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.”
Oftentimes, this begins as a result of wanting to obtain a certain body image, which is something Mycock can relate to. When he began working out, he fixated on men in the fitness industry with “big shoulders, big arms, and abs.” That became the body he wanted, and he directed his workout regimen toward that singular goal. As he worked out more and more, though, he soon equated his quest to get jacked with his personal value.
“I tied my ability to work towards this body as a moral thing. It was: ‘I’m a better person because I can do those things,’” he says. “So when I couldn’t, I was a worse person, and it confirmed to me what I felt deep inside: I wasn’t good enough.”
This sort of muscle dysmorphia—obsessive concern over how muscular one is—can be a powerful catalyst in bringing on binge eating, according to Ash and Tallent. Roughly one-quarter of all dieters go on to develop an eating disorder, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. Oftentimes, it’s that link between trying to control one’s body and being unable to that leads to some sort of unhealthy relationship with food, says Tallent.
Mycock experienced this first-hand. He cut food while trying to get his body to adhere to a certain ideal, and when that didn’t happen, he binged. “I just felt like the only way to feel OK was to order food and eat until I felt sick,” he says.
Despite the struggles men can have with binge eating, Ash and Tallent both point out it’s less likely to get treated, let alone diagnosed. Some of this has to do with the fact that male eating disorders take a backseat. The most recent comprehensive study on men and disordered eating, published in 2019, points out that less than one percent of peer-reviewed studies relate to anorexia nervosa in men alone. The reason for this, to some extent, relates to the stereotypes around who’s likely to encounter a problem with disordered eating.
According to Ash, one thing that can ultimately help men is the right support from friends and family. If someone else a guy trusts can point out the problem, they’re more likely to go to counseling.
For Mycock, that’s exactly how it went down. During the sophomore year of college, around age 21, he had hit his lowest point. He kept to himself whenever he wasn’t attending classes and stayed in his dorm room. When one of his friends realized she hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, she showed up. “I just told her how shitty I was feeling,” he recalls. “And she convinced me that I need to speak to someone to try to get some help.”
These days, Mycock runs MyoMinds, a mental health organization that conducts research on disordered eating. He’s also working on a doctorate at the University of Worcester, looking at muscularity-oriented issues in men. And he no longer feels the need to binge.
For more on male eating disorders, check out the resource page at Eating Disorder Hope.
And if you or a friend is suffering from an eating disorder, contact the helpline provided by the National Eating Disorders Association.
