Bulimia Treatment
Therapy for Bulimia Nervosa. Located in Las Vegas and serving all of Nevada and Florida Virtually.
The big bad thing called Bulimia.
Ask anyone on the street what bulimia is and they’ll probably say something along the lines of “self-induced vomiting.” And sure, that’s part of it, probably. But it’s a vast oversimplification. In reality, bulimia is a cycle that is quite a bit more complicated than that and believe it or not, vomiting doesn’t have to be any part of it. Yep. You read that right.
So what the heck is it then?
Bulimia is characterized by a cycle of binging and purging. Binging is consuming food in higher amounts than you would otherwise, in a short amount of time; purging is making your body get rid of that food, quickly and in one fell swoop. (More on purging later)
It looks something like this:
Eat. Feel guilty for eating. Purge. Feel guilty for purging (and also hungry, because well, you didn’t digest your food). Repeat. That’s the sinister cycle of bulimia. And damn, is it isolating!
Believe it or not, though, you’re not the only prisoner of this weird, gross, and utterly miserable disease.
Lots of people suffer from Bulimia.
Like we said, this disease is isolating. And since you don’t have a front-row ticket to other people’s purge sessions, it can feel like you’re seriously the only person going through it.
You’re not! We promise. And we’re not just saying that: one estimate claims that nearly 2% of American women suffer from the disorder. Another estimate has the prevalence at 1-4% of American women. With such a secretive disease, the amount of discrepancy makes sense. And while the statistics are harrowing, they make it obvious that there’s a whole community to be had of people suffering from the same bullshit that you are.
…and because this is a secretive disease, it might even be a secret from yourself. “I’m not bulimic” is something you may have thought to yourself more than a handful of times by now. “I can stop whenever I want.”
I’m sure you can stop, but if that’s the case why are you here? Maybe some help would be nice?
So do I have Bulimia?
If you’re not already living through this disease yourself, then you’ve surely seen it in movies or on TV. In your head, it may look like this: you eat a bunch, you throw it all up, boom, bulimia. But the DSM-5 criteria for Bulimia might surprise you. So read on.
Someone with bulimia engages in both binge eating and purging. Let’s break that down.
Binging is the act of eating a whole lot of food in a short period of time. Typically a binge is an amount of food that most people would consider excessive. This may look like ordering 5 meals at the drive-through and finishing them all in the parking lot. Or consuming an entire loaf of bread while hovering over the kitchen counter. During a binge, a person typically feels completely out of control. The real fun starts after the binge when the guilt and the shame set in, leading you to want to “undo” the whole mess.
Ah yes, the “un-doing” AKA purging. This is where things get interesting. The DSM-5 does not limit purging to self-induced vomiting. In fact, puking is only 1 of 5 examples listed in the DSM.
The DSM-5, gives a few examples of purging “self-induced vomiting, misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or other medications; fasting or excessive exercise.”
Would you look at that! The purging part of the whole shebang can look like a bunch of different things, not just throwing up. Maybe you’re taking a whole pack of laxatives a day, or completely starving yourself the day after a binge. Maybe you’re running on a treadmill longer than necessary so you can “burn off” the food. The common denominator among these methods, though, is a forceful and unnatural attempt to “un-do” eating. A mild case looks like 1-3 episodes of these behaviors per week, with an extreme case looking like 14+ episodes. 14+ evens out to purging, in some way, shape, or form, at least twice a day.
Twice a day! You could spend that time doing so many other things, like hanging out with friends or watching your favorite episode on TV. And at that point, (if vomiting is your thing) your face is hitting the toilet seat more often than it hits your pillow. Talk about tiring.
People with Bulimia typically spend a good amount of time thinking about food, obtaining food, binging on food, feeling guilty about having eaten and purging. Bulimia can be time-consuming, financially draining, and medically debilitating. We get it.
I’m confused by all these eating disorders.
Look, eating disorders don’t always fit in a perfect box and meet all the diagnostic criteria. And in fact, sometimes people cycle through different disordered eating behaviors, leaning toward binge eating disorder and then suddenly discovering purging and hanging out in bulimia for a while. There are some people with bulimia who start out with anorexia. You might even find yourself missing anorexia, if that’s where you started, because—shit—this binging-and-purging thing gets expensive. And maybe you felt like you had some sense of “control” with anorexia.
