Eating disorders: Not just for women

By KRISTI EATON

VIEW ON HEALTH

Brandon Hunter sat painfully in the bathtub of his Kansas City, Mo., hotel room to call his sister. His body was wasting away, and with little body fat or muscle for cushion, the tub was rough against his bones.

After nine years of suffering from an eating disorder, Hunter was finally asking for help. “I said I wanted to die and I couldn’t do this anymore,” he recalls telling his sister.

When he returned home to Las Vegas from Kansas City, he found family members, friends, even old girlfriends, waiting for him. His family had found a place for him in Nevada to go for treatment for anorexia, only later to realize that they didn’t treat men for eating disorders. He was discouraged, and angry.

“I finally waved the flag that I want help, and now there’s no place in Nevada that will help men,” he says.

His insurance company wasn’t helping either. Before they would approve treatment for an eating disorder, they made him undergo a series of tests. They told him they didn’t believe he could have an eating disorder, because it’s stereotypically women or homosexual men who need treatment, not a straight man in his 20s.

Hunter, 29, was finally able to get the necessary treatment he needed at Rosewood Capri in Wickenburg, Ariz., a world-renowned eating disorder treatment facility. Hunter stayed there for 46 days.

Once considered strictly a disease for Caucasian females in their teens and early 20s, researchers are now realizing there are no limits on who can be affected by an eating disorder. The number of men and children with eating disorders has increased in the last decade. It’s estimated that 1 million men suffer from either anorexia, where the patient restricts food for fear of gaining weight, or bulimia, where the patient binges and purges on food, according to the National Eating Disorder Association. And tens of millions of the men in the United States have some form of disordered eating.

Eating disorders in children have seen a dramatic increase in the past 10 years as well. A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics shows hospitalizations for eating disorders in children under 12 increased 119 percent between 1999 and 2006.

Eating disorders are the most deadly of all mental health illnesses.

“Eating disorders in men are becoming more prevalent,” says San Diego-based clinical psychologist Joy Jacobs. “Even adolescent boys have seen an increase of anorexia.”

The disorder in boys and men like Hunter usually starts because they want to get healthier and more active and change their eating habits, she says. But, she adds, “things tend to just spiral out of control.”

“There’s a certain subset of people who are genetically susceptible,” says Jacobs, an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCSD School of Medicine. “There are some people when they do that, they are not able to stop. That’s what we’re seeing happen.”

Jacobs is currently treating several teenage boys. One 16-year-old boy in particular was trying to eat healthfully, but all of a sudden he lost 50 pounds, she says. His family intervened about six months into the weight loss and underwent family counseling. His family caught it quick, and he’s now on his way to recovery.

“We know that eating disorders, the longer they continue, the more difficult they are to treat. If identified early on, it’s easier to treat,” she says.

Jacobs has noticed one thing that motivates teen boys to overcome the illness is the adverse impact anorexia can have on their athletic performance.

“They don’t have energy, they feel cold all the time, they can’t keep up,” she says. For a teenage boy, this can be enough to ask for help.

She says parents should be concerned if their child stops eating foods that they used to love or eliminating whole food groups, or reading about calories.

“A little bit of education is good, but parents should worry if they become obsessed with calorie numbers and fat grams,” she says.

Becky Henry, who became an “unwitting expert” on eating disorders after her 14-year-old daughter was diagnosed with the disease and sought treatment for years, says the reasons behind the increase in the number of people, including men and teen boys, getting treated for eating disorders is complex.

“Partly, it may be due to increased awareness, improved knowledge in diagnosing and referring,” she says. “We are finally realizing that people of any age, size, race, gender, socioeconomic level and level of health can have an eating disorder.”

Henry interviewed individuals and families for a book she wrote about eating disorders called “Just Tell Her to Stop” that she hopes will eventually be in treatment centers all over the world to give people hope.

While more people are getting treated because of better awareness, she also believes the incidence rate is increasing.

Says Henry: “The pressures on young people are huge now and sports coaches are putting a lot of pressure on young people as well as the overall societal pressure to perform academically. These pressures, when combined with an underlying pre-disposition to these biological brain illnesses, can trigger them.”

Anorexia and bulimia are not illnesses people choose to have, she notes.

‘I KNEW IT WOULD PROBABLY KILL ME’

For Brandon Hunter, his battle lasted close to a decade before he made that life-changing bathtub phone call.

Growing up, Hunter said he was always a little on the heavy side. He was the kid that the other kids would make fun of and ridicule because of his pudgy body. There was even a little ridicule about his weight at home, too, he says. The constant teasing got to him, and he soon began envisioning what it would be like to look different.

