If you suffer from bulimia nervosa, you're experiencing an unnecessarily frightening, demeaning and painful existence. It's unnecessary to live under a compulsion to overeat and then eliminate that food. There are no many treatments that can control the emotions and anxieties behind the behavior. To gradually reduce the need for treatments, you can follow a process called the BAR cycle to eliminate those harmful emotions by eliminating the root causes.

What Is Bulimia Nervosa? Bulimia is an eating disorder similar to anorexia, where we develop an irrational body image, and establish a dysfunctional solution to deal with this image. Anorexics can literally starve themselves to death. Bulimics, however, are also emotionally compelled to engage in binge eating, then to purge the food, either by forced vomiting or by laxatives, or both. Bulimia sufferers often experience malnutrition and damage to teethe, esophagus, colon and rectum...sometimes leading to severe anorexia.

What Compels Me To Binge And Purge? Fear and self-loathing are the main motivations to bulimia. The fear of starvation drives the binge and the fear of gaining weight drives the purge. Self-loathing is at the root of it, because bulimics believe they have to be the perfect weight or no one will love them. Some even resort to measuring everything that goes in and comes out of their bodies, to make sure it's the same amount. If you're beginning to think this sounds a lot like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), you win the prize.

What Treatments Are Available? The similarity between OCD and bulimia nervosa gives us a key as to what treatments can be effective. Often, the doctor will prescribe anxiety medicine in combination with psychological counseling to deal with the fears involved and gain control of the emotions and self-loathing. Like most psychological disorders, treatments are often long-term, with a gradual recovery. Recovery is often dependent upon how enthusiastically the bulimic embraces recovery. Unfortunately, as with any illness, many of us expect the doctor to give us a pill to make it go away with little or no effort on our part. Unless you take action, you're likely to be bulimic and dependent on medicine the rest of your life.

How Can The BAR Cycle Help? The BAR Cycle helps us control our actions by controlling our beliefs and motivations. By taking the actions on Belief in this BAR Cycle article, we begin to change our self-loathing and body-image, taking it from negative and destructive, to positive and constructive. Over time, by building up the belief in ourselves, we can eliminate the root causes of bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Even on a more short-term basis, we can see faster improvement in our treatment and a reduced need for drug therapy.

Bulimia is a serious condition that can lead to physical illness or death. This is why, even if you plan on using the BAR Cycle to help control your condition, you should seek the help of a licensed therapist experienced with bulimia, to guide you and monitor your recovery.

The good news is, you don't need to live in the self-loathing, emotional prison of bulimia nervosa. You don't need to live a secret life of anxiety, binging and purging to achieve some irrational ideal of physical perfection. Instead, you can begin the recovery process by seeing a doctor and getting the symptoms under control with drug and counseling therapy. You can enhance that therapy and eliminate the root causes of bulimia nervosa by using the BAR Cycle to understand and embrace the real you, a person of great value...comfortable in your own skin.