Once a bulimic actually quits the behavior for good, how long does it take before the body is able to function normally again? Does it ever? Is it like quitting smoking, where there’s almost a complete recovery? Or could the person still have a heart attack out of the blue at an early age? Is there a point at which the person is out of the woods as far as heart attack/organ failure/whatever else can go wrong?
Man, I cannot find ANY info on this!
I am definitely not an expert on this, but from what I’ve seen, people with eating disorders don’t just recover overnight, if they recover at all. I saw a TV show a year or two ago where they followed several girls as they went through treatment. You expected that some would succeed and some would fail. Then you find out that some had to drop out of the program long before they were ready just because of insurance issues, and at the end, even the girls who “recovered” at the end of their treatment went right back to where they started once they got back into the real world. It was a sad look into the reality of this sort of thing.
If the person does manage to recover, a lot of the recovery is going to depend on what the person did to themselves. Muscle loss, osteoporosis, and those sorts of things will heal, given time and proper nutrition. Starvation can also cause things like brain lesions which will never recover. Fluoride in water and toothpaste will allow teeth to recover small amounts of enamel loss, but fluoride’s ability to fill in holes in teeth is limited. I don’t know how well the heart recovers from muscle loss. I know your kidneys can be affected too, but again I don’t know how well they recover.
I’m sure one of our medical dopers will be along shortly to give more details and correct anything I goofed.
One of the health problems caused by Bulimia is potassium deficiency which can damage the heart. My (completely unqualified) understanding is that the damage itself is long term, but I can’t find a thing to back that up online.
Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher is a memoir of the suthor’s struggles with anorexia and bulima. She has osteoporosis, a heart murmur, and is infertile, mainly because of the years she spent starving herself. She is rather candid in the book about the fact that she will probably die young because of this…
From what I’ve read it is the electrolyte balance that causes heart issues in people with eating disorders. You should be able to restore this with proper diet and or some meds till the body has restored it’s balance.
Teeth are the another major thing that are effected by bulimics. Unfortunately once the damage is done, only restorative work will help. But that is true of most teeth problems.
With proper testing it shouldn’t be too hard to assess the conditon of a heart. PROPER being the key word.
Was that Thin? I saw that a while ago. It was a pretty disturbing look at eating disorders.
I didn’t remember the name, but yes, that’s it.
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/thin/index.html
As if the whole thing wasn’t sad enough, HBO has an update on that page that says Polly Ann Williams, one of the girls featured in the documentary, has passed away. She was only 33.
I remember reading that on another blog a while ago. I know I didn’t actually know the woman, but damn, that was awful to read. In most TV shows/made for TV movies/books, the arc is someone has an eating disorder, they make the decision to get help, they get better. It’s so devastating to think that that’s only the beginning, and that someone as young as Polly Ann could just die. It feels so wrong.
Sorry, that was off topic.
I just wanted to add my two cents because I agree there’s almost no information about long-term recovery out there.
I am a recovered bulimic. I have been in recovery for 7.5 months, but I was bulimic for 6 years (which is about average for the course of the disease). I am 24 years old, exercise regularly, eat nutritiously, drink plenty of water and generally try to take care of my health.
A month into recovery, I felt like my body was falling apart. For weeks, I couldn’t run (I am a runner), I was foggy in the head all the time, absolutely exhausted, depressed, so thirsty I drank upwards of 4-5 liters of water a day, and I felt this odd dizziness/light-headedness that disconnected me from the outside world. It was terrifying. I went to the ER and was turned away after basic tests were run and also for my kidneys and liver, and 90-day glucose levels (test for diabetes) and all results showed I was in perfect health. I eventually just got better, but still have some of that brain fog/light-headedness from time to time, but not persistently. And I have mood swings.
I have heart arrhythmias, where my heart feels like it skips a beat. They started in my last year of bulimia. I get them a few times a week, randomly. Not related to anything that I can tell. Usually they don’t cause alarm, but sometimes they feel rather dramatic. I don’t know if this is something that will ‘heal’. 7.5 months into recovery, my electrolytes and fluids are all balanced and I should be healthy. My heart must have sustained some damage from all those years of electrolyte depletion.
I think every body is different. For me, it was terrifying not knowing what was the ‘normal’ course of recovery. Find a local support group, talk to others. There are other people going through the same stuff. Accept your body’s natural course of recovery, and seek medical attention if things get serious. Peace.
Several years ago, she wrote another book. It turns out that her eating disorder was the least of her problems; she also has very severe bipolar disorder and is unable to work a “real” job because of it.
I used to work with a woman who had an eating disorder when she was younger, and all her teeth had been capped as a result. There was another woman in the same department who also had capped teeth, but the reason in her case was worse: she had hyperemesis throughout her last pregnancy. 
