A SHIFTING STAR

Thanks, Zac.

 

Every so often, a celebrity gets real. Jamie Lee Curtis poses without makeup and editorial touchups. Selena Gomez shows her “real stomach” on TikTok. Anna Kendrick discusses an abusive relationship. Sometimes these buzzy interviews and articles don’t even coincide with a new movie or album that needs promotion. 

 

Mr. Efron made news last week after CNN lifted a few quotes from a Men’s Health interview. The brief CNN piecenoted that the actor was “currently bulking up for an unnamed role.” If this was supposed to be part of a publicity tour, the producers and his agent must have bruised noggins from repeated head banging. Are readers primed to run out and see Zac Efron in Unnamed Role in an as yet untitled movie/play/TV show/antacid commercial? Even if I were a Zac fan (I’m not, I swear), I wouldn’t have a clue what to input on my phone calendar. Perhaps Mr. Efron had nothing better to do between bulking up tasks than to sit down or Zoom in for a chat with some very persistent reporter. 

 

Efron contends that his ultra-muscled body seen in a “Baywatch” movie from 2017 is unattainable. Technically, it was attainable, at least by Efron, likely with assistance from a full-time personal trainer and perhaps a personal chef. Plus, getting into shape for his role as a studly lifeguard was his job. It was his primary means of preparation. To do so, he got paid more than most of us will earn in a decade or two. Still, he said, "There's just too little water in the skin. Like, it's fake; it looks CGI'd."

 

It didn’t seem that Efron was gloating and doing some version of Superior Dance à la The Church Lady from SNL. The message was that his coveted body came at too great a cost. Efron noted that he ate the same food three times a day. He took diuretics in addition to fitness training and noted that his regimen led to sleep difficulties, depression and other problems that lasted for six months after he let up from his silver screen-primed bod. Technically attainable but ludicrous to strive for. Efron seemed to give the quest a thumbs down. 

 

Cover boy Efron in 2012.

Something told me, as a responsible blogger who nonetheless gets paid nothing for his thoughts, I should go to the original source. I hesitated. Men’s Health is unhealthy for me. The incarnation of the magazine I knew always sported a buff, hypermasculine male model on the cover along with promoted articles about Ten Exercises to Lose the Flab and “easy,” “quick” ways to get washboard abs.  (They’ve apparently changed the cover format in recent years, opting for a celebrity shot of Michael B. Jordan, Kumail Nanjiani or Mark Wahlberg in hopes their fans and oglers will scoop up drugstore copies.) Back in the day, I probably bought an issue a time or two. 

 

Easy abs? I’m in!

 

More often, I’d browse through a copy left behind at the laundromat or sitting on a table at the hair salon as my highlights were setting. (So far from being hypermasculine!) I never subscribed. I really wasn’t the target reader for “5 Ways to Hone Your Triceps While Using a Chainsaw.” But then, was anyone? I suspect guys with chainsaws wouldn’t touch a magazine with a himbo on the cover. Subscribers were probably desperate teen guys in Chess Club while newsstand copies got scooped up by gay men and straight women seeking a little titillation during the flight from Denver to Omaha.

 

I earnestly read/viewed a few of the articles. The thought of getting Popeye biceps from a ten-minute daily routine enticed me. Same with the pitch for defined pecs and deltoids that dazzle. Men’s Health did for me what all those diet books did for women. It appealed to my insecurities. It pestered, beckoned and lured. 

 

Psst. Hey you, flawed person. Sucks, right? 

 

I’ve got a fix for you. Buy me. You gotta invest if you want results. 

 

Might as well have bought snake oil, chucked a couple quarters in the wishing well and rubbed the belly of a Buddha statue. I wasn’t going to get shirtless selfie-worthy abs no matter how many minutes or days I spent doing the five exercises the model demonstrated in the magazine spread. (That’s not how he got them either.) All Men’s Health did for me was reinforce that my body was substandard, that it would always need more work, that I was some outlier who couldn’t achieve results from following a clear routine that was practically GUARANTEED to transform a typical dude. 

 

In offering false hope, the magazine contributed to my eating disorder behaviors—less food, more exercise. No doubt, it has exacerbated other men’s body dysmorphia, too. What you’ve got is never good enough. The body could always use more hulk and bulk, more honing and toning. 

 

Thankfully, I was able to pull the full article online without having to browse the rest of the issue. Efron’s message isn’t as enlightened as CNN led me to believe. He’s still a slave to strict exercise and food intake practices. Even the CNN article hinted at this by including this comment after Efron knocked what he viewed as extreme practices:  "I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat." Gosh, three percent body fat. Now that’s attainable!

