My Messy Life

  Yep... I'm going there. Why? Because it's such an important topic that is usually missed, forgotten or quietly ignored when we discuss eating disorders and how they can affect our bodies; especially with predominantly (cisgender) men who have eating disorders. Being a cisgender man with an eating disorder, this is something that was missed, time and time again, and has had huge effects on my life and - potentially - my future. When I filled in my first questionnaire about my eating disorder for my GP, one of the questions was "Women only: Have you stopped having periods". Of course I skipped over that question, it didn't apply to me so obviously issues like that wouldn't affect men, right? Wrong. Firstly, I want to point out that most people who mensurate will not lose their periods because of their eating disorder, and I don't think it should be used as a criteria to allocate treatment or who is "worse", as eating disorders affect everyone in ...

If you were to say to society "what is an eating disorder?" despite the awareness campaigns and work that has been done, I can guarantee the majority response will still be along the lines of "an underweight, white, teenage girl". Whilst it is true that this demographic does sadly suffer from eating disorders, it is far from the whole story. When I started struggling aged 11, I can honestly say I had never known of a man with an eating disorder. Nor, it seems, had any of the medical professionals who denied me support and basically gaslit me for many years, ignoring what was really going on because "Men don't get eating disorders, right?" Wrong... so wrong. The UK Eating Disorders charity Beat estimates that 25% of sufferers are male. Personally, I think this is a bit of an underestimate, but the truth is we just don't know. We don't know the true numbers of eating disorders full-stop due to stigma, misunderstandings, ignorance and an ingrained...

There is no doubt, living with an Eating Disorder is hard. Your mind using any excuse to revert to the disordered behaviours that maintain the illness. What can make it even harder is living with other chronic health issues at the same time. The constant balancing act of trying to manage both in the best way possible without ever really getting it right. Two of these issues for me is living with my Stoma and Chronic Bowel Issues. For those who aren't fully aware, I will be doing lots on Stomas in the near future. But here I want to focus on the effects of it, and my wider bowel issues, and how that can really impact my eating disorder. My stoma was needed because of chronic constipation and a bowel prolapse, something I had before my eating disorder, but the ED has exacerbated the issue, and caused me to do irreparable damage to my digestive system. Digestive issues are known complications of eating disorders too. My stoma affects my life in a lot of ways: It means I have to i...

Exercise: It's always a good thing, right? Well, that's what society tells us, ingrains into ours' and our children's minds from a very young age.  "The more the better",  "No pain, no gain", "Don't be so lazy", "You'll get unhealthy". The list goes on...  But by using such binary language, we miss the truth:  Yes, exercise CAN be really healthy for the majority of the population. That it is true that many could perhaps improve their wellbeing by being more active, and that exercise can be an amazing aid for both our physical and mental wellbeing. BUT What about the other side of things? What about when it damages your health? What about when exercise becomes toxic? This is my experience. Exercise no longer serves a positive purpose in my life - in honesty it hasn't for nearly a decade. It's put me in hospital once, and nearly on a number of other occasions. It's destroyed my social life, done permanent physica...