Video Transcription

Tim’s experience of an eating disorder | #AnEDLooksLikeMe

Hi, I’m Tim, and an eating disorder looks like me. Eating disorders don’t really have a certain look. No one needs to sort of look a certain way to fit the bill. My journey sort of started when I was 21. I wasn’t very happy with the way I looked, so I became pretty obsessed about the way I looked and how I was perceived by everyone else. You want to be loved, and I chased wanting everyone to like me, to be attractive to women, and stuff like that. It was all from my own self-confidence, and having been teased about the way I looked, I think really reinforced that point in my mind.

The main stigma around it is that it just affects females, and that you have to look gaunt and really sick to have an eating disorder. Both of those are extremely untrue. It affects a lot of males now, and it’s increasing in males. You don’t have to look gaunt. Some medical professionals, your doctors, and even specialists who are highly educated don’t really understand, so they will say things and sort of ask you to do things, and you think that’s triggering for some people. Getting on a set of scales just doesn’t work—it freaks people out—and then they won’t go back and visit that GP because they’ve had that experience before. I’ve had that experience before.

Males now are really struggling with trying to find their own identity because they’re being told that they need to do this at the gym, live this type of lifestyle, and I think that gives rise to people losing a real sense of themselves. But I think now, with men being encouraged to talk about it, this could be the turning point. It’s quite encouraging to see that people, especially males, are able to talk about it now, and that conversation has started. But we need to keep up with that trajectory.

Getting onto it early is the main thing. I kind of wish I had opened up to my friend group and just told them, “Hey, this is kind of affecting me,” and not let it snowball into the way that I let it snowball. We’ve got the experts with the Butterfly Foundation. They’re people who know what people are going through and understand the different, wide-ranging eating disorders. They also know that you don’t have to look sick and gaunt to have one, and I think that’s the most important thing. If people feel like they can come and be understood, then they’re more willing to actually come and get some help. It’s groups like Butterfly that help people like me, but without donations, they can’t keep up the good work.

Video by Butterfly Foundation