Your story is similar to mine in many respects. I'm almost 32 right now, so
we're around the same age. Although I have been through many of the same
phases of anorexia and bingeing/purging, unlike you I was a chubby kid, and
I've always had to battle the "fat gene." I went from 215 lbs. as a kid to
145 at 19 or so, then I held steady before gradually gaining it all back
over about 8 years. By the time I hit age 28 or so, I was up to 240 lbs.!
I couldn't believe myself. Then I worked out devilishly and dieted down to
a muscular 185 lbs. before skyrocketing back up to 230 lbs. after quitting
smoking.

In the last 3 months, I've gotten back down to 170 lbs. but I'm afraid I'll
gain it back, so I've gotten to a point where I'm trying to get my
metabolism up so that I can lose MORE weight (I've stalled right now). I
made myself throw up tonight, which is bad, but it's almost an uncontollable
urge to do so. I make myself vomit about 3 times a week, and I take
Metabolife, aspirin and caffeine 4 times a day. My 600 calorie a day diet
doesn't help my metabolism, but I am scared to eat more than that! I am
really afraid now of being fat, and I find myself in a whirlwind of dieting
that I don't see the end of.

I'd like to reach a goal of 160, but will I stop there? Who knows. All I
know is that if I start gaining weight again, I will really hate myself.

I think I have a decent sense of style in clothes, although I'm more into
hiding myself behind them. I like baggy pants and shirts (at least two
shirts at a time.) When I was fat, I hid behind the baggy clothing. Now
that I am thinner, I still hide behind the clothes so no one will make me
talk about my weight loss (although I get asked all the time, "have you been
losing weight?"

Charley






>From: "mikevice2002 <dekesolo@...>" <dekesolo@...>
>Reply-To: maleeatingdisorders@yahoogroups.com
>To: maleeatingdisorders@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [Male Eating Disorders] I'm "MANOREXIC": A MALE ANOREXIC (AND
>BULIMIC)
>Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2003 01:59:26 -0000
>
>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
>


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