my psychology teacher thinks that bulimia is...

my psychology teacher thinks that bulimia is only a result of the media and magazines and models. He believes that a bulimic solely wants to look thinner to fit in with societal standards. He doesn't believe that someone can develop bulimia as a result of stress or abuse etc.
I feel really invalidated, so i beg everyone who developed bulimia nervosa NOT as a result of magazines and thin models to please reply to this post.
Thank you all

this post is dedicated for anyone else who feels invalidated by people's ignorance

There are many, many reasons one becomes bulimic. For me growing up the ugly duckling in Hawaii, much of what I saw on TV I thought was the truth. I had body dysmorphia, depression, neglect, so much was going on and food was my comfort. As a child I was a junk food junkie; as an older teen I discovered bulimia. It worked until it didn't. At my bottom, I was binging and purging all day every day, getting drunk daily, eating out of garbage cans, no longer showering...I really thought I was insane and that being a drunken bulimic was how I coped. I found recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. Know that there is recovery from from bulimia.

Your psychology teacher sounds terrible! Its not a result of social pressure, at least not always and never entirely. There is so, so much data to support this as well. It also irritates me that saying its from social pressures like magazines and models is meant to invalidate it - even if it was directly correlated with those things, that makes it no less of a disorder.

I've heard this kind of logic pretty often, though. I understand it to an extent - as an adult, I know logically that those things are photo shopped and false, and I can make a rational judgement about why I don't look like the girl in the photo and how much that will really effect my life/happiness. But what if I first came across them when I was a child? What if they were coupled with abuse or even the normal, mild bullying that most kids experience at some point? Would you expect a second grader to make the same rational decisions?