• 3 days ago
Men and boys — talk about your body image concerns. Take it from Sheldon, who's battling an eating disorder and calling on our culture to take men's body image issues more seriously
Transcript
00:00As a guy, when you think of body image, you think of muscles, you think of abs.
00:04Guess what? I don't really possess any of that.
00:06And sometimes I wish I did, but I'm happy with my body now.
00:20I would say that my body image issues are probably way more prevalent than my eating disorder issues.
00:26Eating disorders are something that there is a formal training and treatment for that.
00:30Body image issues, there's not necessarily something, you know,
00:33that they can tell you every single day to make you love yourself.
00:40I went to a restaurant with my mom's boyfriend at the time,
00:42and I had eaten six loaves of bread before the food had even come out.
00:46That was kind of normal for me.
00:48Nobody kind of questioned it. It was just, you know, Ryan's a growing boy.
00:56When I was first presented with the word binge eating disorder and I looked it up,
01:05for me it was an immediate relief.
01:08There was no shame associated with it anymore.
01:19This one guy, he's 31 years old, and he reached out to me and he said,
01:22I was just diagnosed with bulimia, and I told my mom.
01:24And my mom said, impossible, only women get bulimia.
01:27So this is what we're dealing with, just to paint the picture.
01:35I like to say recovered, because if I say recovered,
01:38that's insinuating that I am completely free of this eating disorder and I can put it out of my mind.
01:43If I forget about it, and I'm not mindful about it, I'm afraid that I will relapse.