During my deepest days in my eating disorder, when I was barely struggling to survive, and yet, just…barely struggling to even recover…my dad used to ask me this all the time: “Is it because you cannot…or do not? Do you really want to get well? Or is it that you cannot get well?” Sometimes he would say it softly in deep sorrow. Sometimes, he would cry it out in exasperation and frustration. Other times, he would be raging out the question in anger at this obstinate demon inside of me that was unwilling to let me go.

That obstinate demon? That hideous, yet enchanting, and repelling, yet desirable stronghold over me…it wasn’t vanity. It wasn’t a desire to be thin like the rail-like models on the cover of Vogue magazine. I knew I looked horrible, and I hated the way I looked. I really, desperately, wanted to gain weight. But I wasn’t ready to recover…because I had fallen prey to the seductive, serpentine melody of something named Control. In short, I was not willing to give up the core of my disorder.

In my experience, anorexia formed from layers and layers of obsessive habits, behaviors, thoughts, and desires, all glued together with that addiction to control. I had built a deluded world for myself, in which the rules and principles designed by God did not apply. No, in this world, I was God. I planned and arranged my own rules and principles, and I relished in that rigid system over my lifestyle. Not blindly—I did read up on a lot of information, of course…in fact, maybe too much. Nutritional data, diet tips, exercise routine…I craved and licked up each knowledge…but I twisted them around so that they fit into my own neat little world of obsessions. I was safe in that world…because I was deranged under this sense of imaginary power I had over myself.

As you may already have guessed, this post will be heavy, and severely lacking of food. Let yourself be warned. But I urge you (eating disordered-history or not) to read on. The story shared by this particular person will take at most 10 minutes to read…but its message may stick with you for far longer than that.

Joseph (not his real name) is a young college student with whom I’ve been in contact with for several months. To be honest, I still have the tendency to think that guys have cooties. But somehow, we’ve connected through a common struggle—the addiction for Control through a vicious disease called Eating Disorder. And I have to confess—I used to be one of those people in society to put a stigma on males. The stereotype that males should be tough, manly, and impervious to frivolous concerns like weight and beauty.

Well, Joseph proved me wrong…and he’s opened my eyes into the reality that males struggle with body image, and many of the same struggles that we females do…like control. As I said, my eating disorder did not stem from mere vanity, and neither did Joseph, and neither, I suspect, did most eating disordered individuals. It really started under an obsession to have power over something, which in truth is just a deceived illusion. The sad truth is, such stereotypes against eating disorder prevent many sufferers to ask for help. It certainly took me a long time to admit that I have an eating disorder. And for guys, it’s worse, because they are too pressured by social expectations and stigma to ask for help, in fear that they will be judged and berided for caring about “beauty”.

Thus Joseph has asked to be kept anonymous. But he’s more than willing to share his story. The story of a male with social pressures in the real world, the experiences of a person struggling with an eating disorder, and the testimony of a Christian who has only just realized the infinite and personal Love of God.

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A Different Kind of Fasting
by a certain “Joseph”

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

I repeated the words anxiously to myself in the darkened church, as each silent syllable weighed more heavily on my racing mind. Unadorned, cold and lightly attended, the scene inside the local Newman center that morning seemed indicative of the very day, or at least my conceptions of how it should be. It wasn’t as though I had never read the lines before, and it wasn’t as if this particular Ash Wednesday was — to borrow a phrase from the poet — to be given the value of something long looked forward to.
If anything, it was to be quite the opposite. Because when you’re a young Christian man fighting an eating disorder, the idea of fasting carries (pardon the pun) quite a bit of weight. 

But that is to start in media res, and to get too far ahead of myself. After all, you probably didn’t expect to be greeted by the words of one the 20th century’s most prolific poets when you logged onto Burp and Slurp today, much less the confession of someone currently immersed in the struggle to recover from an eating disorder. If the fact that I’m not Sophia, combined with the fact that I’m also male, doesn’t further catch your attention; well, then every rhetorical device I claim to wield may as well be sheathed for the time being. 