But how is bulimia different from binge-eating disorder? They do sound a heck of a lot alike. Well, binge-eating disorder doesn’t involve the purging aspect. Just the binging and the guilt… and more binging. Everyone’s experience is pretty unique but typically a person with bulimia is driven to purge due to fear of weight gain and a strong dissatisfaction with their body image. On the other hand, a person with binge-eating disorder may feel uncomfortable in their body, but may not have as strong of a preoccupation with their body and weight as those with bulimia. But not always….
Bulimia is also different from anorexia in some pretty significant ways. However, some folks with anorexia also get into binging and purging. Confusing, right?
But ultimately, what does it matter? It all sucks. Every. Eating Disorder. Sucks. And diagnosing yourself really isn’t going to do you any good.
The best way to tell if you have any of these eating disorders is to book a full assessment with a licensed clinician that specializes in disordered eating. What do you know, that’s us!
What are the signs and symptoms of Bulimia?
While bulimia itself involves a lot of secrecy on the part of the person suffering from it, the signs are often clear as day, if you know what to look for (and most doctors don’t!). Common signs of bulimia include those typical of malnutrition, as well as some additional symptoms that are caused by all of the stomach acid that is being produced and moved around unnecessarily.
A few symptoms are hair loss, dull and dry skin, brittle nails, teeth, and gum issues, parotid gland swelling—that’s that salivary gland next to your ear (when it swells you may look a bit more like a chipmunk)—and something called Russels, which are calluses that form on the back of your fingers and hands from all that self-induced puking.
So what happens to your insides if you aren’t properly digesting food? Unfortunately, nothing good. Digesting food is kind of a key component to sustaining life and the act of stomach acid flooding areas of your body it typically shouldn’t is just a recipe for disaster.
Here are just a few things that might occur: loss of menstruation, hypotension, pancreatitis, constipation, IBS, acid reflux, sore throat, cough, hangover-level headaches, heart and kidney problems, osteoporosis, and more. All of the throwing up can literally erode your esophagus and your teeth. Your rectum could even prolapse, due to the inverted pressure that throwing up all the time places on your abdomen. Yeah. The disease sucks your butt in. Doesn’t get much worse than that!
It’s important to note that some people have absolutely NONE of these symptoms and having none of these symptoms does not indicate that the person is healthy and/or does not have bulimia. Medical consequences are not part of the criteria for a diagnosis of Bulimia. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a doctor to give a clean bill of health to someone with an eating disorder. Most doctors don’t have a clue what they are looking for when it comes to disordered eating. (Sorry Doc)
Anyway, as you can see bulimia is a full-body thing. And a full-body thing needs full-body treatment. We highly recommend all clients see an individual therapist, a dietitian that specializes in disordered eating, a primary care physician, and sometimes other specialists such as dentists, GI doctors and ear nose and throat doctors. We will happily hook you up with all of these things and help you navigate the process of getting the appropriate labwork and medical testing done, should you choose to. Or not. This is your recovery, you get to decide.
Beating Bulimia. What is Bulimia Treatment?
At Recovery Unfiltered, you’ll be encouraged to identify exactly what parts of your story you’d like to change. You’ll have someone with you every step of the way to laugh with you, cry with you, cheer you on and, ultimately, help you get shit done. It’s time to stop being a prisoner to disordered eating.
Take a look at what BUlimia Treatment at Recovery Unfiltered is all about:
Radical Self Worth
It gets really tiring seeing the people around you and having only one knee-jerk reaction: “Are they skinnier than me?” With bulimia, you’re constantly comparing, constantly competing, and constantly believing happiness is somewhere else.
At the end of the day, bulimia isn’t about food—it’s about life. At Recovery Unfiltered, we’re here to help you figure out the parts of your life that are holding you back, and help you find the strength to love yourself inside and out. It’s not easy—not at all. But tap into that strength and suddenly, life is worth living again. Oh, and there’s more to life than food, we promise.
Connecting with a Team that Cares
Eating disorders THRIVE in isolation. Bulimia makes it really damn easy to push people away. After all, whether they’re actively trying to help or just in close physical proximity, you might feel like your loved ones are getting in the way of your eating disorder. And if they don’t already know, you worry that they’ll be so concerned that you’ll ultimately just feel worse about yourself. So isolation feels like an answer.
