My friend has been starving himself and vomiting up his food consistently for the past 2 years i’d say, he’s about 65kg whilst being around 6’1, i try to tell him that it’s bad for your health and that sooner or later he’ll just put the weight back on again anyway, but he hasn’t, he’s stayed being relatively skinny and there has been no changes in his behaviour or personality in fact i’d say he’s much happier than he’s ever been.
In: Biology
Starving yourself causes your body to go into survival mode and this causes a huge amount of stress and can permanently alter your genetics. Starving yourself via throwing up the food you have eaten is called bulimia nervosa and it is considered to be a very serious mental health disorder. Constantly vomiting can cause serious damage to your esophagus (the tube that takes food from your mouth to your stomach) and will cause permanent damage to your teeth as the acids etch away the irreplaceable enamel layer. Not actually digesting the food you have consumed can lead to all sorts of nutritional deficiencies which can cause some pretty major side effects as well – e.g. nerve damage, organ failure, loss of mental function and so on.
Starving yourself also has the side effect of causing your metabolism to slow down which means that your friend is at a high risk of quickly becoming obese if he resumes eating food normally without help from a physician to guide him. Under the guidance he should be limiting his caloric intake and combining it with exercise to build up some muscle mass to help improve his metabolism and reach and maintain a safe healthy weight over time.
Being skinny does not mean that you are healthy either. One of my older brothers is fairly skinny but he is really unhealthy and will likely be the first of us 5 brothers to pass away because of this – his skinniness is due to a terrible diet combined with smoking (he mainly exists on corn chips and soft drinks and refuses to eat any fruits or vegetables). What makes that worse is that my youngest brother is extremely obese and my eldest brother is not far off being a full blown alcoholic which should make either of them be the ones at the most risk of being the first to pass.
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