But if I have caught your attention then I ask you to bear with me, because the season of Lent has coxed me out of the cocoon of self-denial, and awakened me to the need to seek recovery.

Like many who go through the trials of an eating disorder, there is an innate struggle for me to identify a time and place where it all began, as well as a particular motive for why it began and the factors which ultimately escalated the behaviors associated with the disorder to the point of my own self-destruction. We all have our own stories when it comes to how we ended up where we are, but in the interest of space and time, I’ll refrain from the details. All that matters for the time being is that in a period of 18-20 months I not only lost some 45 pounds of healthy body weight (much of it muscle), but more profoundly, lost most of my friends, my interests, and my very identity. 

But that wasn’t all I lost.

I guess it never occurred to me that the behavior I was engaged in – the over-exercising, the long and tedious walking, the restriction of anything less than healthy, less than optimal – could have serious repercussions. Sure, I talked of recovery with my nutritionist and therapist, but at the end of the day I hid behind the façade of tomorrow. “Tomorrow,” I would say at the end of each night, “is when you will challenge yourself.” “Tomorrow,” I would say after a day of restriction, “you will make up for what you lost today.” But tomorrow never came, and it wasn’t until late January that I learned the truth of the matter. If I kept pushing against my body, my mind and even God himself, then tomorrow might never come. 

To cut to the chase, I found myself in a hospital bed hooked up to an EKG and an IV, all the while being probed by a small army of nurses and technicians who I had never planned on seeing. That “bum leg” I went to get checked out at my school’s student health center might have only been a short-term effect of my inability to break the treadmill’s sinister embrace, but the severe bradycardia which the doctors discovered was much more threatening. To be 21 years old and to have a doctor tell you that you may need surgery for a pacemaker isn’t just scary – it is defiantly surreal. As for my condition, the cause of it was easily explainable. I had in fact brought myself to this point, and despite my concerns over the long-term health effects, I was told that a full recovery from my ED would likely alleviate the condition of my heart.

Pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

Was the experience a prayer answered? I asked this question to myself in the pew, returning once more to the setting of that early morning service nearly a month ago which began the season of Lent. For us Catholics, Lent is a time of self-reflection, abstinence and fasting; all with the inherent goal of bringing each believer more closely aligned with God by tearing down the physical and mental barriers of this world which so often stand between us and Him. Yet that morning in the church, even some two weeks removed from the biggest scare of my life, I still found myself in a state of debilitating debate over issues relating to my ED. Even as I should have been focusing on the meaning of Lent I found myself asking the familiar questions and attempting to plan out every last aspect of the day’s eating, exercise and school work — once again letting the meaningless details of this life interfere with the importance of my true value in attaining salvation in the next. “How vain was I?” I asked myself angrily. Here I was, incredibly underweight and unhealthy, and I was proposing to actually go through the day as a normal Catholic would and fast?  Was it my spirit I was hoping to enrich, or was it the disorder which had already robbed me of so much? 

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

The answer was the latter, and only after repeating the lines of the poet and staring above the pew at the unadorned crucifix did I have the courage to admit this. And in that moment, some two weeks removed from promising God I would recover (only to half-heartedly give the attempt), did it hit me. If I wanted to grow closer to God, and if I wanted to free myself, I would have to undergo a different kind of fasting, and have to give up something much more meaningful than I had ever given up for Lent before. 
It’s been four weeks since that day, and tying my recovery to the spiritual exercises involved in Lent has been, I believe, the first positive step I’ve made in quite some time. Not only have I lived up to a promise made to God that I would stop weighing myself on a weekly basis, but I’ve gradually begun to give my faith and trust over to the professionals he had blessed me to have come into contact with. I’ve begun to look back on my hospitalization and “wake-up” call as a blessing, and have become aware of the life long sapped of color that I now want to live. Even in this time of self-inspection and denial, I have been overjoyed to learn that there are people in this world who care, and the person they care about is the far-from “ideal “image that I have nearly destroyed myself in trying to create. 

