Eating disorders: Bulimia

Eating disorders can take over the whole of your life. Bulimia affects males and females, young and older people. You may be skinny, slim, a little overweight or significantly overweight. There are no rules with this one with regards to these elements.

However, sufferers do have underlying reasons and causes for their eating troubles and the problem is often driven by emotions; the satisfaction from over-eating helps a person cope with intense emotions. Once a person has gorged themselves until they feel whole and complete, they are often left with the difficulty of feeling uncomfortably full, guilty or concern over putting on weight from consuming so much food; hence the desire or need to purge and be free of what is inside them. 

Once empty, physically, the feeling over emotional emptiness, spurred on by the physical emptiness can trigger a repeat bout, sometimes even immediately after purging. This can be a harrowing way to spend a day.

With bulimic tendencies, sufferers can be sporadic binge/purgers or may experience a continuous cycle of binge eating and purging throughout an entire day, sometimes every day.

Causes of bulimia

Causes of bulimia and other eating disorders are multitudinous.

Circumstances that may lead to the development of bulimia may include:

  • difficulties in childhood or adolescence
  • being criticised
  • fear of getting fat (sometimes prompted by criticism or rejection)
  • experiencing trauma
  • being in an environment that doesn’t enable a person’s basic human needs to be met including: safety, love, belonging and being able to develop yourself and fulfill your potential
  • low self-esteem
  • depression
  • anxiety
  • stress.

As such, many people find that hypnotherapy can be a very effective therapy for managing or even resolving bulimia.

Whichever form a person is dealing with, it is likely that they will be doing their very best to hide it from everyone. This eating disorder is often private with the sufferer aiming to not reveal its existence to others. This is not always successful. Don’t suffer alone. Help is available.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Hypnotherapy Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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