I’m not sure it’s entirely for me. I, you know it, I understand for some people you need, you need that. I think that for me, you know it’s just being comfortable with myself and being happy with myself is a very personal thing. it’s me. it’s for me to be comfortable with myself. So it’s being comfortable in my head. And I have many issues with partners and friends where they have always thought I’m crazy for how I feel about myself, or if I feel big. So having someone tell me I look good, I already know that actually has no effect, or, not telling me I look good but having telling me, having someone sit there and telling me that I, that I look skinny or when I think I don’t doesn’t actually have any effect on me. I know that from experience and I’ve probably driven a lot of people crazy with arguments to that effect. So yeah, I just don’t think for me it’s, it’s something that I need to sort out in my head, you know, myself.

I’m, and again it’s that hating to be a burden on someone, I don’t want to take up someone’s time sorting me out, while you’re like, I just feel that’s not who I am as a person. I think I prefer to do; I like to help people out and listen to them and support them when I can, and I hate taking it back off people I think. And that’s again that’s an issue that I just need to address for myself I think.

We have piloted a face to face group last year in [City] for a year. It was a bit of a tricky one to be honest I mean we did get quite a few guys you know contacting but not necessarily coming to the meetings despite all the tricks in the book to try and get them there. And of course it is very daunting for any man, particularly when they’re not getting help anywhere else, to put the step, feet through the door and take part in a group. it’s quite scary particularly when they might still be very much within their eating disorder and not that at that point of recovery or willing to recover.

But once we got men through the door it’s quite, they kind of got a lot out of it and actually came back to meetings so there was, it was quite successful in that sense. I mean we hope to sort of re-visit that again at some point in the future.

I’ve started a website because I found recovery websites helped me a lot because I was actually hearing from other people that had been through the same experiences and they’re saying, This has helped And, you know, I, they just have a, a lot more ideas about things that might just kind of help you get, because if you’ve been through it yourself then you can say, you know, I tried this and this helped me and I kinda wanted to be able to do that for other people too. So I’ve started one and I have put some of diary entries on there throughout recovery because I think that’s one thing you don’t, when you’re in recovery you don’t, have any idea, you don’t know what recovery’s going to be like.

I think on a lot of, pro-anorexia sites there are links to loads of others, whereas the recovery ones cos there aren’t as many you can’t, it’s hard to find links to thembut, I kind of, with mine I’ve tried to do it with all the different things that I found helped me and not just make it about eating disorders I’ve tried to put a bit about depression and things on like that on it, advice for friends and family so that they can kind of understand a bit morebut I, yeah there were some that I found that justjust, like things you can do like writing lists of all the reasons to recover or affirmations, different, different things you can say to yourself. Or different kind of recovery project things you can do, just whenever, you know, I was feeling a bit down I could go on and read them and there would be positive quotes and things like that and, it just makes you think if they can recover then so can I and, gives you a better idea of what to expect.

At the moment we’re piloting live chats, because you know it means that we can reach out to men, wherever they are. They haven’t got to leave the house, you know it’s very anonymous, confidential, supportive space that is not, and you know so intimidating as going to a group. And hopefully that will kind of be a bit of a link between those men that are not getting help, hopefully through reduced isolation and that online community they build and those supported relationships from that group will then encourage them to go and get help elsewhere, whether it be counselling, whether it be them joining a support group or whatever.

So that’s, that’s the idea. And as I say it’s very much in its early stage of its pilot so I can’t really sort of say how successful it’s been so far, but you know it’s looking promising and I suspect that’s something that we’ll do long term.

And do you have sort of facilitators in the live chat?

Yes.

How does it work?

I mean it’s very, very informal. Each session has a theme, just so we’ve got a point of discussion, there is two facilitators who are anonymous, just to protect that anonymity of the group so people don’t think that they have to identify who they are, because I think that could put people off. Of course we would have user names instead and you know it’s just very sort of, it’s almost like an on-line drop in, so people can come and go and take part in a discussion and you know and then just leave at any point. You know so it’s very sort of flexible.

