A man overcame anorexia which saw him wake up in the middle of the night to run laps to burn calories. Dave Chawner, 34, began restricting his food intake at school as a way of "stopping time" ahead of him and his mates heading to university.
He was triggered by a number of factors, including praise he received for losing weight. His disorder took hold in his second year at university when he would set his alarm for 3am so he could run laps around the school grounds to pre-emptively run off the day's calories.
Comedian Dave was able to play the system - fooling medics by concealing from them the severity of his condition. In truth his eating disorder was so encompassing he was suicidal and began writing letters for his family to read when he was not around.
After eight years of restricting his eating or over-exercising, Dave finally accepted treatment aged 23 when a nurse told him his brain was suffering as a result of lack of food. He is speaking out after a survey revealed one in three men suffering from an eating disorder do not seek any help or treatment.
Dave said: “There were a number of different factors that led up to it. I was trying to lose weight for a play I was in, and people kept congratulating me. I loved my school and my mates, but was going to be going off to uni, so eating less somehow became a way of stopping time.
“I was working in a boarding school over summer in 2010 when I was in my second year of university. We had all our meals provided at an exact time, and it was always pizza, pasta, and chips.
“The lack of control over food really freaked me out."
Dave then began setting an alarm in the middle of the night to wake up and do laps. He still failed to recognise that he had developed an eating disorder, until a colleague confided in him that she used suffered from bulimia.
“That was a light bulb moment for me, as I realised something was not right," he said. “But I never did anything about it, as I didn't feel ill enough - it just kind of bounced along in background.
“I was very unhappy at that point, and I knew the route I was going down. I became very insular and was ruled by exercising and calories.
“I would wake up, go to toilet, weigh myself."
Dave, a volunteer for eating disorder charity Beat, says he never shares how low his weight got. “Stuff like that isn’t helpful," he said.
"In a way part of me is embarrassed I never weighed less than a bag of crisps or anything extreme like that. I would do anything that I could to avoid thinking about hunger, I’d work and write a lot from cafes so I couldn’t snack, lunch would come, so I would go home and have something to eat and I would then go out and walk for ages to get rid of it.
“I was also self-medicating with booze. The reality is eating disorders are really dull.
"It’s just a lot of similar behaviour over and over again."
Anorexia has one of the highest mortality rates of any illness, with up to 10% of people diagnosed dying within 10 years of getting the disease, according to eating disorder charity, Hope. My behaviour was definitely what I would call a passive suicide attempt,” said Dave, who was 22 when his anorexia was at its most severe.
“I had started writing letters for when I was not around. Heart disease runs in my family. I knew this, and tried to exacerbate the problem, as I thought dying of a heart attack would be a nicer way to go."
Dave then decided to see his GP for depression, but still withheld just how bad his mental state was.
He said: “I played the system. There are certain numbers and comorbid factors that they deem you to be a danger to yourself
“I would play around with those in order to stay out of proper treatment. It was only when a nurse told me to eat as I needed to ‘feed my brain’ that something hit home.
Dave was then diagnosed officially with an eating disorder and was given fast-track treatment at Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell, South London – which Dave called like a ‘Hogwarts of eating disorders’. He was then under care for two and a half years, having psychotherapy once a week and check-ups on his health, while he lived in a flat in Brixton.
“It was a gradual recovery back to health,” he said. "As I was doing the treatment, I started writing a comedy show about therapy.
“Comedy and therapy aren’t too dissimilar - they are two sides of the same coin.”
Now Dave works with academics from different universities and uses comedy to build students’ confidence and develop their communication skills. “The main thing I love doing is comedy and mental health," he said.
He has just published a new book ‘Weight Expectations’, which he says is an attempt to demystify some of the language used by medical professionals. "There is less airspace given to men with eating disorders," he said.
“There are so many men that I know who have eating disorders and body dysmorphia."
According to Beat charity, over half of men have never had any treatment for their eating disorder. “Lots of men who are gym fanatics, or eat lots when they’re depressed would never associate it with having an eating disorder," he said.
“People see it as something that’s binary - the reality is it’s more of a spectrum that we are all on."