“At 8 years old, when most kids want to grow up to be an athlete or firefighter, I always just wanted to know what it would be like to be skinny and not hear fat jokes,” says Hunter, a senior administration at MedicWest Ambulance in Las Vegas.

He would continue to toy with thoughts of what it would be like to be someone else, to not have to deal with the thoughts in his own head. Once he finished his high school he began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. “I’ve always experimented with mindsets that weren’t mind own, so I turned to drugs. I turned to liquor, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the thoughts of myself,” he says.

Ten years ago, when he got into the ambulance and paramedic field, Hunter vowed to clean himself up and remain sober, for himself and for the people he would potentially treat.

Then one day he got on the scale. It read 237 pounds. At 5’11”, it was the most he had ever weighed. He again made a vow. This time, he’d do whatever it would take to lose the weight.

He began running. Soon, though, he was going to the gym three to four times a day so he could fit in his 12 to 15 miles. He’d leave in the middle of parties so he could fit in his run, returning later with an excuse for why he had to suddenly leave. He’d carry a scale in a duffle bag with him so he could check his weight at a moment’s notice, often weighing himself 30 to 40 times a day.

The weight started coming off. When he hit the 200-pound mark, he was so happy he took a picture of the numbers on the scale. With the weight loss came an increase in his popularity, he says. Women started giving him more attention. Men and women complemented him on how he looked. Soon, though, weighing 200 wasn’t good enough. He needed to lose more weight. He got down to 190. Then 180. Then 170. Every time he reached the number he thought would make him happy, he’d realize it wasn’t good enough and vow to lose more.

His weight plummeted to 136 pounds. He began noticing his body was shutting down. He was getting heart palpitations. He couldn’t urinate due to a lack of nutrients. With his medical training, he knew what he was doing was hurting him, but he couldn’t stop.

“I knew it would probably kill me, but I felt so bad I didn’t care,” he says.

His lowest point came while he was in Kansas City for training. He started abusing diuretics because he couldn’t urinate. He hadn’t eaten in two days, but was still going to the gym religiously. He felt like he was going to vomit, but he had nothing in his body to throw up.

He lay down in that bathtub in his room and called his sister. He thought asking for help and seeking treatment was going to be the hardest part of his battle, but he soon learned he was wrong.

“After I was discharged, I was told Las Vegas is one of the worst places for support for an eating disorder,” he says. “There are plenty of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, but nothing for eating disorders in the Valley.”

So he started his own support group, a Las Vegas chapter of Eating Disorders Anonymous, a 12-step program in several states. The group began in August and meets every Tuesday from 8-9 p.m. at Rooms for Recovery on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas.

The highest number of people he ever had show up at a meeting was 14. The lowest number was one, aside from himself. Other men occasionally come, but he admits it’s more often than not a female majority.

ALCOHOL AND ANOREXIA

Like Hunter, Patrick Bergstrom’s descent into anorexia was combined with alcohol. Unlike Hunter, Bergstrom felt his life went smoothly until his 20s. Up until college, he never really struggled with anything, he says. He set and still holds all the lacrosse and several weight lifting records at Smithsburg High School in Hagerstown, Md., a small town 60 miles outside of Baltimore.

“However, when I went off to college, my world totally changed,” he says.

He went to the University of Tennessee but transferred to Wesley College in Dover, Del., after his first year when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. From there his life seemed to unravel. On the surface, his life seemed great, but he was struggling internally with his identity. He turned to alcohol and began focusing his attention on losing weight. It only got worse once he graduated from college.

“After college I bounced from job to job, was eating about one meal per day and drinking hard on weekends,” he says. “For about three years, I lived off of coffee and Red Bull, though nobody ever seemed to really notice.”

Just like Hunter, he tried to ask for help, only to be rebuffed.

“I tried to get help in 2006, but my problem was brushed off as just drinking too much,” says Bergstrom, 27. “I stopped drinking, but I was still not eating. I didn’t think guys got eating disorders and that’s what I was told. I spent many nights in tears and I wasn’t sleeping. I was totally miserable.”

While eating disorders in males are on the rise, he says it’s a disease that many still associate only with females.

“The scary thing is that guys really don’t get the help they need until they are beyond sick because nobody sees it as an illness men suffer from,” he adds.

It was in 2007, about a month before he was to get married, that Bergstrom cried out for help and entered treatment, where he spent 30 days.

He has since started I Chose To Live, a website that he says is more of a motivational recovery movement than just a site trying to provide awareness. It started as a way for him to connect and help others, but he has met some of his best friends through it.

“It’s really just a cause started by people in recovery trying to live free and celebrate life,” he says.

Warning signs for anorexia in males, according to Bergstrom, include isolation, use of energy drinks, excessive exercise, substance abuse and use of supplements. Also, take notice if someone is showing strong signs of denial and mood swings.