10 million French people are said to suffer from eating disorders. Among them is bulimia, which is characterized by the compulsive ingestion of food in a limited period of time, followed by inappropriate compensatory behaviors such as vomiting.
"I have considered suicide"
This is what Zina has lived for 20 years. It all started when this young woman, now 35, was a teenager. After a slight weight gain, her parents forced her to diet. "I was thinking all the time, like: 'but you're going to be huge', 'are you aware that obesity is a disease?', 'You don't want to be pretty like girls your age? '", she says.
So many remarks that created in Zina a feeling of failure and guilt. Result? The young woman began to pay attention to everything she ate. "The day I swerved I said to myself:‘ it doesn’t matter, you have your magic eraser, you make yourself throw up like that it doesn’t matter ’”, she explains.
By force of control, Zina's "deviations" became more and more extreme: she ingested gargantuan amounts of food and could vomit up to six times a day. "I considered suicide. I considered ending my life because this lifestyle had become impossible to maintain", she remembers.
"Bulimia is a mental illness"
To fight bulimia, the young woman asked for help from doctors. "How many times have I been out of a doctor's office with advice on physical activity or nutrition?", she says.
But Zina reminds us: bulimia is a mental illness. And it is possible to cure it. This is why she decided to break the silence on this eating behavior disorder, but also to denounce diets and grossophobia. "The adjective fat is associated with a whole ultra negative collective imagination: fat is a lack of ambition, ugly, lazy, poor health, in short the fat is one who does not want to become. And this afraid of getting fat it is omnipresent and maintained collectively ", emphasizes Zina.
His message to people who suffer from bulimia? "You are not alone (…) and we can be cured of this disease. If we started to send a truly benevolent message to women saying that they are beautiful as they are, wouldn't that be nice?", she concludes.
Read also :
⋙ Bulimia and binge eating disorder: how to detect the first signs of these eating disorders?
⋙ Bulimia: 4 misconceptions about this eating behavior disorder
⋙ Bulimia, anorexia: what difference?