A Cautionary Tale about Bulimia. - Bulimia often causes weight gain, rather than weight loss!

A Cautionary Tale about Bulimia.

Someone whom I helped years ago by advising her to reduce salt intake in order to lose weight rang me this mornng. - We are friends now, though we have never met, and we usually speak to each other about once a week on the phone.

She told me today that she now realises how her weight problem began.

She had not been overweight - just sort of a nice normal weight - not thin. And then someone took to teasing her about being a bit tubby and she decided she would lose weight, and she tried to do this by making herself sick after eating in order to lose the food and the calories it contained. We tend to refer to this as bulimia these days, but at the time she was doing it either the word was not in use or she was not aware of the word. (I didn't think to ask her how long this went on.) The reason she stopped doing it was because the acid in the vomit was damaging her teeth. And it was while this self-induced vomiting was going on that she became overweight.

She then went to 'slimming' classes for years and counted calories and went hungry but continued to gain weight and became very fat indeed. She also developed diabetes and impaired vision as a complication of the obesity, and hypothyroidism, in my opinion as a consequence of eating insufficient food.

It wasn't until I told her that the way to lose excess weight - and to lose it fast - is to cut down on salt/sodium, that she started to lose weight. By taking my advice and forgetting about reducing calories and going hungry, and just concentrating on reducing salt, she is now not much above her original weight.

But it was the bulimia that started her weight gain. - This is because when the body has insufficient food/calories it has to feed on itself. It has to make the skin thinner, the muscles weaker. It has to rob the bones of some of their mineral content - leading to osteopenia. It conserves resources by shedding hair and eyebrows and eyelashes and weakening nails. - Short of calories, the person feels very tired and has to rest. Rest exacerbates bone loss and muscle weakness. You can think of many further consequences yourself. This is a downward spiral.

Crucially, as far as weight gain is concerned, eating insufficient food causes the walls of the blood vessels to weaken and get thinner. - Then, if the person is someone who likes salt in/with their food, the excess salt and the water it attracts to itself will enter the bloodstream and the weakened veins will not be able to resist the incursion of this extra salt water, and the sodium retention and water retention that result cause in turn weight gain and obesity. - The way to lose some of this weight gain is to do as this person did - abandon dieting/slimming/inducing vomiting and all that nonsense, and simply eat less salt! - Reduce salt intake to the lowest you can manage and keep permanently to a low salt/sodium intake.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it!
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Remember: 'slimming' is harmful and unnecessary; all that is normally necessary to lose excess weight is to eat less salt, i.e. to reduce one's sodium intake, and to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables - because their high potassium content helps to remove sodium from the body.