Meridian East

SAM'S SITE HELPS OTHERS

Our Fixer's website is set to help many men with eating disorders

Eating Disorders Awareness Week takes place this month (23rd to 28th February). Eating disorders are a serious mental illness affecting 1.1 million people in Britain.  One man who knows that all too well is ITV Fixer Sam Thomas, whose project was to launch a ground-breaking website Men Get Eating Disorders Too.

22 year old Sam, from Brighton, battled with bulimia for 8 years. Frustrated with the perception that it is a largely female issue and the lack of services for men, he decided to set up a site to offer help and support for men affected by anorexia, bulimia and other food-related disorders.

‘Men Get Eating Disorders Too’ (www.mengetedstoo.co.uk) was launched last November. Here, Sam tells us what’s happened since.

“In the space of six months, the project has come from being an idea to an almost established project that aims to raise awareness of eating disorders among men so that men can seek support. Here I explain how the project has come about, with all the various developments and achievements so far.

How I came to set up the site…

For some time, I had this idea to set up a website for men who had been affected by eating disorders to provide them with the information and advice and links to support. This was something quite personal to me, as I had suffered from bulimia for eight years and hadn’t come across any similar sites or services specific to the needs of men. Therefore, I knew that this was something I had to do -  to help the many thousands of men out there who were carrying out there eating disorders in secret due to the lack of service provision.

Not only that, I was aware there wasn’t a lot of coverage of the issue. There were occasional articles in the press but not that often and was usually focused on certain aspects of eating disorders (e.g. bigorexia – not necessarily anorexia or bulimia, etc). This was something I felt as though had to change in order to help make men more aware of their eating habits and recognise the symptoms in themselves, so I wrote a letter to two national  magazines ‘New’ and ‘Gay Times’ and told my story to get this coverage.

I got quite a bit of feedback from the articles, including a couple of emails from other sufferers. This re-affirmed my idea to set up the site so I decided this was exactly what I should do. I had no idea how to create a website, let alone run one and my knowledge on eating disorders was only reasonable, though I realised these were things I could learn and/or get people to help me with.

I put in a couple of funding bids to organisations that seemed appropriate. There was quite a long process to hear the outcome of the bids, so in the meantime, I began researching and getting the foundations for the project in place. I made some posters to get some volunteers involved and began writing some content for the site. In this time, someone told me about ITV Fixers from a project I was volunteering with. On a whim, I sent an email to Fixers outlining my idea and soon got a response. Two weeks later. I met ITV Fixers Young Persons Co-ordinator Ree to discuss the ways in which Fixers could help me.