KJ Apa and Other Men Are Speaking Candidly About Disordered Eating. It’s Time to Listen.
Riverdale star and musician KJ Apa is giving a clear and unflinching voice to men’s experiences with disordered eating.
Eating disorders have often been erroneously understood as a “women’s issue,” one of the many statistical misconceptions that have plagued the history of disordered eating since the term “anorexia nervosa” was first coined in 1873 by Queen Victoria’s personal physician, Sir William Gull. While it’s still true that a majority of people with eating disorders are female, a growing number of boys, men, and gender-nonconforming individuals are living with disordered eating, with the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) estimating that about one in three people struggling with an eating disorder is male.
Apa brought his perspective to this issue recently, describing the depths to which his eating disorder and history of substance abuse took him in a Tuesday appearance on Dylan Sprouse and Brendan Columbus’s Wildmen podcast. Apa, who says he’s been sober for over a year, told Sprouse and Columbus: “Anything that makes me feel good, I will abuse. It’s something that I’ve learned about myself. Even eating. My relationship with eating—especially on that show—was bad.”
Apa was candid about his memories of bingeing and purging on the set of Riverdale, recalling how he ordered a large amount of food from McDonald’s and urinated on it in an attempt to leave it unfinished—and, ultimately, being unable to resist. “I go, throw up all the food that I ate… I go back outside about 20 minutes later after lying there in bed being like, ‘I’m hungry again, because all the food is now out of my body.’ I went downstairs, I go outside, and it’s there, right? I start eating around the piss. I ate the rest of the food and left the soaking piss food there.”
It might feel shocking to hear a Hollywood star be so open about the visceral pain and difficulty of his eating disorder, particularly in the age of a “thin is in” mentality and the ever-present GLP-1 discourse, which has perhaps, ironically, made honesty about desiring thinness more difficult than ever to discuss honestly. Apa’s story matters hugely, though; not just because of his fame or his willingness to describe the lowest points of his disordered-eating experience, but because we are so unused to hearing men be so blunt about their difficulties with compulsive behavior around food.
The experience of dealing with stigma and incorrect assumptions about disordered eating certainly isn’t unique to men, but given that much of the (still-incomplete and often lacking) language we’ve developed to talk about eating disorders tends to presume a patient who is female, cisgender, white, and financially stable, men—particularly men of color and LGBTQ+ men—often find themselves without tangible examples of their experiences to relate to. A 2020 National Institutes of Health study noted that “prevalence rates for male ED cited in much of the recent history of research is a gross underestimate.” In other words: How are you supposed to heal from an eating disorder, or even recognize that you have one, if you’re deeply unused to seeing people who look like you model their experiences of ED recovery?
Of course, focusing on eating-disorder narratives like Apa’s and those bravely shared by other famous men, including Zayn Malik and Ed Sheeran, doesn’t mean we should automatically privilege them above the experiences of women and gender-nonconforming people. There’s still so much work that needs to be done in terms of understanding the sad truth that people of all gender identities, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations can and do suffer from disordered eating. But the first step in our collective cultural work toward healing might just be to uplift and celebrate all stories of eating-disorder recovery, whether or not they fit with our preconceived notions about who is “allowed” to struggle with food and body image.
