❤️ Your Heart & Eating Disorders: What’s Actually Happening Behind the Scenes
Your heart is your body’s overachieving bestie — it never sleeps, never takes a day off, and keeps everything running. But eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa can seriously mess with its rhythm, strength, and safety.
Breaking it down in a clear (but not scary) way:
🫀 How Anorexia Nervosa Affects the Heart
When your body isn’t getting enough fuel, it switches into survival mode. That means it starts conserving energy — including slowing your heart down.
Common cardiac effects:
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Bradycardia (slow heart rate) — the heart beats fewer times per minute to save energy
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Low blood pressure — can cause dizziness or fainting
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Heart muscle shrinkage — the heart can actually lose mass, making it weaker
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Electrolyte imbalances — especially low potassium, which can trigger dangerous heart rhythms
👉 In severe cases, these changes can increase risk of arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats) or even sudden cardiac arrest.
⚡ How Bulimia Nervosa Affects the Heart
Bulimia often involves purging (vomiting, laxatives, diuretics), which disrupts the delicate balance of minerals your heart relies on to beat properly.
Possible effects:
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Low potassium (hypokalaemia) — one of the biggest cardiac risks
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Irregular heart rhythms
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Palpitations (feeling like your heart is racing or skipping beats)
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Dehydration, which makes the heart work harder
⚠️ Even if someone looks “physically fine,” electrolyte shifts can happen quickly and silently — and the heart is extremely sensitive to them.
🧠 Important Reality Check
These heart effects are medical consequences, not signs of “how sick someone looks.” Cardiac complications can occur at any weight and at any stage of an eating disorder.
🌱 The Hopeful Part
The heart is surprisingly resilient. With proper nutrition, hydration, and medical support, many cardiac changes can improve or fully recover. Recovery isn’t just emotional healing — it’s also giving your heart the chance to regain strength.
💬 Quirky but true takeaway:
Your heart isn’t judging you, counting calories, or demanding perfection. It’s just trying to keep you alive. And it deserves care too.
My Personal Experience of Cardiac Problems
As a 12 year old with zero knowledge or experience of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, I had no idea that rapid weight fluctuations through restricting, binging and purging food could pose a significant risk to a persons health. Maybe if I had, I would’ve thought twice before turning to desperate measures to change my body.
Despite my rapid weight loss through restricting, binging, and purging as a pre-teen, I didn’t require medical treatment for cardiac issues related to my eating disorder until my late teens/early 20s, when I experienced erratic heart palpitations, tachycardia, bradycardia, and irregular ECGs.
Prior to my experience of cardiac related medical issues, I would have guessed that they likely occurred as the result of rapid, erratic weight fluctuations and prolonged weight loss. But there was another likely candidate that I never would have known about had I not experienced it myself. And, it was one that could occur at any weight or shape, and without symptomatic weight loss or drastic body-mass fluctuations.
Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that self-induced vomiting and laxative abuse could be a primary risk to cardiac health, due to it stripping the body of critical minerals and electrolytes vital for maintaining a consistent heart rhythm, and effective functionality. The first time I experienced this I presented a medically ‘healthy’ weight, which goes to show-contrary to popular belief-that eating disorders can cause serious medical risk to those diagnoses outside of anorexia nervosa and symptomatic low weight.
As well as the cardiac issues I experienced from purging and laxative abuse, I did also have a couple of ECGs with ‘abnormal’ readings after periods of rapid weight loss and semi-starvation. My excessive exercising was another factor that didn’t help my cause, because overworking and straining my heart muscle when I had fewer reserves to fuel my physical activities, meant my body started to source energy from anything it could, including muscle mass.
Bodies will do anything to survive, which today I recognise as a remarkable biological feature in human beings. They are also extremely resilient. Fortunately, my heart is functioning well today, and this now acts as a key motivation for me to feed my body the regular nutrition it needs to function in a place of recovery.
Whenever I feel insecure and get thoughts about needing to change my body, I remind myself that I need my heart to live and continue my life in recovery. I now have the gift and chance to make up for the years I lost on my eating disorder, which I do not intend to waste.
Most importantly, I need my heart to continue with this project and deliver the objectives of Munch and Mend. I will not rest until I know I have done everything I can to hopefully help others relieve the shame and despair they are silently struggling with as they navigate life with a toxic eating disorder whilst also raising awareness to the reality of these disturbing, evil diseases.
Heartbreakingly, I have seen too many people lose their lives to eating disorders over the years, and most often it is the result of their hearts no longer being able to take the strain. Well, I intend to look after my heart forever more so I can honour all those beautiful lives lost to these futile diseases.
It’s finally time for me to get my revenge. And when I do, that last piece of my damaged heart will be healed for good!
