Oral presentation: Bulimia

Pau and me did the presentation about bulimia: 

Good morning, we are Alba and Pau and today we will do a Little exposition about Bulimia. We have choosen this topic because we think it’s an important topic and we are interested, in fact, nowadays bulimia is very frequent in our society, above all, in girls.

This disease is an eating disorder that provokes in a person a certain helplessness to dominate the impulses that lead them to eat, but with the feeling of guilt and shame after eating many foods. (dominar los impulsos que les llevan a comer, pero el sentimiento de culpa y vergüenza tras ingerir muchos alimentos). When you’re struggling with bulimia, life is a constant battle between the desire to lose weight or stay thin and the overwhelming compulsion to binge eat.

It’s important to note that bulimia doesn’t necessarily involve purging—physically eliminating the food from your body by throwing up or using laxatives or enemas.. If you make up for your binges by fasting, exercising to excess, or going on crash diets, this also qualifies as bulimia.

The diagnosis is difficult because the episodes of binge eating and vomiting are hidden easily.

The origin of this disease is due to biological, psychological and social factors because these factors change the vision of the individual’s self and respond to a great fear of gaining weight. The bulimic always feels fat, even though his weight is normal, he can’t suppress his cravings.

Generally, this disease starts when someone does some dangerous diet without medical supervision, in other words, the food limitation imposed by the patient leads to strong state of anxiety and pathological need to ingest a lot of food.

On the other hand, unknown biological vulnerabilities. At least, the factors more know, as we said before, are related to the social environment, specially, teasing about the physical condition.

Many of the factors match those of anorexia, obesity or affective disorders arising in the family, for example.

Generally people who have bulimia, before have been obese or have been on numerous diets without medical supervision, actually the patient’s self-esteem is low and identifies with his body. Normally they tried to hide vomits so that’s why the disease often goes unnoticed for a long time. Typical symptoms of bulimia are:

-On food intake: The patient eats a lot of food in a very short space of time. The patient hasn’t control over eating and anxiety is such that believe you can’t stop eating.

Patient, to prevent weight gain and offset the binge or excess meals causes vomiting, using laxatives, or resort to other means that you can control the weight, for example the abusive practice of sports.

In particular physical signs that show this disease include weakness, headache, swelling of the face by increased salivary and parotid glands, teeth problems, dizziness, hair loss, menstrual irregularities, and sharp increases and decreases in weight , although generally not suffer an oscillating weight as important as manifested in anorexia.

People who have this disease don’t recognize that they have it. This type of people comes into play physical and emotional health, for this reason the bulimia should never be ignored.

Two approaches to treatment are psychotherapy and medication. It is preferable that the treatment is by a qualified therapist and not subministration not an antidepressant because the disorder may reappear when you stop it.

Depending on gravity of bulimia, the patient may be hospitalized or have an outpatient treatment. First of all is to avoid vomiting, normalize metabolic functioning of the patient, it imposes a new balanced diet and eating habits. With this treatment psychological treatment is developed in order to restructure rational ideas and correct the misperception that the patient has of his own body.

We should say that bulimia healing is achieved in 40 percent of cases, while an intermittent disease that tends to be chronic. The mortality in this disease exceeds that of anorexia due to complications from vomiting and the use of purgatives.

In my view, this illness reflects complexes that people have. I think that bulimia is a modern illness because people have many external pressures to be perfect, for example, models who seem dolls television or in magazines… And this makes a brutal complex which creates many eating disorders, bulimia is one.

People should be satisfied as they are because everyone has a particular beauty, although I know that bulimia or another eating disorder goes further than this.

I must admit that I was very nervous and Pau was more quiet than me. I feel bad because I had prepared very well and for nerves the presentation wasn't perfect. Well, I hope that the next presentation is better than this. 

(I can't put the video of our presentation)