I'm 16 years old and I'm kneeling beside the toilet in my family's bathroom. I am trying to make myself throw up. For the past fifteen minutes my fingers—first one, then two—have been dancing around the back of my throat. I can feel my knuckles push hard against the roof of my mouth. My fingernails prick the gap between the soft squish of my tongue and the rougher edges of my esophagus. For a second I almost gag. I feel a little jolt of excitement but then…nothing. I listen to the running sink and then reach for my toothbrush on the counter. The toothbrush always feels harsher than my fingers do, but I ate bread at lunch. This has to get done. I turn the toothbrush to its handle, I don't want to ruin the bristles, but just as I'm about to do the act the bathroom door opens. My mom and I briefly make eye contact then she closes the door. I'm ashamed. I feel embarrassed. It's like I've been caught stealing or jerking off. I put the toothbrush down, sit and the floor, and I sob. A day later when I weight myself I realize that I am down two pounds. I suck in my stomach and take a selfie in the bathroom mirror that I later post to Myspace. I feel validated and whole. Variations of these events have been happening for two years and will continue to happen until I leave home for university.
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I've wrestled with an eating disorder, on and off, since I was a teenager. The statistics about eating disorders in Canada are mostly based on a 2002 survey. It says 1.5 percent of the population between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are diagnosed with some type of eating disorder, and around 10 percent of that are males. While in my life I've known other men who have struggled with food, we've rarely talked about it. Whenever the subject has come up, it's quickly glossed over with jokes about two-a-days at the gym or the denial of t-shirt sizes. The closest thing I ever got to a real conversation about my eating disorder happened when a friend and I were blackout drunk after a work party. He told me about how as a kid his mother would make the family weigh in person by person on after Sunday dinner and record their weights in a note pad. I explained that growing up my dad used hand puppet called "the ignorant moose" to point out how much fatter I was than my brother. We laughed off the anecdotes and continued to drink.
While conversations about female body image and the struggle with food have slowly been creeping into larger societal conversations, the topic of male eating disorders is still something that's rarely spoken of in public. There is a stigma for men about admitting their problems with food. Guys are supposed to be able to eat a lot. Guys aren't supposed to be too worried about the way they look. We're not supposed to talk about our feelings. I knew that I couldn't be the only one in my peer group who's had trouble with this, but for a long time I didn't know how to ask. Recently I put out the call on social media asking if any men would be willing to talk to me about their struggles with food. Slowly but surely the private messages started to fill my inbox. There were a lot more than I would have expected. In the following days I had candid and brutally honest conversations about how eating disorders have affected some of my friends. Below are stories from those conversations, the hope is that they serve as a reminder to any guys that struggle with food that they're not the only ones.
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Jeremy Hammond, writer at The Hard Times and host of 'Ballin' Out Super'
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I grew up in a single parent home, and by this time my brother was away at college. My mom worked two jobs, so I was eating dinner alone fairly often. I think being independent in that way made it easy to just stop eating without anybody asking any questions about it. I spent about six months trying my best to only eat solid food twice a week. I would drink tons of coffee and Diet Coke as a means of filling my stomach and I guess the sugar in the Coke would keep me from passing out. When I did eat, it was a very ceremonial process—I would only eat foods I hated, or that were difficult to eat. A big favorite was stale bread soaked in vinegar. I wanted food to feel like punishment, and the pain of hunger to feel like my normal state. Getting to sleep at night was always hard, and I would go without it pretty frequently. Any amount of strenuous activity would make me dizzy. I remember passing out skateboarding a few times. Honestly it's hard to remember the time period, because my brain was fuzzy and useless for so much of it.It took a long time for people to even realize I was losing weight at an unnatural pace. At that age your body changes a ton regardless, and people could dismiss it as me growing into my body. Being a boy didn't help either. Nobody really thinks of boys as being susceptible to body dysmorphia or whatever. I was a fourteen year old who dropped forty pounds because I wanted to look like Connor fucking Oberst, but it was still easy for people to assume nothing was wrong. It's insane, my therapist knows all about my history with eating disorders, but still frequently references the root of anorexia being "conflict between young girls and their mothers."
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I still hate my body, but I've accepted that there are aspects of it I can't change. What's toughest now is losing weight in a healthy way through diet and exercise. There's always going to be that call of the wild in me, the little voice that says I should be eating less and if I just had more control I could lose the weight faster. There's always going to be the voice when I hit my goal weight that says I could be thinner if I only cared more.It's the start of grade five, my family is living in Alberta, and I'm pushing 240 pounds. I'm 5'3" maybe. I'll be about 260 by grade six. I don't remember being big in grade four. And I guess in my mind I wasn't, though the thought 'he become fat over summer vacation' seems kind of ridiculous.I'm outside on the playground, or lack thereof, on/near benches and I'm with people who I would call my friends for the last time. We're hanging out with the grade seven kids. His name his Colby or Cody or something redneck. I disagree with him? There's a small debate. Now I'm not a smart kid and I'm still not one by a long shot, but clearly I must have been on top this one. He says whatever and ends the argument by calling me bitch tits. His girlfriend laughs. My friends laugh. And that's when I became fat.I started developing an unhealthy relationship to exercise. Always trying to lose weight, pushing myself to the point of throwing up and never letting myself off the hook, because losing weight means exiting the world in which I have to live in. And here's the thing: I'll show pictures to people now, who didn't know me then, and am often met with 'you weren't that fat.' And physically, no maybe not, but that's how I was identified all through school to graduation and I played into that role so much so that I haven't unidentified as fat.
Jesse Byiers, puppeteer
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I have Binge Eating Disorder. Unlike bulimia, binge eating is not followed by purging, but excessive exercise, or fasting. I experience guilt, shame, and distress about my binge eating, which can lead to more binge eating. This can look like a lot of different thing. It was taking the protein bars from the top cabinet when I was a kid because they taste like chocolate bars and going out behind the woodshed in my backyard to eat two or three in a sitting until my parents move them because protein bars are fucking expensive. It's sneaking out to the fridge in college, when my roommates were asleep, and I thought they couldn't hear me making my many sick sad sandwiches to bring to bed, only to get up right after eating those to make maybe one more and eat something filled with sugar. It's that fact that If I do not portion my food, or have someone cut me off, I will and have (multiple times, even in my adult years) eat until I'm sick. It's sleeping. It's unaware. It's unapologetic. It's well I didn't eat breakfast or lunch, so this probably isn't that bad for me. A shotgun wedding. It's nothing can go to waste.As I said before, I struggle. The patterns are still very much a strong influence in my life and force me to be very conscious of how I eat. My partner will always check in with me and help me with portion control and just eating when I'm supposed to. And I mean, I live alone, so even though I have that support group I still have to go home and hold myself accountable for what I bring into my house. Working in an art studio (and it's a dream come true and I love it) can be difficult as I'm sitting all day and it's such a mental stretch that often I just don't do the exercise I should be doing after work, which only just adds. I unfortunately don't have an answer of how it gets better, but that's the way it goes sometimes.
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Jiv Parasram, cultural worker
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