‘Male eating disorders tend to fly under the radar’: How it feels to suffer from anorexia as a teenage boy

Samuel Pollen’s eating disorder was a habit that started small and snowballed – meals that shrunk over weeks and months, exercise routines that went from healthy to obsessive

Many people still believe eating disorders only affect young women (Shutterstock)

Being 12 years old is not easy. You’re finding your feet at school, you’re on the precipice of puberty and you’re desperately trying to understand the person you’re becoming, even though that person is changing every single day.

It was at this age that I developed an eating disorder, which, as you can imagine, made everything 10 times worse.

The number of boys with eating disorders has soared in recent years, and yet, many people still subscribe to the belief that this is an illness that only affects young women.

And it’s not surprising, given that’s the stereotypical narrative that mainstream media projects: women worry about the way they look, men don’t. As a result, parents of teenage girls may be better-equipped to recognise the warning signs for an eating disorder. They are on the lookout for fad diets and obsessive trips to the gym or bathroom – the signs that newspapers and TV shows have told them to look for. Parents of 12- and 13-year-old boys, however, may not be nearly as vigilant.

Hence, I was able to keep my eating disorder a secret for a while.

When I was at my worst, I retreated from the world around me. Friends invited me over and I told them I was busy. When my parents wanted to take me somewhere, I resisted.

Almost all social occasions involve food. Even if you’re going out for a meal, it’s popcorn at cinema trips, ice cream for days in the park. When you’re 12, it’s very hard to not eat at these occasions without drawing attention to yourself. And the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself.

So instead, whenever I could, I chose to be alone. Every day after school I would race home and lock myself in my bedroom, where I would read a book, play video games, or just stare at the walls. It was boring, but at least no one was looking at me. And I didn’t have to eat.

For me, having an eating disorder was about a habit: a habit that started small and snowballed; meals that shrunk over weeks and months; exercise routines that went from healthy to obsessive. According to eating disorder charity Beat, these are common symptoms.

I carried on eating three meals a day but those meals grew smaller and smaller.

Each ingredient was carefully weighed and entered into my food journal: neat rows of numbers told me exactly how many calories I was consuming, right down to the milk in a cup of tea. I also started to exercise obsessively, running every day, farther and farther, as though I could outrun what was happening to me.

Soon, these behaviours calcified into routines, and deviating from them became unthinkable. If I took a day off running – because I’d pulled a muscle, say – I felt like a failure. I weighed everything I ate, because I couldn’t trust the numbers printed on the packaging. It doesn’t take long for something to become normalised, an intrinsic part of who you are – especially when you’re 12 years old, and your identity is fluid.

This is why experts stress early intervention, because the sooner these habits are addressed, the more likely it is they can be broken. Eating disorders can be deadly and early intervention is key to making a full recovery, says Beat. What you don’t know can kill you. It nearly killed me.

My parents knew something was seriously wrong, but they didn’t know how to fix it. They were in between a rock and a hard place, obviously wanting me to change my habits without putting pressure on me, because they knew pressure could make things worse. To start with, they thought the food journal was a good idea, since it would demonstrate that I wasn’t eating nearly enough. But even that quickly became a kind of game, where I tried to score lower and lower each day. Dealing with an eating disorder sufferer is hard because their behaviour is irrational, changing like the wind. Whatever my parents tried, I would somehow throw it back in their face.

My friends, for the most part, didn’t notice. Many have seemed really shocked when I’ve since told them about my eating disorder. On the one hand, this seems incredible to me – when I look at photos from that time, I’m so obviously sick. But at 12, everyone’s body is transforming. Furthermore, from my experience, boys generally spend a lot less time scrutinising each other’s bodies than girls. It was easier for me to slip under the radar.

One day, when I was 13 years old, I got the flu. I was too weak to get upstairs to my bedroom or for my mum to get me into the car. I’d managed to hide from my parents just how bad things had become. The call-out doctor referred me to Camhs, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, for outpatient treatment.

I was lucky. My treatment began almost immediately and went relatively smoothly. I think just the diagnosis alone helped – a medical authority telling me how seriously wrong things were. A nutritionist put me on a diet plan that helped me gain weight, while a clinical psychologist got to work breaking my habits and the irrational lines of thinking that lay behind them. The end, just like the start, is hard to pinpoint, but by the time I was 14 I was a normal weight and eating healthily without thinking too much about it.

Some people struggle with eating disorders for much longer than I did, and those are often the stories we hear because they are so tragic. But I think it’s also important to talk about the other outcome – that you can recover completely, and go on to lead a healthy life. People are shocked when I tell them this. But these days, besides my minor discomfort with sharing plates, I don’t worry about my eating at all.

Why did it happen? That’s always the hardest question, because there’s no single answer. I was an anxious child. I tended to push myself academically, and felt it keenly when I fell short. This wasn’t because of a pressure anyone else put on me. No one was punishing me for falling short or telling me they were disappointed. The high expectations were all in my head. But not eating gave me something I could win at, something I knew was entirely in my control. For a certain type of person, self-denial is powerfully addictive. You grow to love the feeling of going without – and once you’ve started, it gets harder and harder to stop.

Many people are looking for somewhere to place the blame on the reason why eating disorders among men are on the rise. Being able to compare myself to millions of (artfully filtered, aesthetically perfect) others on Instagram, as a young man today, certainly wouldn’t have helped my eating disorder but equally, social media isn’t the sole cause of mental health issues. It’s an easy target, in the same way some women’s magazines full of stick-thin models have always been easy targets. Goodness knows, we should talk about their influence – but we should also discuss the stretched NHS, which makes the early intervention that is so important in successful eating disorder treatment a huge challenge. We should concentrate on our culture of self-denial, in which sugar and carbohydrates are evil, and fasting is increasingly normalised.

When it’s comes to men’s eating disorders specifically, there’s still a huge recognition problem. That’s partly why I chose to write a teen book, The Year I Didn’t Eat, about a 14-year-old boy with anorexia. I want people to see a little of what it’s like – not just the dramatic moments, but the everyday reality of living through something like that. I want them to know that life goes on around the edges, and that you don’t need to be a doctor or a clinical psychologist to help someone who’s living through one.

When people ask me what they should do if they think someone has an eating disorder, I tell them: be there for them. Try to get them the medical care they need, absolutely, but also: don’t make every conversation about their eating or their weight. If they try to shut you out, don’t push it, but let them know the door is always open. My recovery was far smoother than it might have been because, as I broke the bad habits, I had others to fall back into. Family board games. Walking the dog. Playing Mario Kart with my friends. My family and friends kept treating me as a person, rather than a patient. And that made all the difference.

We often think we need to understand mental health problems, but really, that’s just setting us up to fail. You can never understand what someone else is going through. What matters is that you’re there. What matters is that, when they’ve turned you down a thousand times, you keep asking. Because someday, they may say yes – and you may just save their life.

‘The Year I Didn’t Eat’ is published by ZunTold. It’s available now from Hive or your local independent bookshop. For advice and support on eating disorders, contact Beat on 0808 801 0677, or visit their website