Hello there,

I'm an anorexic male. I'm 34 (will be 35 on March 26) and this is my
story. As a child I was naturally svelte and thin, but my father--
who was a grotesquely muscled construction worker, 6'4 and 200 lbs--
couldn't accept my body as it was and wanted me to look like him.
So, starting at age 4, he would make me sit for HOURS at the dinner
table making me eat disgustingly large quantities of cooling,
congealing food in order to make my body like his. Trouble was, I
didn't WANT to look like him; I was perfectly happy looking the way I
did and actually felt SORRY for the way he looked--like Frankenstein
or a Sasquatch. One evening after eating a particularly large meal
that he forced on me, I went to the toilet, flipped up the lid and
hunched before it. I thought that if I reached with my fingers down
my throat into my stomach I could --thinking with the logic of the 7
year old that I was--"pull" the food back out of my stomach. All
that happened was that I gagged and retched. Finally the food came
rushing out of my stomach and plunged hotly into the toilet bowl.
From that day on, I was a bulimic, self-inducing vomiting after every
huge meal my father forced me to eat. I felt smug that I'd found a
way to get rid of all those calories he'd so ferverishly fought to
put inside me. This eat-and-vomit cycle continued almost daily until
I was 13, when my father left my mother for another woman. Then I
stopped making myself throw up, as I had no need to do so anymore.
He divorced my mother the next year.

From 13 to 17 I was happy with my naturally svelte, willowly body,
reaching, at age 18, my full height of 5'10 and weighing 120. That
was in 1986, at the height of the "Miami Vice" fashion craze for
menswear, and I delighted in reading GQ magazine and wearing all the
unconstructed sportjackets over T shirts with multipleated pants in
casually chic shades of pastel pink, peach, aqua, lavender, fuschia
and white. So I was fashionably thin and very fashion conscious. I
was entering college that year, and my sister kept razzing me how I'd
put on the "freshman 15" and how "all that eating anything" I wanted
without gaining weight would catch up with me. I became petrified of
loosing my thinness. So, at the beginning of my freshman year of
colege at Akron U, I bexcame anorexic, restricting my caloric intake
to 1000 calories a day; I dropped, during a six month period, from my
naturally thin 120 pounds to 105. Then, one day when I had just
turned 19, I looked at a picture of myself and thought that my face
looked like a skull. So I resolved to "get back up" to my former
svelte 120. I ate normally from then on--but the anorexia must have
ruined my metabolism and slowed my heartbeat (a symptom of anorexia)
because over the course of the next year I BALLOONED to a hideous 180
pounds on my 5'10 inch frame. I thought I was muscley and chunky--
not fat, just too muscley. I hated the hard, solid
breastlike "pecs" that protruded from my chest, the muscles in my
arms, the thick thighs, the big butt. One day, when I was 20 and in
my second year of college in 1988, I was standing in front of the
mirror and was so disgusted at my muscle-chunky self that I decided
that I had to do SOMETHING to stop this weight gain. I had a
grotesquely muscled body like my father--what I'd always dreaded. So
I hunched in front of the toilet, jammed--just JAMMED--two fingers
down my throat and coughed, sputtered, and then I hit the magic
button and up came the particles of half-chewed steak, up came the
mushy coconut cream pie complete with flecks of coconut, up came the
gloppy chewed cookies, and tons of liquid. "Empty again," I thought
and flushed the toilet. So I was bulimic again at 20. Fearful that
people would hear me throwing up, I blasted the boombox in the
bathroom to drown out the sound of my vomiting, and oh do I remember
that 1988 Dance Music song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley,
which they played about 20 times a day. I'd be vomiting to the
syntheszied rhythms of that disco tune, and to this day every time I
hear it on an oldies station, it reminds me of self-induced vomiting,
and that sizzling vomit acid, and the sour stench of vomit. I was
bulimic and anorexic simultaneously from age 20 to 25--when I simply
grew tired of starving myself and then gorging and vomiting, so it
just sort of fizzled out.

My weight by then had dropped to 119 on my 5'10 frame--where it
stayed until I was about 26, when I gradually, after eating normally,
crept up to 136...then 146...then 150. And then I just said to
myself "I don't want to gain anymore weight, but I'm not going to
starve myself again or vomit either." So I just cut out all snacks
and ate three very small meals a day; my weight dropped back to 136,
then 130...then, over the course of the 1990's, crept up to 140 by
the year 2000. Over the course of the past few months it dropped to
135 and it seems to fluctuate between 135 and 140--either way I'm OK
with that because I'm still currently, as of February 2003, very
slim and svelte at 5'10 and 135, with a 33-inch chest (with three
sternum bones protruding), a 30-inch waist, and a 32 inch inseam. I
currently don't starve myself but simply eat 2 small yogurts for
breakfast along with a glass of chocolate milk and a glass of
Hawaiian Punch. Lunch consists of a peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwhich and 2 glasses of Hawaiian Punch. Supper I often skip but
it might be a few small slices of pizza, a salad, or some other small
meal with nothing to drink. I'm almost 35 and still am very much into
the "Miami Vice"/Don Johnson clothing. Even though the clothes aren't
made anymore, I've taught myself to sew and make my own Vice-like
sportshirts with printed patterns of paint splashes, paintbrush
strokes, or splattermarks of vivid pastel rose, seafoam, baby blue,
mauve, lemon, turquoise, and the like. I wear these with white
triple-pleated pants that I buy from Diamond's Menswear and
International Male,and slip on $6.00 deck shoes with no socks, just
like Don Johnson did in the 1980's. I also buy Miami Vice-like
clothes from International Male: I own 27 hot pink unconstructed
single-button linen/cotton blend sportjackets (my prized possesion,
all brand new and kept hanging in protective plastic); 21 pair of
pastel bubblegum pink triple-pleated linen/cotton/rayon blend pants;
6 fuschia "wet look" short sleeved sportshirts; 6 turquoise "wet
look" sportshirts; over 80 pair of triple-pleated and double-box-
pleated white pants; and more. I'm just very into the image of
thinking the ideal man should be very svelte and willowy and dress in
casually chic Miami Vice-like fashions. It's an image I live for.

Well, if you want to hit me back with your opinions of this email,
please email me back at dekesolo@.... Thanks and have a great
day.

--Dean