‘I thought I’d invented it’
Actor opens up about males and eating disorders
Sam Thomas spent four years vomiting up the contents of his school lunch box before he ever heard the word “bulimia.” Bullied in school for getting top marks and having an effeminate manner, Thomas took refuge one day in the boys’ lavatory, where he wolfed down his packed lunch before throwing it back up, starting a daily ritual he calls “bingeing and purging”, which continued for much of the next decade. It was the 1990s, and teachers at his school in Southport, Merseyside, never mentioned eating disorders. Nor had he seen them discussed on television.
“I thought it was something that I’d invented, something unique to me,” the 33- year- old recalls. “At the time, I don’t think we were even having conversations about women with eating disorders. It wasn’t on anyone’s radar. I certainly didn’t think it was damaging my health.”
But Thomas’s story is not unique. Last week, actor Christopher Eccleston became the latest high- profile man to speak out on the issue, opening up about his decades- long battle with anorexia in his new autobiography. “Many times I’ve wanted to reveal that I’m a lifelong anorexic and dysmorphic,” the 55- year- old writes in I Love the Bones of You. “I never have. I always thought of it as a filthy secret, because I’m northern, because I’m male and because I’m working class.”
The number of adult men admitted to hospital with an eating disorder rose by 70 per cent between 2011 and 2017, according to figures, which showed a particularly sharp jump in midlife men aged between 41 and 60. Men now make up about one in 10 of those diagnosed with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, once considered the preserve of teenage girls and housewives.
Eccleston suggests his revelation might come as a surprise to fans of Doctor Who, many of whom remember him as a perfectly healthy- looking Time Lord in 2005. “The illness was still raging within me as the Doctor,” he writes. “People love the way I look in that series, but I was very ill. The reward for that illness was the part. And therein lies the perpetuation of the whole sorry situation.”
But male anorexia does not always lead to visible weight loss, says Dr. Victor Thompson, a clinical sports psychologist. “You can’t always tell just by looking at somebody, particularly if they’re always a bit thin. You can detect some weight loss, perhaps, but you can also start to notice behavioural changes, too — are they not eating in front of you? Are they making excuses? Are they making quite unusual food choices — lots of celery, vegetables, no protein or fat?”
Dr. Thompson says that patients with anorexia or bulimia feel they have lost control over an aspect of their lives — an affliction as acute for men as it is for women. “It might sound crazy in hindsight, when it gets extreme, but initially when you start going to the gym or dieting you see results, and that can be very reinforcing.”
For Thomas, wanting to get thin was never his chief concern. Instead, he explains his bulimia as a “coping mechanism” to deal with his school bullies: “It’s externalizing that awful feeling you get, in a similar way as somebody might cut themselves. It’s releasing what’s trapped inside you that’s just absolutely doing your head in.”
He didn’t discover what bulimia was until he read one of his mother’s women’s magazines at 15, and even then continued to keep his illness secret: “The interesting thing about bulimia — and I think this is more the case with men — is that it’s very secretive, because the signs aren’t obvious. For a young woman with anorexia, I think the signs would be fairly obvious, because they’d lose weight quickly, whereas for men it doesn’t get picked up. Men have more muscle bulk than fat content, so a man who’s restricting could actually look very toned.”
Thomas sought treatment at the age of 18, and eventually recovered with the help of youth workers. He now works as a mental health campaigner and hasn’t “purged” since he was in his early 20s.
Some experts say that men have always suffered eating disorders — now, thanks to a shift in attitudes, they are just more comfortable going to the doctor for a diagnosis.
Samuel Pollen, whose novel The Year I Didn’t Eat, was inspired by his own experience of having anorexia as a 12- year- old, says the old stereotype of a “teenage girl throwing up after ballet” is losing its hold, and the public now understand that people with anorexia and bulimia come in many shapes and sizes.
But he also blames our increasingly fitness- obsessed society, which, in the age of Love Island and Instagram, puts ever more pressure on young men to look the perfectly- toned part: “You always had bodybuilders who ate raw eggs, but now half the people in my office drink protein shakes.
“We worry about what we eat ... there are positive sides to that, but there also can be negative sides if you’re the sort of person who absorbs rules and tries to perfect everything,” Pollen says.