Still, to sit here today and say that I am recovered would be a lie. Likewise, to sit here today and tell you that my daily battles of recovery have been overwhelming successes would also be to evade the truth. There is work too still be done, and further steps that I desperately need to take. I still struggle in daily conflict with the numbers game, the veiled deceit of ‘healthful’ eating that shouldn’t (and doesn’t) apply to my situation. The constant calculations of saturated fat and added sugars; the “eat this, not that” mentality that saturates a society of chronic dieters. Yet, even as I continue to struggle, I draw strength from the poet’s words.

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

I pray every night that God gives me the strength to win this unseen struggle, and the courage to turn away from the constant debates in my mind and sit still. When it comes to eating and dieting we know too much, and the knowledge of what is truly good and bad for us – or at least what we think is good and bad for us — has the potential to ruin our lives. I never began this escapade thinking I would get to this pathetic state, nor did I want to. In fact, if there is one myth about eating disorders that must be put to rest, it is that they result exclusively from “body image” issues. 

So what is at the root of this scourge and these debilitating behaviors which have drastically and negatively affected my life?  It has taken me a long time to discover this, but my real “issues” revolve not so much around how I look or how I feel or wish to feel, but rather the gripping need for control. It is this need for control, coupled with a longing sense of searching for validation in what is healthy or correct, which I believe is at the root of many eating disorders, especially for males. To make a long story short, and to press over the details, my own struggle began during a time in my life when I became “fed up” with events outside of my control, and decided that I could no longer risk being vulnerable or leaving things to chance. It just seemed like nothing was working out in my life, and in my pursuit of perfection in so many areas — academic, physical fitness, that ‘All American’ boy image was trying to conform to — the only way to achieve my goals was to build in the necessary control aspects to assure myself that I could reach those false values. Here was a situation in which I was taking my trust and the direction of my life away from God, and putting it completely in my own human (and thus flawed) hands. At the same time I desperately needed some kind of validation, some illustrious (if not false) pat on the back each day to let me know that I was in fact someone special, and I was doing the right thing. By conforming to these control aspects in my life I was thus accomplishing both tasks, but at what price? The answer, I hope you have discovered, is painfully clear. 

As I have alluded to, my challenge this Lent has been, in a way, the familiar challenge. That is to say I have given something up, and given something up that is both profound in the way I live my life but also detrimental to the way I behave. Yet unlike most peoples’ Lenten experience, my sacrifice involves a different kind of Fasting, and instead focuses on a giving up of the control aspects tied to my eating disorder (as well as my habits to overwork and over-analyze my ‘progress’ in my academic and professional careers) instead of giving up the ‘usual’ Lenten sacrifices of a favorite food or minor habit. The goal is the same – surrendering to God’s will – yet the way in which to meet the goal remains unorthodox. But it is my hope and prayer that by tending to this exercise in spiritual discipline, and by giving up my need for complete control and knowledge over the food choices in my life, I will finally tear down the walls which I have built between God and myself. This is the meaning of Lent, and this is the meaning of fasting.

I left church that morning with the familiar sign of the cross scribbled in black ashes across my forehead. But that is not all that I left the service with. I left, for the first time in a long time, with a sense of peace and trust, and a sense of validation for the mission I was embarking upon. It wasn’t as if I was free from all anxiety, and it was not that I had seemingly found a path towards simple and straightforward recovery. Yet the debate at hand (as well as the decision over whether or not to fast in the literal sense on that particular day) had been decided. And with those first steps, and with the silent offering of a day of full and complete meals, I took up my own cross and embraced the spirit of this most holy of seasons. Looking down at the poem I carried in my hands, I felt an odd serenity come over me, and a feeling that my lonely cry was somehow, somewhere being heard. 

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

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I don’t think I can add any more than Joseph already has so eloquently expressed, except to ask you to…Share your thoughts?

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