Men get eating disorders too

Brut America

Men get eating disorders too. After years struggling with bulimia at a time when it was considered a woman’s issue, Sam Thomas wants to change the narrative ...

Transcript

00:00was probably about 2007 and I remember sort of googling just men eating disorders and hardly

00:05anything came up. I kind of thought well if I was a woman in the same set of situations with

00:20the severity symptoms that I had at the time, would I have been offered treatment? Now obviously

00:26I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is that possibly my gene disorder would have been a

00:31bit more of a priority. It was mostly homophobic bullying and in those days, you know it's nearly

00:44just around about 20 odd years ago, the language was pretty horrific. I basically hid in the boys

00:51toilets because it was the only place where I knew I'd be found and I would eat on the contents of

00:58my lunchbox. So as time went on, probably over a few months, it sort of became from comfort eating

01:07to binge eating and then eventually where that whole build of attention anxiety combined with

01:15the fullness sort of made me feel quite sick. I kind of thought well I'll just make myself sick.

01:22I remember that letter quite well. It was from a single mother who'd recently split from her partner

01:34and when she put the kids to bed, you know she would binge and purge. Even though I did relate

01:39with her situation, I certainly related with her behaviours and that's how I came to learn

01:45of this new word bulimia. It's basically saying you've got bulimia, it's an eating disorder and

01:51it's very serious. If you don't get help, you'll die basically and she listed all the health sort

01:55of impacts, you know everything from cardiac arrest, your stomach rupturing, all sorts of

02:00scary things and I was 15. So you know I'd been bulimic pretty much for a good couple of years

02:07by that point and it hadn't really occurred to me that I was causing myself harm or the

02:13long-term impacts that it would have. None of those things registered with me.

02:26And I remember quite well when I was sort of beginning to sort of attempt to sort of recover

02:32from bulimia, all the literature at the time you know was just all females you know and I remember

02:39sort of reading literature and it had female pronouns you know, it had you know pictures of

02:45you very young, very thin women you know and the interesting thing was that anorexia sort of

02:51had all the airtime as it were, bulimia just didn't really sort of, it was almost seen as

02:55secondary I think in some ways. Being a man you know we just weren't having

03:08conversations about it sort of hardly at all let alone men with it sort of so you know as time went

03:14on bits and pieces that I'd learned you know the only person I knew of who had bulimia was Princess

03:20Diana in those days. There were lots of men out there, big names, celebrities even had bulimia

03:26at those times that spoke about it years later like Elton John for instance but you know there

03:30was no visibility, no sort of anyone that I knew of that was in recovery, male or female and all of

03:38a sudden you know opened that can of worms you know in the sense that you know there was a whole

03:44you know thousands of men that contacted in those first few years. They were in exactly the same

03:49position as I was you know just very much on their own, not aware that other men were out there

03:54were suffering as well, that's kind of what my job was for that 10-year period to really focus on

04:00raising the awareness but also hopefully supporting the needs of men.

04:11The danger is I think we just treat eating disorders just as eating disorders that you

04:15know will just sort of come back and it might not necessarily be in the form of eating disorder,

04:21it can be through all sorts of things through drug and alcohol use, it could be through self-harm,

04:25it could be through, the list is endless. Now I kind of realised in the end that I was recovering

04:29from quite a number of different things and I swapped bulimia for alcohol throughout the course

04:35of my 20s and even though I was recovering from bulimia from the age of 21 I started drinking at

04:3924 and one of the things that I've realised you know have reflected on many years of what I've

04:47been through was the fact that underlying trauma like the bullying I mentioned at school because

04:52that had said had left such a sort of huge impact for me to me being at being where I'm at now

05:01you know I can sort of think about recovery in a more holistic way.

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