I kind of kind of caught up in all that whole sort of pro-anorexia circle, and it was only until, only when I guess, cos you know the whole internet was a big thing and it was easily accessible and for a 13 year old girl it’s really you know, it’s so, when you’re on the internet and you come across it it’s like, Oh okay And someone that’s already struggling with their, with their body and their weight and body image issues, it’s like, Okay well I can do this, I can do that and so that became a real big issue for me.

But I got out of that while I was fifteen, even though I still, cos I kind of realised well, whoa that’s a problem, I can’t, this, you know it’s not right, it’s kind of, it’s disturbing. But my eating disorder was still going on and it was, I just wasn’t involved in it anymore and, now it’s just like, I can’t, just can’t even believe that I was actually ever involved in that sort of situation.

I did, I just had to leave because I think it became, you know, from what sort of started as sort of like a support system, kind of ended in like a competition between girls, and posting their weight, their calorie intake, so it was so extremely… and I thought, Well I can’t hack this. I’m not here for, not here for competition, I’m not here to know what your weight is I wanted support. So…

Do you remember at the time, how did you feel about their comments or reading other people’s posts? Do you remember what you felt?

Well, Ashamed. I felt, cos I remember, you know, I would post, say, I’ve had X-amount of calories toda and they’d be like, Well that’s a bit too high So I was like, really ashamed of myself. And then say other people’s posts were quite, you know they would post what they’d eaten or what they were planning to do, and then the girls like cheering them on, and it was all like, Whoa I kind of found that really disturbing, cos I felt well, you know people with eating disorders they’re kind of like a slow, you know, you slowly are killing yourself, and these girls or boys even, and they’re like cheering you on, they’re telling you to do it and it’s, it I couldn’t like, I didn’t understand that concept. So, and then I realised well, this isn’t right, this really isn’t a place where I want to be involved with. So I had to, I just thought, well I need to delete this account, I need to, I can’t have any more involvement with this because it’s negative, it’s affect, it’s not good for me and if I want to get better then I need to leave

At the time I think I was just naive and didn’t really know but that I think, I can definitely say that that kept me as bad as I got. I don’t think I’d have been, I think I learnt quite a lot from it, which isn’t good but at the time I didn’t realise this. So, and I started counting calories, I’m like, my whole life I’ve never, before that I’d never known calories, or I didn’t even know what my weight was really before, but kind of I started counting calories and I knew all the calories in everything, and I started only having kind of a certain amount of calories and then it gradually cut down. And I wouldn’t allow myself to go over that amount.

So originally I just kind of joined the community, and just read other people’s posts, and, to start off with it wasn’t really something that I was that kind of into. But as it went by it became something like a daily, I had to go on it every day, and I was kind of set up my own journal and looking back at it now I don’t know why I did it, but on my journal was kind of me saying my weights and what I’d eaten and posting pictures of before and after, and because I wanted to be thinner and I wanted people to say whether I looked thin enough, or kind of, because that’s a big thing, that people comment and say that you’re looking good or kind of encouraging to stay ill, which is really wrong, but at the time it was the only place that I could kind of talk how I actually was.. Because no-one else understood, like around me at college they all just kind of kept telling me to eat and they didn’t really know what was going on. But on the websites I could actually say how I was, how I was feeling and I could see that other people were feeling the same.

So to me it felt like a nice helpful environment at the time. But I know that it wasn’t, now. Because it was really unhelpful really. Because I think without them, although I wouldn’t have had kind of the understanding of other people, I wouldn’t have learnt as many tips and tricks as I did, and I probably, if I didn’t have, if I hadn’t come across them then I probably would’ve spoken to people sooner. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? That you would have spoken to people sooner?

I don’t know. I think it wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have felt like it was such a big secret. Whereas with like the pro-ana websites, a lot of it is kind of hiding and kind of you learn how to hide stuff. How to hide behaviours and your physical looking and, so I think if I hadn’t learnt all those things and I hadn’t been caught up with being ill and trying to stay ill, then I might have listened to other people. Whereas I felt like the people who I became friends with on the websites were the people to listen to because it made more sense to me at the time.