My eating disorder was not spotted because I was a boy
You Are What You Wear star Darren Kennedy tells Elizabeth Archer how a restrictive diet blighted his adolescence
WHEN Darren Kennedy looks back on his teenage years, the memories are wrought with pain.
Struggling with being gay while attending a Catholic boys’ school in Ireland, he developed an eating disorder which blighted two years of his life.
Now, Darren, 39, is keen to speak about his struggles.
“As I’ve matured I’m more at ease discussing these things,” he said. “It pains me to think of young people going through what I went through, which is why I’ve always been open about my experience.
“People assume that men are fine and don’t suffer with issues with their body or want to lose weight. I still think we’ve a long way to go until we recognise that men struggle too.”
Looking back on his early childhood, Darren had a healthy relationship with food.
He said: “I’m the middle of three children, and in a good old Irish family you always have to sit down and eat together and polish off the plate.
“Food waste wasn’t allowed. I always loved my food and was encouraged to eat.”
But when he was a teenager, a family member made a comment about his appetite.
Darren said: “I remember one day when I was about 14 or 15, we were at a family occasion at a relative’s house and someone made a comment about how much I ate. My uncle replied, ‘It’s all fun and games now, but wait until you hit 18 and it’ll catch up with you’.
“I didn’t react or say anything at the time, but it lived with me.”
Then about the same time, someone at school remarked on Darren’s weight. “I remember an older student making a comment about my size. I was probably chubby but never obese. It triggered something in me and it compounded what my uncle had said.”
Darren began to restrict what he was eating. “All I lived on was cereal and sandwiches and the weight dropped off me.”
Meanwhile, his restrictive diet went unnoticed by his parents. “Because I’d never had an issue with eating when I was a kid, my parents didn’t really monitor what I ate.”
He lost weight rapidly and finally friends began to notice.
“People made comments and I thought, ‘Great, this is working’. Those comments fuelled me with positive encouragement, although people didn’t realise that’s what they were doing.”
Darren became obsessed with checking his appearance.
He said: “Every time I ate I was obsessed with seeing if my stomach was bloated and I thought I had a fat face. Eating would send me into a guilt spiral – a vicious circle.”
Looking back, Darren can see how unhappy he was at the time. “I was coming out to myself and coming to terms with my own sexuality,” he said.
“I went to a Christian Brothers all-boys school where if you played Gaelic football you were kind of on a pedestal – and I didn’t. I stood out for all the wrong reasons and I got bullied.”
Eventually, he came out to his friends and family and was relieved to be accepted.
Darren said: “I started coming out when I was around 16, to my closest friends who were girls. And then I came out to my brother first and then my sister shortly afterwards. My brother said: ‘Don’t tell mam and dad’. So I held off for a while and eventually told them when I was 18.”
It was about the time that the grip his eating disorder had on his life began to loosen. But food still occupied his thoughts. He said: “If I wasn’t eating food, then I was thinking about food.”
In his mid-20s, Darren worked as a reporter and producer on an Irish TV programme about food. “We had a dietician and I worked with her creating videos and meal plans. And I learnt a lot about food that I didn’t know and about how to eat healthily.”
His experiences are one of the reasons he is proud to be a presenter on new BBC show You Are What You Wear, alongside Rylan Clark-Neal.
The programme, he says, encourages men and women of all shapes and sizes to love the way they look. Darren said: “It’s very much about making the most of what you have.”
You Are What You Wear is on BBC One on Thursdays at 8pm
If I wasn’t eating, then I was thinking about food