Lisa thought college would be the perfect opportunity for some fast weight loss. Typically about five or ten pounds overweight, she had always felt fat and wanted to take advantage of her newfound independence to shed a few pounds.
At first she followed a few fast weight loss tips and just restricted her eating: no snacks, no fat, just salads. Then she discovered that if she occasionally wavered, she could “undo the damage” by vomiting. Before long she was planning daily binges and purges that sometimes consisted of a dozen doughnuts, pizza, cookies and candy bars. Weighing herself five or six times a day, she became so afraid of gaining weight once she hit 100 pounds that she could barely eat anything without purging.
Two years later she she had long abandoned her fast weight loss diet and knew she was in trouble. “I was so weak that I would skip classes because I couldn’t make it across campus. I had heart palpitations, my teeth were rotting, I couldn’t stand the cold, I had terrible mood swings, I couldn’t concentrate, and my hair was breaking off and falling out,” she recalls. “It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but the only thing that made me get help was having too many bad hair days.”
Lisa didn’t realize then that her “bad hair” was just one sign of what had become severe malnutrition. Though her body could digest some food during a binge, the high-fat foods she binged on didn’t stay with her long enough to provide much nutrition.
