The most common symptoms of bulimia nervosa are bingeing and purging. However, there are also a number of other symptoms to look out for.
Binge-purge cycles
Someone with bulimia will often go to great lengths to try to hide their bingeing and purging behaviours. Bingeing and purging can be defined as:
- Binge eating – this is when you eat excessively, even if you’re not hungry. Typically, during a binge eating episode, you might consume 3 or 4 times more food than you normally would. People tend to binge on foods that are considered to be unhealthy. This might include crisps, chocolate or other types of ‘junk food’. This behaviour is typically marked by feelings of guilt, shame or distress afterwards
- Purging – after binge eating, bulimia sufferers will often try to remove the calories they’ve consumed in order to try and maintain their body weight or shape. Purging behaviours include making yourself sick, exercising excessively or abusing laxatives, diuretics or enemas
The binge-purge cycles associated with bulimia can be triggered by hunger, stress, anxiety, tiredness, loneliness, or at times, for no reason at all.
Worryingly, people with bulimia may appear to have a stable or ‘normal’ weight, because the binge-purge cycles can balance this out. While you might have slight weight fluctuations, these don’t tend to be as extreme as in other eating disorders, such as anorexia or binge eating disorder (BED). Therefore, people with bulimia can appear to be a healthy weight, which can make this eating disorder very difficult to spot.