In 2019, I was sitting on a train to London Bridge when my agent called. I’d booked the biggest acting job of my life.
I cried in the train toilets, with the door sliding back and forth like I was a hesitant contestant on Blind Date.
After the celebrations and the excitement though, came a growing sense of imposter syndrome.
I’d only had one TV job before this; surely, they’d made a mistake or would change their minds once they realised they’d accidentally hired me: a scrawny kid who looked like a ginger peanut.
I wanted to do my best, to work harder than I ever had done before. The only problem was I was still quite new to TV acting and hadn’t quite worked out what that meant yet.
Sure, I could learn my lines and write out all my character’s thoughts – even keep a diary in character. But it didn’t feel like ‘hard work’, it wasn’t taxing. It felt fun.
I felt like I had to do more, to be more.
That was when I remembered I’d been told during casting that the role would require nudity. Suddenly, I had a tangible, physical place where I could focus all my determination to work hard: my body.
That was my first mistake, and the start of my disordered relationship with my body.
Truthfully, I’ve worried about the way my body has looked my whole life.
Growing up, I always felt like I had to work so much harder than others to have a body that I didn’t hate.
The men I looked up to were athletic and lean, and clothes hung off them like they were made for them to wear. In comparison, I had ginger hair (which for whatever reason we acceptably ridicule in this country), a deep voice and a bit of a protruding sternum. It didn’t help that, when I started doing school plays, I was always cast as the old man, as it compounded the way I felt on the inside – it was a fact that I was a bit different.
By the time I was 15, I’d already experimented with dieting. So by 2019, aged 24, I felt like I had a legitimate reason to change my body.
At the first opportunity, I started restricting my food and upping my exercise. Very quickly people in my family started to notice the changes in my body. Shadows developed under my cheekbones, and sleeves of T-shirts I’d once filled now flapped in the breeze.
At first, their comments were born out of admiration but within a month, they were out of concern. With every remark about whether or not I could ‘eat a bit more’, I felt gratified. That what I was doing was working.
I’d like to say that I wasn’t aware of the problem that was developing, but that would be a lie.
I knew that, when I took pictures of myself every single day to look out for weight gain – or when I’d panic because I’d eaten bread, or when I’d obsess over the scales – that I wasn’t being healthy.
But I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, it was a short-term necessity for a role. I wouldn’t be the first to do it, nor would I be the last. I thought I could snap back to my old mindset once I’d finished the job.
That was my second mistake.
My food restriction and obsession with exercise and looking a certain way had nothing to do with the work I was doing, not really. That was an excuse that I gave myself, and continued to give myself, in the years that followed.
That said, by 2021, I was in a good place with food and exercise (helped by support from friends and family). I was working regularly on various TV shows, and importantly had shifted my mentality – I started to view food not as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but as no more than what it was, nutrition to help my muscles recover after a big workout, or to celebrate after a big win!
As a consequence my self worth wasn’t attached to the way I looked. I felt like I’d really turned a corner.
Come 2022, I was hired to play an incel, Eric Foster, on Hollyoaks. The strange thing with a show like Hollyoaks is how your own struggles start to mirror that of the character you’re playing.
I’d just moved to Liverpool for filming, gone through a break-up and for the first time in my life I felt quite lonely – in a sense, so was Eric.
In both of our lives, things felt a bit out of control and so, true to form, I started restricting my food intake again. It started slowly; I thought I was just being a bit more mindful as to what I was eating. But before long I was obsessing over food once again.
Being on TV so regularly brought with it something new I hadn’t considered – with Hollyoaks, I could be on screen up to five times a week, which meant I watched my weight fluctuate over the course of a year.
Whenever I perceived I had gained weight I felt awful, like I had lost control. In my mind gaining weight meant failure, which in turn meant I wasn’t working hard enough or being disciplined – and ultimately, I had failed as an actor.
On top of that, my schedule meant I couldn’t maintain the obsessive levels of exercising I had been before, so I had to start prioritising different types of training. I gained muscle, and quickly.
On one particular day, three colleagues approached me separately to tell me they thought I was looking ‘big’ and that they’d had to change my costumes to hide the muscle I’d packed on.
They meant it as a compliment, that I was looking strong – but it spun my head. To me, being lean meant I was hard working and successful at my craft but ‘big’ sounded like the opposite. I felt like I’d let myself down and, just as bad, I felt like I’d let Eric down.
I didn’t seek any help, mainly because my issues felt a bit trivial. There were people with real problems whereas I was just a bit obsessive over how lean I looked. But the minimisation is part of the difficulty.
Most men don’t realise they have an eating disorder because they think their struggle is a by-product of being disciplined – they don’t think it’s serious enough to class as a problem. Personally, I’ve always felt like other people, women especially, have gone through much worse and that I shouldn’t detract from their experience.
Furthermore, it almost feels emasculating to say you have an eating disorder as a man. The discourse around it tends to focus on the struggles of women and girls, and the extreme scrutiny they have received over their bodies throughout history.
Yet since the dawn of social media, we’ve seen a worrying rise and glorification of realistically unattainable muscular physiques and an association between muscularity and masculinity.
If you suspect you, a family member or friend has an eating disorder, contact Beat on 0808 801 0677 or at [email protected], for information and advice on the best way to get appropriate treatment
If your identity as a man is tied to how lean you are, it becomes very difficult to not become incredibly self-critical or to even speak up if you find yourself struggling.
I’ve not spoken publicly before as I didn’t feel comfortable naming my experience as what it is: an eating disorder and muscle dysmorphia. I’ve realised that it’s not about the action, it’s about the motivation behind the action. In my case, I was motivated by the idea that if I gained body fat, I would fail at my job. And that’s simply untrue.
Now I’m trying to be more kind to myself and remind myself that it’s my ability and work ethic – and not my body fat percentage – that will take me further. And that seems to help.
My family and friends now know that I’ve struggled with an eating disorder. They have been, and are always, amazing – they recognise when a behaviour is healthy or disordered before I do.
If I start talking about calories or my body critically, or start restricting myself from a particular food in the name of being a more ‘disciplined’, ‘hard working’ or ‘better’ person, they sit me down and talk to me. That’s all. They just talk to see if I’m OK, and that’s enough.
While I am happy to be open about what I’ve been through, worryingly, it’s common, particularly in young men from 18-30.
When someone is decked out with a six-pack and goes to the gym a lot, the assumption is that they must be healthy, but to gain that physique often requires an element of extreme restriction that can be unhealthy.
We need to reconsider the way men think about their bodies and their food and they need to be empowered to feel comfortable acknowledging when behaviour becomes disordered. More education and awareness around male eating disorders can also help friends and family recognise that their loved one may need help.
During the depths of the actors’ strikes of 2023, when everything felt out of control again, I put my energy not into my body but into writing a film about a young man who innocently seeks to get a bit fitter before falling down a rabbit hole of restriction, self-punishment and tying his self worth to his body image, enabled by sections of the online fitness community.
At the start of this year, I teamed up with some wonderful charities and, more recently, Sophia Harris of Apollo Nutrition, to target the film at the right audience.
The film is here to combat the narrative that body fat percentage equates to discipline. I want to help charities around the country catch eating disorders in men early and prevent them from escalating. I want to encourage people to reconsider the way they think about their bodies, and health and fitness as a whole, in a way that’s really entertaining.
Exercise is amazing and fundamentally good for you, but we often find ourselves in an atmosphere of self-flagellation and restriction and tie our self worths to the way we look. I think it’s time we stopped.
More than anything, I want to destigmatise the topic of male eating disorders. It’s OK to acknowledge you have a problem with food and exercise.
You’re more than your body fat percentage.