 

Efron is still a slave to his past image. His pre-production preparation for his unspecified upcoming project consists of “bulking up.” He’s not sitting home and embracing a muffin-top midriff while watching “Real Housewives” marathons as he chows down on packages of Little Debbie’s Mini Donuts and spoon-feeds himself pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. (Surely, the word “chunky” would scare him off.) He continues to make a living from being buff, most likely continuing to have a personal trainer and answering to a pesky agent and producers who demand to see his daily food and exercise journals. Efron is a commodity to them. 

 

A portion of the interview was conducted at a steakhouse and the writer mentions that Efron split a filet mignon, a “seafood tower” and a “Japanese A5 Wagyu steak.” Sorry, a meal of donuts and ice cream seems more conventional.

 

Efron is not going to ever be a role model for guys battling body dysmorphia.  

 

People online tried to shame Efron 
a couple of years ago for his
supposed "dad bod," seen on 
the right. Utterly ridiculous.

But it’s still something that he admits that his movie-perfect body is both unrealistic and comes with damaging consequences. Maybe that is enough to give a few guys obsessing over their bodies a tiny jolt. Maybe they’ll cut themselves some slack. Have a croissant, take a day off from the gym or at least cut a few sets. Go for dinner with a friend and order something off the menu that sounds tasty even if it isn’t high in protein. Maybe even split an appetizer—fully loaded nachos. 

 

I’m too entrenched with my own unhealthy, extremes ways of exercising, eating and thinking about my body, but there’s hope for vulnerable twenty-somethings who feel inferior from seeing actors like Efron in movies like “Baywatch” and from seeing the stream of shirtless selfies posted by gym rats on Twitter. 

 

Stop sucking in your stomach for photos. Live a little. Let go a little. Just breathe. Just be. 

BREAKING AWAY

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Part of shedding stigma involves talking and writing about our experiences. In this post, I reach far, far back—well, to yesterday—to offer an illustration of how one aspect of my eating disorder and my struggles with depression play out.

More than once, my eating disorder has saved me. I know the psychiatrists, nurses, dietitians and occupational therapists who have worked with me don’t want me saying that. They’d shake their heads and mutter something about how I’m not ready for treatment. Yes, they’re right about me not being ready, but that doesn’t negate the fact my eating disorder has been a life saver.

It should come as no surprise that many people with eating disorders have concurrent mental health diagnoses, like anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. As someone who is bipolar II (basically that means my bouts of mania aren’t as extreme as a person who is bipolar I), my depression is a frequent visitor. (Alas, the mania doesn’t come as often. Things are GREAT when I’m manic. Until I come down from it, in one sudden crash.) I’ve come to know many people who experience depression, especially from attending a mood disorders group where people talked openly about their struggles. Through this, I’ve learned that the way I navigate through depression is atypical. And that’s because of the eating disorder.

Many people going through depression are lethargic. Hours, even days pass, shuffling from bed to sofa and back again. Sometimes there’s binge watching, but without any sense of pleasure. Letting Netflix roll into a next episode of a seven-season show is easier than lifting the clicker and pressing the power button off. Some people talk about being too tired to eat but more often what I hear is that they’re too tired to cook. A family size bag of Doritos becomes lunch, a tub of ice cream dinner. Weight gain becomes a byproduct of depression.

To be sure, I’ve had gone through prolonged periods of listlessness but they are rare. Part of my eating disorder is a compulsion to overexercise. This feeling is more urgent than anything I’m feeling—or not feeling—due to depression.

I only have to dig back to yesterday for an example. My day started off rather normal, but by afternoon, I sensed I was off. Before I knew it, I was seriously down. No reason. That’s the frustrating thing that can distinguish clinical depression from normal depression. If someone gets laid off or goes through a breakup, feeling depressed makes sense. It’s part of the process of dealing with loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I’m generally a taskmaster. Give me a problem and, after a fair bit of procrastination, I deal with it. It’s harder to snap out of depression when you can’t identify a reason for it.

By 4:30 in the afternoon, I was ready to surrender to the blues. I flopped on my bed, closed my eyes and thought, Good one, Depression. You surprised me again. You win. I became critical of my writing, my relationship, my decision-making—why the hell did I rent a place smack in the middle of a cacophony of construction booms and blasts? A nap would be nice, albeit impossible. Eyes still closed, I saw myself walking into traffic and jumping from the roof of a building. This I’ve termed “safe suicidal ideation.” I don’t have the guts to go through a violent death and I don’t want others to witness such a thing. Safe then, but dark.

And then I opened my eyes and sprang from the bed. I had to get changed and stretch before a three-hour bike ride. Eating disorder trumps depression. The mattress would still be here when I returned. And so I headed off. For the first twenty minutes of the ride, I was irritable. A side effect of COVID-19 has been that more people have sifted through their garages and hauled out bikes. My route was too crowded with too many curves that made me have to wait too long to make my passes. Everything was too much.

