How many calories will cutting yourself consume? Please disregard the use of vocal chords involved as I understand that everyone’s pain threshold is quite different. Let’s just say I make a 5 inch long gash down my forearm with a razor blade. The gash is one eighth of an inch deep. How many calories will it cost to repair the damage?
Note: this is purely hypothetical.
I’m interested also, but I hope to God you’re not a cutter.
One could generalize the question: How many calories are spent repairing the damage from various kinds and degrees of injuries, wounds, disease, or other sorts of tissue damage?
Are there people who do this as a form of weight control, sort of analogous to anorexia?
Presumably, people who get into self-cutting are in a very stressed condition in the first place. How many calories does that burn to begin with?
Your question was actually a pretext to my question.
But does anyone have an idea about how many calories it’ll consume to repair the tissue?
I don’t know the answer, but I can tell you how to find it.
Step 1. find out how efficient the human digestive system is at extracting nutrition from protein.
Step 2. Find out how many calories are in a strip of low-grade meat 5 inches x 1/8" x 1/8".
Aside from the calories, you’re also going to burn up several vitamins and minerals in the repair process. A biologist or nutritionist could probably tell you which ones.
Well, the act of self-harm is likely to trigger stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisone etc) which will increase the metabolic rate. This is considered to be a problem in a number of paralympic sports, where paralysed athletes use self-harm to trigger autonomic dysreflexia to improve performance.
However, the additional caloric consumption is unlikely to be great, and certainly not sufficient to maintain weight loss. Calorie use for repair of an injury is unlikely to be great, either - your body is constantly working to repair and replace a significant proportion of your cells, so injury repair is par for the course, and is part of your basal metabolic rate. Of course, if that cut gets infected things are going to be different, and major blood loss requires significant calories to replace (apparently 600 calories per pint), but you couldn’t keep that up for long (anemia would kick in as it also takes time to replace the lost cells, and you would have to consume a lot of iron).
As for cutting in association with eating disorders - there is a strong association. However, this is more to do with the issues of body dysmorphia and self-esteem that are inherent with any eating disorder. Issues of shame, self-control and depression all combine to trigger both disorders, and can cycle off each other in a destructive circle.