TORONTO - Ron Saxen had run himself ragged on a relentless regime of dieting and exercise to maintain the lean, muscular physique that catapulted him in the modelling world.
So when he was asked to drop five pounds to model underwear in a fashion show, Saxen agreed - before a wave of distress took over.
"My thought was two things," he recalled. "One,'I'm so sick of this, I can't hold on anymore,' and two, 'I'm not going to go in no fashion show in my underwear."'
He proceeded to polish off a large pizza, candy bars, fruit pies, topped off by almost four litres of rocky road ice cream and nearly a half a kilogram each of M&M's and hot fudge sauce, vowing he would "be perfect" tomorrow.
In an extreme attempt to shed pounds the next day, he ran and walked 43 kilometres. And then he ate 13 doughnuts and six Taco Bell burritos.
Instead of losing five pounds, he eventually gained 70 in six months.
"It was kind of that last little snap and I pulled the pin on my career - gone," he said.
More than 20 years later, Saxen is speaking candidly about his longtime battle of the binge in his new book "The Good Eater" (New Harbinger), where bouts of excessive indulgence in food saw him down as many as 10,000 calories a day - equivalent to nearly 19 Big Macs. The average daily requirement for active males between the ages of 19 and 30 is 3,000 calories, according to Canada's Food Guide.
"I knew I had a problem, but I always thought it was peculiar to me, party of one, Ron Saxen only messed-up guy," he said in an interview during a recent visit to Toronto from his home in Northern California.
"I didn't know there was a name for my pain, but I certainly knew I had a problem."
As the self-described "chunky one" in his family, scarfing copious amounts of food - usually in private - brought pleasure and stress relief for Saxen, one of five children raised in a strict, religious household.
His father would challenge him to see who could chow down the fastest. Other parents commented that the Saxen was "such a good eater," wishing their own children would eat as he did.
But at times, the guilt of consuming high-calorie concoctions would take its toll.
"I would tell myself ... 'Starting tomorrow, I'll begin the rest of my life,' because that was my way to allow myself to have a great party binge," he said.
"Then when you go crazy at the end of the binge, you've had 10 or 15,000 calories and you feel physically like crap, and mentally you feel like crap because you've just let yourself down, you've just done this thing you think is stupid and embarrassing, you can rock yourself to sleep with the promise ... 'Whatever I did today doesn't count, because 12:01 a.m. is a new day.' "
Even when a career on the catwalk beckoned in the early 1980s and he had dropped to 179 pounds, life as a model was far from perfect.
"At 21, when I was a model, I got all the weight off, at the end I was living off 1,000 calories, working out for four hours, beating the living crap out of myself, and I still was the same screwed-up guy."
Saxen now recognizes that his binge eating was a way for him to modulate his anxiety, to "blunt out, numb myself and not feel" in life before and beyond the runway.
At 44, his new approach is to work his way through problems rather than turning to food, adopting an intuitive eating strategy he's practised for the last year and a half.
"I've learned that I can have whatever I want. I can have a Snickers every day if I want, it's just learning to stop when you're satiated, physically and mentally, to stop," he said. "Where I got in trouble is that I would keep going."
While statistics on the number of people living with binge eating disorder (BED) are scarce, it appears to be almost as common in men as it is in women, and sufferers tend to be "genetically heavier" than the average person, said Merryl Bear, director of the Toronto-based National Eating Disorder Information Centre.
Bear said spotting the signs of someone living with BED can be challenging for outsiders, often because bingeing is done in secret.
"If an individual sees someone they care for who regularly eats large amounts of food in one sitting, and who speaks about feeling unable to stop eating or out of control over their eating and talks about shame or guilt about their eating behaviour, then that's always a sign for concern and worth exploring with the person," she said.
"It's important to recognize that any form of eating disorder (is) about emotional issues, it's about self-esteem issues that need to be addressed. It's not about size and it's not about food."
Symptoms of binge eating disorder include:
- Eating large amounts of food frequently and in one sitting.
- Feeling out of control and unable to stop eating.
- Eating quickly and in secret.
- Feeling uncomfortably full after eating.
- Feeling guilty and ashamed of binges.
As well, people who binge eat may have a history of diet failures, and may also be obese. About one in five obese people engages in binge eating.
