Male Bulimia & Body Image: What I Learned As The Only Man In Eating Disorder Therapy

TW: Eating disorders, bulimia

It’s not particularly fun to tell people you had an eating disorder. There’s not a cultural framework for talking about them, and societal perceptions of them are often very outdated.

Saying ‘yeah I had an eating disorder’ in polite company, even around people you might know well enough to not be weird about it, usually produces the same physical response as saying something like ‘yeah I used to train puppies for dog fights’ or ‘I funded my degree by selling my underwear to old men on the internet.’ Not quite disgust, not quite pity, more a sort of embarrassment that you’d bring up something so unsavoury. Mentioning eating disorders forces people to confront both shame and bodily fluids, and we hate that.

I couldn’t tell you when I first actually made myself sick, I have never been a particularly consistent diarist. But I can tell you the thought process that led to it started in early 2012. I was 16, I’d just been to Australia with my family over Christmas to visit family and while we were there, I came down with a very bad case of food poisoning.

I couldn’t keep any food or water down for the best part of a week, and when I got back after the school holidays, gaunt and sallow from having to stay inside and not eat, people would not stop telling me how good I looked.

I had been a very chubby kid, and I could still feel that in high school, both on my body and reputation. Even though I look back at photos of myself from that time and I can see that some of the puppy fat had started to drop a little bit, I still carried the literal and metaphorical weight of being one of the school’s fat kids around with me.

So, when people told me that I suddenly looked amazing, something switched in my brain. I knew that I’d been sick every day for a week, and that had produced results, so I just carried on. It’s obviously a sign of an unwell mind to associate something harmful with success, but that’s the way my brain worked at the time.

Born in the late 90s, I’m technically the youngest it’s possible to be and still be a millennial, and while I’m of the opinion that terms like ‘Millennial’ and ‘Gen Z’ are generally shorthand for older right wing journalists to call young people annoying and stupid, there is something to be said for the Millennial-Gen Z cusp adults who were children in the 2000s and teens in the 2010s.

What this means is that we were children for the explosion of diet culture propaganda of the 2000s, teenagers for the sharp pivot into body positivity of the 2010s, and now young adults as we slip into the uncanny valley territory of the GLP-1 era. It’s a lot of twists and turns for one mind to handle. You have to be thin, but even if you’re not thin you have to love yourself exactly as you are as you desperately try to attain thinness.

This isn’t the sole reason I ended up in Eating Disorder therapy, but it’s fairly important cultural context.

Between the praise for losing weight and the constant pressures from all forms of visual media since time immemorial, I was desperate to keep getting smaller.

I stopped eating breakfast before school. I’d make excuses at lunch. At home I’d eat dinner with my family, then say I was going upstairs for a shower, and while the water was running I’d force two fingers down my throat to purge the dinner from my body. This was a pattern that continued for the best part of a decade, ebbing and flowing in its intensity – feeling like I was doing something positive, whilst my skin worsened, and my teeth loosened.

It was the pandemic that eventually forced me to tell my family how bad things had gotten. Locked in close proximity, it was difficult to hide how unwell I was.

When I first started making myself sick, I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing was bad, it felt like a shortcut rather than self-harm. When I told my mother, she was very upset, as you would be if you found out your child had hated themselves to the point of ritualistically vomiting for a decade. She urged me to go to a doctor, and the doctor referred me to a specialist clinic.

As we know, the NHS is operating under a huge financial and physical strain, so I spent a long time on the waiting list to be seen for treatment. But eventually I was put into an Eating Disorder group therapy unit, with a Specialist Cognitive Behavioural Therapist.

An Eating Disorder group therapy unit is actually a lot funnier than you might expect. Gallows humour abounds. I felt a deep kinship with the women in the group. I was, however, the only man there.

Statistically this tracks; 25% of those with Eating Disorders in the UK are men, but there’s an undeniable difference in the ways men and women are socialised to scrutinise their bodies. This is not a hard and fast rule, an eating disorder is not a single disease, nor are those suffering a monolith. It’s more about trying to control something in your life when you feel out of control in other ways.

This is certainly my experience as a man with an eating disorder. I’m not exactly the most masculine of men – sitting somewhere between Nathan Lane and Graham Norton on the catty homosexual scale – but I did go to an all-boys school, and have been socialised as a man.

It’s undeniable that a part of being raised as a boy involves competition, being tasked with being bigger, better, stronger. In this era of information delivered by extreme short form video, we’re served 45 second snippets of ‘protein’, ‘diet advice’, ‘weekly training splits’, personal trainers advising you how to hit shoulders and back with one simple exercise. When you’re gay you’re coupling that with your burgeoning sexuality, unsure whether you are attracted to men, or just want to look like them. You’re both object and objectifier when it comes to the male gaze.

I think for men it’s difficult to talk about, because of the misconception that eating disorders solely affect women. I don’t think this was true for me, but I certainly didn’t realise what I was doing to myself was an eating disorder for a long time because I thought an eating disorder was just starving yourself. This isn’t to say that in order to release men trapped in cycles of disordered eating is to pitch them against women suffering from comparable situations.

It’s to interrogate why we feel the need to strive towards a goal that is unattainable. It’s not necessarily about body image, if you had asked me when I was in the throes of bulimia what I wanted to look like, the goal would have been nebulous. It’s always boiled down to ‘something else.’

I don’t think that you can ‘think yourself better,’ therapy takes a lot of work, practice, and challenges your preconceived notions about what kind of person you are. But at some point you also have to decide that you want to get better, and that you can. And part of that comes from accepting that you have a problem. If you think you might, tell someone, you never know what could happen. You could turn a corner, or, like me, you could end up doing a one man show about it in Edinburgh. Who’s to say?

Dom McGovern: Prize Hog will be performed at 8:30pm in Pleasance Courtyard from 5th-30th August at the Edinburgh Fringe