Dia-bulimia .. Skipping Insulin to Lose Weight ( Here's a new one, folks)

[SoCalDem]

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=81960

Diabulimics -- Skipping Insulin to Lose Weight

By Al Tompkins (more by author)

Normally, most of what you eat is broken down into glucose, the sugar that fuels your cells. Insulin, meanwhile, is the hormone that unlocks cells and allows them to take glucose in and either burn it or store it as fat. But in as many as 1.4 million Americans diagnosed with the autoimmune disease known as type 1 diabetes, this process has gone haywire.

The act of taking less insulin to lose weight is happening far more often than you might think, according to Self:

Because diabetics have the unique power to control the amount of insulin they give themselves, they have a tempting -- and dangerously easy -- way to shed these unwanted pounds. One in three type 1 diabetics reported skipping or underdosing their insulin to lose weight, according to a study by researchers at the University of Toronto. "A lot of women avoid intensive insulin management, even though it has tremendous health benefits," says Ann Goebel-Fabbri, Ph.D., a psychologist at Joslin Diabetes Center and Behavioral and Mental Health Unit in Boston. "This behavior is like playing Russian roulette with your health. It's almost like they're turning back the clock to a point in history when we didn't know that the consequences of diabetes were preventable."

The problem is widespread enough that physicians now see insulin underdosing as a form of purging, making it a close cousin of the eating disorder bulimia. Some doctors even call it "diabulimia." Unlike disorders such as anorexia, in which a person severely restricts calories, a person omitting insulin can eat whatever she wants. Pizza, beer, ice cream -- none of it can be processed by the body. Nor do diabulimics have to go through the pain of self-induced vomiting. All they have to do is skip shots and watch their weight spiral drastically down, calories purged from the body in a sugar-filled stream of urine.

Most people outside the diabetic community have never heard of diabulimia, and it's not in the DSM-IV, the text outlining recognized mental illnesses. But over the past few years, the term has found its way online, where women have picked it up, finally able to give a name to their disorder.