I realize I might be black balled for saying this, but depending on the severity of the problem, there may be no long term, and even no short term, negative health consequences at all. Binging and purging is by itself not a physical health risk unless it’s done so much that a person becomes malnourished or their electrolytes get out of whack. You have to do it quite a bit for that to happen. As for the long term damage, it’s the starvation that may cause problems, but even that has to be pretty severe. I would submit that the “skipped heart beats” referred to above are garden variety premature ventricular contractions that many people have and have nothing to do with an eating disorder.
Oly, I sincerely hope that you are correct in assuming my cardiac arrhythmias are normal. I often entertain the fantasy that I’m on the same track as everyone else health-wise and sincerely hope I am, at least in the long run. However, statistically speaking, I would be beating some odds if I came out of 6 years of eating disorder without any repercussions.
I do feel compelled to engage in a bit of conversation regarding your implication that bingeing and purging and starving yourself are not severe health risks. I am a budding addictions and eating disorders researcher (motivated from my own experiences of course). We all know that full-blown eating disorders are very harmful physically and mentally, but you have raised the interesting question of whether sub-threshold eating disorders (not severe enough to be categorized as an eating disorder) are harmful. I did some digging, and here is what I found in the clinical research literature:
Sub-threshold bulimia (bingeing/purging less than two times a week) is associated with:
- increased anxiety and depression (Touchette et al., 2011).
- increased body dissatisfaction (Vas Leal & Peñas, 1999)
- increased suicide risk and functional impairment (Stice et al., 2011).
- a 32% chance of progressing to full-blown bulimia (Stice, Marti & Rohde, 2011).
Sub-threshold anorexia (under-eating for the purpose of losing weight, but not below the cut off BMI) is associated with similar things, but without the risk for progressing to clinical anorexia.
I hope this helps clear up some of your misunderstandings. This is only a very small sample of all of the research that has been done to help people better understand how to lead healthier, more fulfilling lives.
I did make sure to add the caveat “depending on the severity” If someone is purging and/or starving to the point of becoming malnourished or electrolyte deranged - that’s a physical health, possibly even drop dead type, risk. But less than that, it’s at least an open question, as you say. The body can withstand, adapt to, and recover from a lot.
As for clearing up misunderstandings, I submit with all due respect rhat tou may have misunderstood the focus of my post vis a vis the OP. The risks you enumerate are psychological, not physical. The OP seemed to be focused on the physical, so my response was as well. I leave the psychological opining to those, such as, perhaps, you, who probably know more about that than I.
As for your heart rhythm, have you been formally diagnosed with an arrhythmia? If so, I stand corrected and apologize.
Oly, point taken. Although I remind everyone that psychological harm is not separate from physical harm, and conditions such as suicidality, anxiety and depression are associated with a wide array of negative physical health outcomes, like high blood pressure, heart disease and premature death.
That said, you’re absolutely right, the body has an incredible capacity for healing. That is the wonderful thing about recovery.
As for your personal question about my heart arrhythmia, no. I do not have health insurance. Besides this reason, I’m not compelled to seek a doctor’s help for this issue because, as I understand it, a diagnosis would 1) be very difficult to capture on the appropriate technology since the arrhythmias only happen a couple of times a week, and 2) if the doctor decided to take my word for it, the only treatment seems to be medications and the generic ‘healthy lifestyle’ prescription that I already do my best to follow. So I just try not to worry about it.
Again, I’ll leave the mind-body issues to those who dare to go there. The OP asked how long it takes before the body starts functioning normally after a bulimic person quits “the behavior”, which I take to me an binging and purging. The implication is that “the behavior”, by itself, necessarily somehow causes the body to not function normally, ie. that binging and purging by themseves must somehow cause some significant bodily damage. What I’m saying is that, unless it is very severe, that behavior probably does not cause significant short term, and even less likely long term bodily damage. In that way, I’d liken binging and purging to cutting behavior. Disturbing, yes, and likely indicative of “maladaptive” stress responses. But, as long as the cuts are, as is typical, superficial and kept reasonably clean, they are unlikely to cause significant bodily damage, beyond unsightly scars.
That’s not to say that “the behavior” is not properly concerning, or is not associated with psychological morbidity, or that that psychological morbidity is not in turn associated with some sort of physical health problem. Indeed, it seems you cannot toss a crackpot self help book out a window with out hitting something that isn’t “associated with” “heart disease” or high blood pressure. But endless strings of possible associations was not, and for me still is not, the issue.
As for your heart, the brief description you have really sounds like harmless PVCs. But I can wholly understand how it can be worrisome. I have them myself, and, despite being an MD, it still freaks me out sometimes when I get “that feeling.” I hope you can in the near future get an assessment and, let’s hope, put your mind at ease. At least about that!