I pedaled on. I knew I’d soon break from the path and take the lesser-cycled roadway and eventually I’d be heading up the long climb to the University of British Columbia where many a casual rider would turn back. A guy on a fancy-schmancy road bike passed me and suddenly I had a new focus. Keep up with him. Don’t use your twenty-seven-year old squeaky eighteen-speed bike as an excuse for him to break away.

I did keep up. There were a couple of points where I could have passed him, but I didn’t. I knew he’d leave me in the dust when we reached the hill. Sure enough, my gears got fussy and I couldn’t get in the right groove on the ascent. I passed more riders but his jersey got away from me.

The good thing was that I’d shaken off depression and irritation. I felt content pushing my fitness level. I was appreciating the leafy coverage from century-old trees. I was in the moment, watching in case one of the cars parallel parked by the road might suddenly pull out, failing to see me in the side mirror (if they looked at all). By golly, a survival instinct had kicked in!

I passed a peloton of riders taking a break in a parking lot. Matching jerseys, more fancy bikes. I picked up my pace, but I knew they’d overtake me at some point up ahead. Bring it on!

Sure enough they passed me, but I implored my legs to work harder. I kept with the two “stragglers” and, in time, passed them as I had more power than them on the hills. At fifty-five, I was decades older. Cue imaginary fist pump.

Depressed people aren’t known to do a lot of fist bumps, imaginary or otherwise.

Seventy minutes into my ride, I dialed it back a bit, switching over to a shared pedestrian/cyclist greenway, deciding I didn’t want to be that guy who takes out a toddler on a tricycle. I explored new routes making my way east across the city. I stopped by the lovely blue heritage house built in 1904 that I used to own with an ex, before snapping pics in Mountain View Cemetery—research for one of my writing projects. I zigzagged along streets of a bike route I hadn’t taken in fifteen years, not since the ex and I sold that house. I dismounted and walked along a winding dirt path in a park that is but a sliver at the end of one block, a place I’d searched for to no avail last summer when I was putting together an article about Vancouver’s lesser known parks. I felt vindicated. I hadn’t imagined this spot after all! Once I reached the border for Burnaby, I turned back around, bumbling my way through detours due to pop-up construction zones. I cut through a path along Trout Lake and passed a few clusters of skateboarders in the slowly developing South Flats district before finding my way back to the seawall and reaching home.

If that’s a lot of detail about a single bike ride, it’s intentional. There was plenty to fill my mind along with a few adrenaline rushes. Sometimes the exercise is but a reprieve from depression. Nothing conquered, but a welcome distraction. Other times, like last night, it comes early enough in a depression cycle that the deeper malaise fails to take root. Last night, I felt satisfied and, yes, a little exhausted. It was a good kind of tiredness, body moving, mind in the moment, three hours away from my bed and the mindlessness of scrolling internet feeds with too much snarky political commentary and snippets of unsolicited porn.

This time I did it. I dodged depression. Hats off to exercise. Thank you, eating disorder. I’m still trying to learn effective strategies, still taking medications that I feel offer more side effects than solutions. For now I’m just grateful something works.

TREATMENT WITH ASTERISKS

Free again! I was discharged from hospital yesterday after spending six weeks in a treatment program for people with eating disorders. It’s hard to know if it made a difference. Already this morning I’m restricting food again and obsessing over what my exercise will be. The habits of the disorder are so entrenched that it almost seems foolish to think a month and a half of interruption can have substantial impact. There’s deeper work to be done.

“Can’t you just eat more?” I’ve had that question posed by my mother and by my best friend.

Others have said, “But you always eat when we go out.” True. The eating disorder likes to be secretive. It’s my own thing. I do it when no one else is around. It’s why I turn down a lot of dinners. (Being vegetarian makes for a surface excuse, no questions asked. I don’t know if it was just a coincidence, but at one point during my hospitalization, six out of seven patients on the unit were vegan or vegetarian.)

Even during my stay, I was straying from program whenever I could. I got daily passes to go home and, instead of taking the bus to and from as directed, I’d walk the three miles at a brisk pace, passing other pedestrians at every opportunity. While the program required three meals and three snacks per day, I’d skip the snacks while at home and reduce my meal. I figured two full meals and two snacks represented enough progress. And enough calories.

I had longer home passes on weekends and, while exercise was forbidden—full symptom interruption, they called it—I managed to fit in three moderate exercise sessions per week. This was as radical a change as I could tolerate. I told myself I was making the program my own.

