Remember when we were young enough to have sleepovers? I do. In one particular instance, a friend had commented on my torso when I was changing my shirt. ''You have boobs!'' The sentence came out as a joke but hung in the air, and for the first time in my life I questioned my physical appearance. How is that we go from unconscientious babies, with no self concerns other than needing to eat and poop, to being self aware adolescents, questioning ourselves as putting our bodies on trial. You don't inherit self-hate. You aren't born with low self-esteem. You don't come out of the womb regretting what you were made of. At one point or another, I looked in my bathroom mirror, eye'd myself up and down and asked, 'what is wrong with me.' Looking back, now I laugh. Most adolescent boys, up to 70%, experience the development of breast tissue during puberty. Yet a simple comment, or slag about my own appearance, shook my world. The next day I ran. I didn't know how far to run or what I was even looking for, but I ran. I was 16 and hellbent on changing who I was.
I grew up without a dad around, and as such I never had a male role model. I looked around to other guys for example, but never felt like I was the same as they were. They were in better shape. They were stronger, faster and incidentally seemed to be more in control. My family didn't live on much and we endured some pretty challenging domestic conflict. So I guess, in one way, I was trying to control my life by running away from it. I started to count calories, run five miles a day and avoid social situations that involved unhealthy food and drink. The more I ran, the more my body begun to thin out, but I never saw it. In fact, I only thought I was getting 'fatter'. So I ran more. I dieted harder. If I went to a party on a Saturday night, I would punish myself the next day by skipping breakfast and lunch and running ten miles that night. My knees are still thanking me. And it's funny. I still never thought I had a problem. I had convinced myself that as long as I wasn't sticking my head down a toilet, I didn't have a problem. When I eventually began to do that, I told myself that it could have been a lot worse, I could not be eating at all. As my dissatisfaction with my own body increased, I binged harder, puked more, and ran longer. The irony of all of this is that I never thought I had a problem. I thought that if I ever had a problem, I'd know it. I was merely controlling variables to reach a 'better' weight. My skin got dry, my bones were brittle and my testosterone dropped. Depression, anxiety, you name it. I got it all and I thought I never had a problem. I have spent more time than I'd like with my head down a toilet, and you'd think with all that time you'd get to know yourself pretty well down there, but I never did.
Life has a funny way of sending you in situations you would never see as a benefit, but in the long run, it all fits into its pieces. I injured myself from excessive long distance running (who'd have thought) and couldn't run for six months! At the time I never thought I could survive such a long stretch without running, but the absence of it actually forced me to find a new outlet. I moved to China, thinking I could atleast escape home for sometime. And go figure, I didn't last very long before trying to run again, only relapsing into injury and frustration. I was still binging. I was still getting sick, but I was equally getting fed up. I was tired of the routine. I can still recall breaking down in the garden in front of my apartment in the middle of the night. I was frustrated and sick of the unhealthy routine I had subjected myself to. I no longer wanted to miss out on life. I was thousands of miles away from home with every possibility in my hand, yet I felt trapped. That's when I realised I had a problem. I couldn't enjoy the foods of a new country without worrying about my weight. Not knowing calories put me at unease. I realised a change was needed and that I needed to disassociate with running. After taking a safe amount of time away from excercise, I began to focus on getting stronger, rather than losing weight. I couldn't do five pushups, let alone a pullup. But I begun none the less. I ate more, worried less and lived more. I actually began to become happy with myself, regardless of how I looked.
To my surprise, a few weeks later, I began to put on weight! My body was naturally adapting to weighted resistance (strength training) by building muscular tissue. That I could gain weight and not be upset blew my mind. Three years later, I'm healthier than I've been. Sure, I still struggle with soe issues, but I'm a thousand miles ahead of where I've been.
Looking back, one of the main reasons I never sought help was because I was ashamed to admit that I as a male had an eating disorder. As an illness traditionally associated with females, having an eating disorder was a distinct insult, if not contradiction to my sense of masculinity. Guys had guy problems. Girls has girl problems. If you google eating disorders, you will find clinical definitions that identify EDs as prevalent amongst young women. While this might be true, how much of that is changing is undiagnosed, due to the silence of men struggling with E.Ds, shamed by their environment. We paint pictures of men who are muscular, ripped, jacked, call it what you will, and expect men to meet those standards. At the same time we call them to be silent in suffering. We build the idea that our body reflects our worth, and destroy them for a sense of peace we never get. Men are committing suicide. Men are suffering from a lack of confidence, a lack of purpose and are all the while shamed for what they're not. Men are less likely to seek treatment for eating disorders because of the perception that they are “woman’s diseases. For what it's worth, the moment I began to make peace with what I saw in the mirror, the more I began to accept myself. Having a close support group was crucial and I owe much of my recovery to some friends I won't forget. Suffering in silence is a massive misconception. There are more men struggling with societal expectations than you would think, and we're all body conscious from to time. Feelings those emotions are okay; but what you do with them is key. If you'd like to lose some weight, first learn to disassociate your body from YOU. You are not your body, and your self worth is not measured by it. The only body you'll ever have is the one you're wearing right now. You can lose weight, you can get muscular, but you cannot change what's on the inside by sculpting the outer appearance.
“No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside.”
The process of writing is a spiritual and mental process. We write with the heart first and edit with the mind second. I thought that this article couldn't reflect much. It's the same shit as everyone else's, but it's my shit none the less. The very worst of those fears is making myself venerable. But without vulnerability, how can anyone ever have a real conversation? If you ask me how I am, and I respond by saying grand, that's all you'll say back. But I open up and tell you how I really am, the odds are you'll probably do the same. So let's start the conversation. Let's make the change. I hope atleast one person finds comfort in reading this. If you are struggling, you can send me a message, or call bodywhys helpline at 1890 200 444.
Saving this from becoming an allegory of who I was, or worse, a self pitying lament, I'll say that now I'm too busy being who I am to regret who I was. And to be honest, if I had one thing I could say to my former self, it wouldn't be ''why'', it would be ''it's not your fault.'' As I write this, I'm preparing to throw on some Adidas sneakers and go the gym. In many ways, they remind me of the asics. Sure, they're worn and a bit beat up. But they're about all that are, and my body jumps with excitement as I tie the laces.
References
http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/
Sungot-Borgen, J. Torstveit, M.K. (2004) Prevalence of ED in Elite Athletes is Higher than in the General Population. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 14(1), 25-32.
Weltzin, T. Carlson, T., et al. (2014) “Treatment Issues and Outcomes for Males with Eating Disorders” in Cohn, Lemberg.
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