Bulimia is an extreme psychological disorder that can be life-threatening. It is a vicious and ongoing cycle. Bulimia, or bulimia nervosa, is typically where someone will uncontrollably binge on a large amount of food in a very short period of time. Often these will be poor food choices that are high in saturated fat, or very high in sugar such as pizza or donuts. If you could picture someone aggressively searching through their fridge and pantry, before loading the kitchen table up with junk food and sitting down to rapidly consume large portions, then this wouldn’t be an image too far from the truth. Bulimics wouldn’t have trouble consuming an entire tub of ice cream or multiple packets of chips in one sitting.

After exhibiting such eating patterns, someone suffering from bulimia will become saturated with guilt and disgust and then feel the need to force themselves to vomit or expel the food from their body, using medication like laxatives. This is usually in an effort to avoid any weight gain. In the mind of a bulimic, there is a never-ending battle between the desire to eat and the desire to avoid weight gain.

The action of overeating, feeling incredibly guilty, and then purging can often be an outlet if you’re not coping well with or negative experiences or situations in your life. It is much like someone turning to alcohol or drugs as an escape route from their reality.

Other paths used to also avoid weight gain include:

• Extreme exercise following the process of binge eating – Because of the unpleasant nature of vomiting, some bulimics choose to engage in a high level of exercise in order to burn the calories from the food they just binged on. Because the foods that they binged on contain little nutritional value, the body often does not have the energy to keep up with such high activity, and severe fatigue and sickness can result.
• Taking laxatives – With the knowledge that laxatives increase bowel movements and the convenience of swallowing a pill, or even chocolate laxatives, bulimics often find this to be an easy option to lose weight. However, the continual use of laxatives can place a lot of stress on the body and result in dizziness, dehydration and inflammation in the body. More serious complications of long-term laxative abuse include the body’s inability to expel faeces (loss of haustra). This can come about from the use of laxatives more than three times a week and for a longer period than one year.  
• Use of enemas -These are considered as mechanical laxatives as they are fluids introduced directly into the anus, used to expel faeces from the bowel. This is quite an unpleasant procedure that can cause bloating, pain in the abdominal region, bleeding and cramping.
• Taking diuretics -These include pills that help to expel fluid from the body by increasing urination. Diuretics are popular in the dieting world as they help to lose weight. Unfortunately, these pills contain many chemicals that have their own harsh side effects such as skin rashes, dizziness and fatigue. Diuretics can be dangerous as they work to remove water from the body and can result in dehydration, lightheadedness, loss of vital electrolytes and even fainting.
• Extreme dieting or fasting -Bulimia is not just recognized as excessive eating, but also includes actions taken as a result of that eating. Feelings of guilt can turn to the feeling of need to starve oneself because of prior reckless eating and weight gain from calories.

All of these actions play a role in the vicious cycle that is bulimia. In America alone, the lifetime prevalence for bulimia in females is 4.7 million, with males being considerably less at around 1.5 million. With many people feeling too ashamed to seek medical attention, those figures are no doubt much higher than what’s shown on paper.