Really, I lied. Just like an addict. After every pass, I said I had no struggles. I said I ate according to my meal plan. I told them I did not exercise. I had to lie so I’d keep getting passes. The daily trips off the ward were what kept my sanity. I told them what they wanted to hear. I left as a success story.

So what was the point of it all? Why did I give up six weeks of freedom? In spite of my cheating, my body took in more food and more variety. To a regular person, eating peanut butter or mayonnaise would not be a victory, but higher fat foods were real challenges. Heck, even the amount of water they made me drink was a challenge. My exercise was severely reduced. The miracle is that I didn’t gain weight even though that was my constant fear.

What most people focus on is the outward signs of the eating disorder—amount of food intake, bingeing, purging and exercise. These are clear things to follow when assessing progress. But if it were simply about eating more and exercising less, treatment would be relatively simple. What many people overlook are the psychological reasons for why the eating disorder developed and continues to be fiercely maintained. Issues like self-esteem, perfectionism, betrayal, abuse and neglect come into play. The eating disorder represents control, self-discipline, even comfort. As my eating disorder has gone on for decades, it’s far trickier work uncovering the roots of it so that real, lasting change can occur.

I may be out of hospital but more work remains, on my own and with professional support. Nasty bugger, this eating disorder.

A BELATED AFFIRMATION

There are days when I wake up in my hospital bed and I still wonder if I belong here. For the past five weeks I’ve been in treatment for an eating disorder, an affliction I’ve struggled to acknowledge within myself and I’ve struggled even more to get others to understand.

Each and every time I’ve dared to disclose to someone, the response is quick, a snap judgment. “You don’t have an eating disorder.” 

I don’t feel like having to prove my point.

It’s true that I don’t look the part. I’m male, I’m in my fifties and I’m not rail thin. I even sport some pesky love handles. 

Twenty-four years ago, I dared raise the possibility of an eating disorder with my family doctor, a compassionate gay man whom I assumed would have many patients with low self-image issues, disordered eating and excessive exercise regimens. I had a great deal of angst in the build up to telling him what I thought I might have. He dismissed it as if to reassure me. It only made me feel more alienated. If I didn’t have an eating disorder, then how could I get help? I was starving myself for huge chunks of the day, obsessing over fat content in foods and exercising through injuries, feeling trapped by my workout routines. If I missed a day, the belly would never be tamed.

There were ebbs and flows to my disorder. In relationships, I’d sometimes let up. I’d eat ice cream and pizza with my boyfriend, feeling like a sinner but happy to have a partner in crime. Whenever I wasn’t with my boyfriend, the food restricting would kick back into high gear. Aside from my non-skinny appearance, a big reason so many people haven’t thought I had an eating disorder is because the key behaviors happen when alone. It’s a clandestine disease. When my eating disorder ruled me, I didn’t want to be caught. I didn’t want anyone telling me to change. My eating disorder brought a twisted sense of comfort. It represented control and self-discipline when I felt powerless in many areas of my life. 

You don’t have an eating disorder.

I heard it so many times, I felt I couldn’t get help. I was embarrassed to bring it up. I didn’t want to be invalidated again.

Even when I was hospitalized for depression five years ago, refused food and obsessively exercised in my hospital gown on an elliptical, professional staff failed to recognize my ED behaviors. It took a second psychiatric hospitalization for a psychiatrist and dieticians to piece things together after the nurses complained about my resistant behaviors to eating meals and to eating with the other patients. I finally got a referral to an eating disorder program. 

There are no elliptical machines during my current hospital stay.

I’ve since been assessed by doctors several times. Each time, I hear a common refrain in my head: You don’t have an eating disorder. Each time, I am both disheartened and relieved to hear the doctors confirm the diagnosis. Yes, I have an eating disorder.

As I sit in groups with other patients with eating disorders, I nod with them. They say the same things I think. They nod when I speak. By golly, I belong. 

When I awaken at 5 a.m., I can’t help but wonder if much of my life would be different if I’d gotten help twenty-four years ago. With earlier intervention, maybe I would have overcome the insecurities about my body and chipped away at all the self-hate. 

In my hospital room, I tell myself it’s not too late. I want to believe this old dog can learn a new way of living and can be more forgiving of all the imperfections I obsess over. This cycle of treatment ends, however, in nine days and I know I’m nowhere near real change. Many of my co-patients have had multiple hospital admissions. Is it the program that’s unsuccessful or is the eating disorder just too strong? Maybe it’s both.

I’m lucky to have more counseling and another treatment program on the horizon. Another team of professionals is recommending I stay three months in a group home for people with eating disorders. 

Me? I may not look the part but suddenly the professionals won’t let me slip through the cracks. My behaviors still feel entrenched but I have some hope for change. I want this hospital stay to be the start of a different way of living.