1 In 4 People With Eating Disorders Are Men. So Why Was I The Only Guy In Group Therapy?

After 10 years of hiding my purging, entering group therapy brought gallows humour, deep kinship, and one stark reality: I was the only man in the room.

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 There’s not a cultural framework for talking about them, and societal perceptions of them are often very outdated.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........

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