Male Binge Eating: One Man's Courageous Story

Feb. 25, 2007 — -- By all appearances, Ron Saxen had it all.

At 6'3", with flowing blond hair and chiseled features, Saxen was a handsome 21-year-old living his dream as a successful, up-and-coming model. He graced the covers of magazines and walked the runways for top fashion designers. Ron's life seemed perfect.

Except for one thing.

Underneath his confident exterior, Saxen was living with a deep and shameful secret.

Saxen was a binge eater -- a person who compulsively eats large amounts of food in a short period of time without purging.

"I spent so many years in the darkness of binge eating disorder," Saxen recalls. "It was a way to cope with stress, good or bad. It would just numb me out. So maybe it would be a stressful situation, and I would start to feel real jittery and I would think, 'Oh, I can have some food.'"

While eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia attract more publicity, it is binge eating disorder, or BED for short, that experts say is the most prevalent eating disorder in this country, affecting four million people -- nearly 40 percent of them men.

That startling estimate may even be low, according to Marilyn Kotcher, a psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorders.

"I do think it's a growing problem nationwide that men are really suffering from eating disorders," Kotcher says. "There is more pressure on men to look better. And eating has become a way that people feel that they can control some part of their lives that they can't control any other way."

For Saxen, the pressure started as a confused child living in fear, in a household governed by military-style discipline.

"My mother used to keep a note pad if we did things wrong," Saxen recalls. "And when my dad got home late from work, she would give him the note pad. And sometimes he'd wake us up and discipline us."

Saxen said the trepidation of laying in bed "waiting for my father" made him sweat profusely and, ultimately, take refuge in food.