But being alone with your negative thoughts can be like an infection: leave them be and they’ll multiply, and before you know it, you’ll have a whole colony of bad vibes wanting the worst for you at all moments of the day. Therapy? It’s your antibiotic. Unload all the crap in your brain that’s been eating you up inside and stop the scary thoughts before they multiply even more than they already have. And most of all? You won’t push us away. Promise.
Healing Food Related Trauma
Bulimia is, the most literal sense of the word, a traumatic thing to do to your body. I mean, think about it: this disease inflicts violence upon the vessel you use to move through the world. Our trauma-based approach addresses everything from top-line stuff to the things you have buried deepest inside of you.
But it’s all so EMBARASSING!
Tell us about you at your worst. No, seriously: paint us a picture of your most embarrassing food habits in your day to day. We’ll be there to keep it all safe and tell you that maybe, it’s not as bad and shameful as you think it is. We do this for a living. Do you really think your eating disorder behaviors somehow trump the thousands of others we see in a year? Yeah, good luck with that. We wish we could tell you that you are as freakishly unique as your eating disorder has you convinced you are. But that would likely be a lie.
Opening up to us is the key to this whole shebang. I know, it seems scary. But trust us: if we join forces, the light that we can shine on your darkest hours might just make it…. well, way less dark.
But I’m too far gone.
You might think you’re screwed up beyond repair. You might think that no one can reach you. We’re here to tell you that we’ve heard it before, and maybe we’ve even said it ourselves. How about you let us be the judge of that?
This is the only way I know how to be.
In order to get better, you’ll need to see that bulimia might not be the thing that’s making things better—perhaps its actually making things worse? (I mean, you aren’t just scrolling this website for shits and giggles are you?) Accepting that probably seems like an impossible task.
We’re here to show you that this isn’t the only path. And how do we know that? We walked that very path ourselves, and lived to tell the tale. Your life can, and will, be so much more than endless trips to the bathroom. We are pretty used to people telling us they don’t know how to eat. They don’t know what full feels like, and they don’t trust themselves around food. We have clients that don’t remember a time that they weren’t binging and purging. That’s all an okay place to start recovery.
I’ll probably just relapse.
Look, not going to bullshit you, this is totally possible. The honest truth? It’s likely that you’ll still be binging and/or purging, or at least feel the urge to binge or purge for a while once you start therapy. We can help you learn the tools to cope with the crap that keeps you in the cycle but using those tools is tough and chances are you aren’t going to figure this out overnight.
Relapsing is scary, we know. But you’ve probably heard it before: healing isn’t linear. A good amount of people relapse. But relapse doesn’t mean starting over, it’s just another way we learn. Learning what triggered you and integrating that knowledge into your journey to leverage and strengthen your recovery over time is not failure, it’s a great step in the right direction! And if you are that person that has done therapy for bulimia 100 times already and yet here you are again, then clearly you’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. We’d love to hear it.
But my life is a hot mess, this isn’t a good time for me.
This seems to be the case with many of our clients, and this exact thought process is often what keeps people in disordered eating for months, years, decades or even lifetimes. They sit around and wait for a day when it will feel EASY, or a time when they will feel “ready”. What the heck does “ready” even look like?
We’ve got news for you, there really isn’t going to be a day that comes when recovery is suddenly easy. There will not be a day when you have more “time for recovery” or some exceptional level of motivation.
Sure, we’ve occasionally seen people that jump into therapy highly motivated and they just hit the ground running, but typically that is a side effect of rock bottom, or some sort of health issue, or an ultimatum from a loved one. Do you really want to wait for that moment?
We promise your life can be a hot mess, you can feel like you have no time AND you can be on a recovery journey simultaneously. How about we help you bypass all that rock bottom stuff…. so you can get on with living your life sooner rather than later.
It’s a long road home, there won’t be a better day or time to start recovering.
Contact us for a free consult and we’ll help you figure out the rest.
We are literally only a phone call away. And if we can’t help you, theres a good chance we can find you someone that can. Not into phone calls? No problem, shoot us a text or an email.