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
Gaining weight back isn’t really the main issue. It’s not bad because it’s ineffective to lose weight, it’s bad because it’s dangerous and has a surprisingly large amount of serious health consequences that are absolutely life threatening
The bigger problems are more about its effect on nutrition and fluid balances and physical damage to your esophagus and teeth
This sort of behavior is especially hard on your heart due to its effect on hydration and electrolyte imbalances. This puts immense strain on your heart and can cause a multitude of different issues related to blood pressure, which can have downstream effects on pretty much all your organs, with your kidneys and heart being especially in trouble. These effects can be very dangerous in the short to mid term and can lead to significant reduction of quality of life in addition to being outright life threatening.
Additionally, there’s a number of concerns with malnutrition in general, making it easy for your body to be deficient in a number of vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients, which can have a very wide range of really dangerous problems depending on what you end up being deficient in
Then there’s a significant amount of damage to your esophagus and teeth, leading to all sorts of painful and sometimes life threatening injuries from that. Additionally it will increase the risk of cancer in your esophagus and mouth, this is more likely long term and not something that’ll happen in the short term, but I don’t think I need to do much to convince you that cancer is bad
The thing is, he likely knows it’s not exactly healthy. People who do this tend to be struggling with mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and very very likely some issues with self esteem. Similar to people who are alcoholics, they likely know it’s harmful but struggle with intense feelings of emotional pain and it provides them a brief bit of relief. You’re unlikely to get far just being like “don’t you know how bad this is?!”, it’s common to have a lot of feelings of shame with things like this and going at it that way can just feel like you’re shaming him and won’t likely be helpful.
The better approach is to express that you care about him and are worried about him, you could mention learning about the health consequences of it and feeling scared because you don’t want those things happening to him. Realistically the most effective thing he can do is seek professional help. I know that can be difficult for a variety of reasons but is likely the most effective way to recover from this. I’d just recommend focusing more on a “I care about you and am worried” vibe rather than scolding him for it or just trying to convince him that it’s bad, because he likely knows this and ultimately this is a symptom of an underlying mental health issue rather than him just simply being uninformed
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