Please be advised that the following content includes discussions and references to eating disorders, and exercise caution when reading if you experience disordered eating or are affected by content regarding disordered eating. Seek professional resources—including those below—if needed.
George Mycock can trace his problems with binge eating back to sports. As a boy in junior high, he often felt inadequate. He can even recall being scared of the third Harry Potter film during the scene when one of the Hogwarts professors transforms into a werewolf. But he was also taller and bigger than all of his classmates, and that made him a star on the rugby field.
“I had a really low sense of self-worth and just didn’t think I was good enough for a number of reasons. I didn’t think I was masculine enough,” he says. “Rugby was my way of proving that I was.”
When he was 13, though, he broke a vertebra during a match, and it sidelined him for a year—not only from the field but also from school. When he returned the following term, his body had changed. “All of my friends kind of noticed. I wouldn’t describe it as bullying, but people definitely treated me differently,” Mycock says. “I took that as a loss of people thinking I was worthy. And the way that I attributed all that was to my body weight.”
Beginning at age 15, and over the next decade, he started hitting the gym hard. He began to lose weight and build muscle, and as the compliments rolled in, Mycock took his training regimen even further. He exercised more and usually went to the gym multiple times a day, every day of the week, while also restricting his diet and taking loads of supplements. Eventually, he plateaued at the gym, as his muscular gains slowed, and he struggled to keep up with the extreme workout routine he set for himself. That’s how his eating disorder developed.
“I was getting so much positive feedback when I was losing weight that I just thought: ‘I’ll do more exercise, and I’ll eat less food,’” he says.
Males and eating disorders typically aren’t thought of in the same sentence. “When people think eating disorder, they usually think anorexia and women,” says Reggie Ash, LPCC-S, a licensed professional clinical counselor and director of therapy at Equip, a California-based company that provides virtual eating disorder treatment.
Men, however, and especially young men, are still susceptible. About one in three eating disorders will occur in men—and of that number, another one-third are teenage boys trying to gain weight in order to build muscle. In the U.S. alone, it’s estimated that 10 million men suffer from some type of eating disorder.
According to Casey Tallent, PhD, the national director of collegiate and telebehavioral health at the Eating Recovery Center in Denver, Colorado, a common pattern for men who are bulking is to restrict foods, work out hard, feel hungry, and then binge, which hits on two of the most common types of eating disorders in men: restrictive and avoidant tendencies and binging. “Oftentimes what we see in binging is that it’s an effect of restricting or of exercising so hard that you’re hungry,” she says. “Men try to work out and eat a clean diet, and then the physical hunger kicks in.”
