Use and Abuse

Eating disorders sound so easy when one thinks of them. I can either starve myself or binge and purge, a great solution for attaining the perfect body. But what many people don’t realize when weighing the pros and cons of these vicious disorders is the entire package that comes with it. It isn’t common knowledge that eating disorders help lead to substance abuse of different types of drugs and why would it be? To an outsider, it is unexplainable but to someone who lives with the effects of having an eating disorder, it makes perfect sense. To those people, using and abusing these substances only adds to their main goal: losing weight; they never think about the damage it is taking on their bodies. As shown in Figure 1.B, a graph generated from a study conducted by CASA (The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) at Columbia University, cigarettes are the most used substance by females with eating disorders, because it suppresses the appetite, followed by alcohol, because since they do not eat there is a greater chance of purging after drinking. Females with eating disorders use and abuse drugs at a greater percent than those without any disorder symptoms.