“Hi, I’m Justin. I’m new here,” I introduced myself. What the hell was I doing there? I felt like Sasquatch at a ballet recital. At 22 years old, 200 pounds of lean muscle mass and 4 percent body fat, I sat and listened to women describe their anorexia. Which is the most fatal mental health condition. Organ failure, wasting away, suicide. It’s deadly serious, more so than any other psychiatric illness. Good thing I’m different, I thought.
I was sitting in the group therapy circle at a specialized unit for eating disorders at a hospital in New Jersey—the only man among 26 women, including teenagers and an 11-year-old. Several were ballet dancers. And then me, the new in-patient. A 16-year-old talked about needing to be smaller. I didn’t get it. She was tiny already. Me? I needed to be bigger. I grew up with 1980s action movies. Conan the Barbarian was like an uncle to me.
Actually, my father was my personal Conan. A competitive bodybuilder, he wore neon-pink bikini bottoms and flexed onstage. He would take me backstage at his competitions and toss me a bottle of spray tan: “Here son, go ahead and grease up your dad!” Meanwhile, my mom would sneak me chocolate cupcakes in the supermarket.
By 2002, those forces converged into a confused, weightlifting, binge-eating law student named Justin. I crashed hard. One night I had enough of my cycles and was ready to end them all. For good. That’s what landed me in the hospital.
I’d spend the next 28 days with my friendly ED group circle. Though we were cut from the same cloth, it didn’t sink in. On my second day, the nurses yelled at me for doing pushups. “Exercise is good for you,” I retorted. I guess my co-patients had never tried to do 200 crunches on a linoleum floor, so there was no hospital workout policy in place. I was downright ready to rumble when I learned the bathroom door policy: “Open at all times.” I’m a grown man, and I get stage fright, I argued at the wedge desk of nurses. Blank stares. One of the “Skills” sessions was learning how to eat food, and why it’s good for you … Seriously? I looked around at my horrified co-patients. Not me. I knew how to eat. Jumbo industrial cans of tuna with salsa—pure protein, no fat, no sugar. That’s an iron warrior’s meal plan.
Then there was the actual hospital food. It was decent, even tasty, but I had preferences. I started a mutiny when I refused to eat rice pudding. I don’t like milk or gelatinous dairy. “Pick a state of physics,” I snarkily quipped. The 11-year-old and a few others joined my nutrition sedition. Flanked by the entire nurse squad, I was escorted out of the lunchroom and rewarded with another private counseling session by the head doctor. “Justin, we have a system here …”
All I kept thinking was: They don’t know me. They don’t know how to deal with me. They kept calling me bulimic. But I never threw up. The doctor tried to point out that the definition of bulimia includes forms of compensation like purging, but also compensatory exercise and fasting. I mean, did I run on a treadmill at the highest incline going full sprint because I hated myself for inhaling two Papa John’s supreme pizzas—with buttery dipping sauce? Who doesn’t—am I right? And skipping a few meals to bring that stomach back down to washboard flatness after gorging on Jack-in-the-Box chicken sandwiches just makes good sense. Are these compensatory measures according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? To me, they were vital skills and techniques that gave me power—He-Man transforming from weak Prince Adam.
Identification is a threshold step for healing. Maybe if I had seen another man in the ED center who looked like me, who knew the riddle of steel, the pain of the squat rack, and the shame of the ice cream aisle, I might have found a crack in my armor. Or maybe, quite simply, I just wasn’t ready. I learned years later that recovery is for those who want it, not for those who need it. And that eating disorders can have some of the longest relapse trajectories of all the substance abuse disorders.
But back then, sitting across from the women in the hospital group circles, I couldn’t see it—our similarity despite our disparity. They had their own riddle of steel—their wrought-iron guts and pure ferrum will. Forget my 300-pound bench press. Brooke, who I later dated and knew well after we left the hospital, was stronger than me. She was a graceful ballerina from Toronto who weighed 86 pounds. I never knew the pain of perpetual, systematic refusal of all food. At the time, I considered myself no more than a self-obsessed gym rat worried about my six-pack.
But anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating … They are all related, and I was more alike to these women than I knew. Eating disorders, like many substance abuse disorders, involve distorted ego, an imbalanced swing from low self-esteem to egosyntonic—aka pride. I discovered that my anorexic co-patients, some of whom later became my dear friends, didn’t actually want to be thinner. They wanted to disappear. Too much self. The same way that the more I lifted weights and the bigger I got, the more I binged. Too much me.
I would spend eight more years battling my binge eating, and it would be 11 years between my hospital stay and the time it was recognized as a separate affliction in the DSM-V, in 2013. In that same time, between 2000 and 2018, eating disorders doubled around the world, with binge eating becoming the most common form and the least understood—an estimated 3 percent of the U.S. population suffers from it.
I now know that I was addicted to the highs and lows. Being at the bottom of a pendulum swing was where I came alive. Eating a shitty, greasy meal was a reason to eat healthy the next time. Screwing up was a welcome and distracting raison d’etre. A mission, a purpose—it staves off contentment, boredom, and death. You can tell me to have a nice day. That’s easy to ignore, because it’s fake. But tell me to have a regular day? I will freak the F out. That’s my worst nightmare, my Sisyphean mountain, my impossible challenge. That’s why I needed my pendulum of “good food” versus “bad food.”
I now know that most men like me suffer in silence, being more isolated and lonely than ever.
Gym culture can often mask eating disorders and body dysmorphia for young boys and men. It did for me. I thought my shredded midsection meant I was doing great—never mind the starving and fasting and binging that came with it. And the horrible turmoil. My angsty outer armor of self-sufficiency that was tearing me apart.
I had to learn my lessons the hardest way. Through more pain. More late-night binges. More failed willpower. More scorched-soul emptiness. Relapse became my inescapable teacher. In 2010, I was finally ready to admit defeat. With my own two feet, I walked into a recovery meeting and said the first true thing I could think of: “Hi, I’m Justin. I’m new here. And I think I need some help.”