.

How does it happen

“I made an appointment with a friend and didn’t come. While she, the poor thing, chewed on her nails in anticipation, with trembling hands, I smeared chocolate butter on half a loaf, cut lengthwise, while breaking five eggs into a curling frying pan. No friendship in the world would have taken me away from my bacchanalia: I ate a sandwich with scrambled eggs and mayonnaise, sweets – Olivier salad, and buckwheat porridge – with gingerbread. I felt good. I did not think about what was happening to me: during the meal, the thought process stopped. However, like all other processes.

For the lyrical hero Blok, the truth was in guilt. For me – in food. Half an hour without chewing and swallowing seemed senseless to me. This went on for six months. Later I learned that this is called bulimia.

But first, there were signs of anorexia – a disease, the fashion for which, they say, caused the skinny girl of all times and peoples Kate Moss. I also wanted to be skinny. Not to defile on the catwalks from Paris to Nakhodka, but to please men. I’ll make a reservation that I’ve never been a fat girl. And the men, in principle, liked it. I started to work on myself. Refused sweets, meat and bread. After six in the evening did not appear in the kitchen. Jogging and swimming. And a month later she lost a lot of weight. My classmates barely recognized me: “Where are your funny cheeks?” The girls asked. “Have you grown back in your chest?” – the boys snapped. The happiest moments I experienced when I heard behind my back: “Have you seen Anya? Skin and bones. There is nothing to look at! “

However, the words of that guy sunk into the soul. And I started to eat. First, one sheep, then a kilogram. First one chop, then ten. It turned out that it is easy to become happy: food is always at hand. I don’t need friends, lovers and pretty dresses anymore. I want to eat.

But I didn’t want to gain 17 kilograms. The insidiousness of bulimia is that you don’t immediately lose shape. But one day you suddenly discover that the jeans, which you used to fall into, now categorically do not fit. However, you don’t stop eating. Because you can’t … “

What’s this

This is the story of my friend Anya, a beautiful girl with a good figure. Her bulimic attacks were far behind her. But until now, she shudders at the memory of the experience.

“We can talk about bulimia when bouts of gluttony with the absorption of much more food than is typical for an ordinary person to eat, are repeated at least twice a week for three months,” says psychotherapist Yaroslav Filatov. – During an attack, the patient is unable to stop, control the amount and method of absorption of food. Such gluttons suffer from feelings of guilt, hide their attacks from others and often deliberately induce vomiting or give themselves an enema to get rid of the food they have eaten. The very desire to hide the manic attitude towards food from loved ones already indicates bulimia. Often, both before and after bulimia, these people suffer from anorexia – an obsessive desire to eat as little as possible. They are starving, frenzied in sports. In Russia, it is believed that this is a stage of one disease, in which anorectic self-restriction in food can easily turn into bulimia, or they coexist. Can you imagine a picture of the body being tortured? “

Some epileptic seizures are also associated with binge eating. Similar symptoms occur with senile brain changes and diabetes.

Bulimia mainly affects women. And usually it all starts in adolescence. An approximate portrait of a young bulim woman: a girl of 16-18 years old, impulsive, afraid of independence and dreaming about it, preoccupied with her physical attractiveness, suffering from frequent family conflicts or indifferent neglect in the family. Such become gluttons in three cases out of 100. Among adult women, mistresses and unhappy lovers of all stripes are at risk.

In men, bulimia nervosa is 10 times less common. Partly because men are less sensitive to fashion. The fact is that this disorder (overeating plus concern for losing weight) is often and not without reason associated with the fashion for a slim figure and the desire to make it perfect. Indeed, how can one not get sick when from the TV screens, from the pages of glossy magazines, a great many of unattainably thin beauties are looking at us!

By the way, people suffering from gluttony do not necessarily become like shapeless barrels over time. With bulimia nervosa, you may not need to gain weight. A common complication in this disease is an electrolyte imbalance and a shift in blood pH to the alkaline side due to the loss of vital salts during body cleansing. But with anorexia, thinness often reaches the degree of dystrophy, physical exhaustion is accompanied by endocrine disorders.