The Silent Scream

It was 10:30 a.m. on a weekday in October, my perfect moment. I had pinpointed a low-traffic time to avoid people—which was a paradoxical challenge, since I lived in New York City. I needed to buy something rare, something genetically engineered just for me—usually found in a shopping mall. Handheld, spongy and syrupy, with maximum mouth-feel—an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Or more specifically, twelve Auntie Anne’s pretzels. 

Walking through the Penn Station food court, I was hungry and on a stealth mission. How loud is Penn Station during a weekday mid-morning? It’s dead silent to me. I turned up my headphones to help me dissolve into the crowd of commuters. Listening to Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely (And Never Be Found), yeah, I know I’m a cliché. But maybe things are clichés for a reason—there’s universal truth in what we do compulsively. I needed Thom Yorke’s sprawling chimes to distract me from my growling stomach and my other tape player, the one telling me I am skinny and fat and disgusting and ugly and ……… weak. 

At the counter, a teenager asked me what I wanted, and I remembered why Auntie Anne’s was a tough target. Her nametag said Desiree. I was way too suspicious to be interacting with some bubbly youngster working their lunch shift. I was too tall (6’3”), too unshaven, too flat in my hair and eyes. I was wearing baggy Adidas workout pants, a white hoodie, and my aura of stay-away anger. 

People might assume my outer shell is tough but it’s the flimsiest form of protection. As Nietzsche said, “the golden fleece of self-sufficiency protects against thrashings, but not against pretzels”—okay, he said “pinpricks.” Which I think means: don’t be fooled by my ripped muscles. They exist only for show and armor. As a kid, I craved attention. As an adult, I need approval like other people need oxygen. 

Okay, so how does one acquire a dozen pretzels? I was an OB—Original Binger. Before Door Dash, kiosks or self-checkouts, I had to stare a human being in the eyes and plead for my obscene quantities. I mentally reviewed my best practices. Rule one was obvious: Don’t just be my true self. Hi Desiree, I’m a 22-year-old law student and I’d like to eat twelve of your delicious pretzels really fast and then feel like killing myself, please. 

How about the “Party Pick-Up Order”? Where I act a little upbeat but also distracted, like I’m ordering for my study group or an office doughnut gathering: Umm, let’s see, who wanted buttery salted? Yeah how about six of those….. ummmm ….. someone wanted cinnamon-sugar….. Oh, vanilla frosted? Adrian likes those. Yeah, twelve should be enough for everyone.

There’s no shame when I’m pretending to buy sweet treats for other people. I looked around. Hmm, does anyone need a dozen pretzels? “Quick! There’s a bus of hungry nuns who can only ingest buttery salted and cinnamon sugared dough!” Once, when I had a real girlfriend who was ailing for a pint of ice cream, I felt the liberating power of truly buying comfort food for someone else. Behold my conveyor belt of chocolate. I have no shame, for it is not actually for meeeeeee! What a rush. 

This is why I loved the human-less touch of vending machines. The only drawback was the quantity quandary. I couldn’t carry enough Cheez-Its and Twix bars. I’ve tried the cargo pants method too. Even when successfully concealed within pockets, those mini packs of junk food simply became shame maracas. Every step and movement creating a crinkling alarm waltz, signaling to passers-by that I had an unforgivably abnormal number of cheap snacks stuffed into my pants. 

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Mine was an affliction of abundance. I had the privilege to be around so much food that I could waste it—not by throwing it away, or by not eating it. No, I ate it. I ate it all. I wasted it in my Tupperware stomach. From empty, the human stomach can stretch 75 times its size, holding up to four liters of food and fluid. I filled up every stretched corner of my football stomach with so many calories of mass-produced factory food. 

Ironically, my condition came from a place of scarcity. From an early age, I learned the riddle of steel combined with a dose of self-deprivation. It was the early 1980s in America, which meant shirtless muscular men were exploding out of my boxy television: barbarian cartoons, live-action wrestling, and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Left to my own interpretations, those ab-filled images created a washboard floor with no ceiling in my psyche. My childhood mantra was “Be a lone wolf”—with less fur and bigger biceps (no easy feat, given my fuzzy and skinny genes). An inner scarcity. No needs or demands on others. Only the harshest expectations of myself and my manscaped chest size. 

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Back at Penn Station, I hustled through my order, grabbed the pretzels and rode the subway back home. The shame voices were getting louder, trying to drown out the screeching metal of the subway steel tires, so I maxxed out my headphones. Staring into my reflection in the train window—gaunt eyes and sallow face—I should have recognized the signs of undernourishment. I should have been thinking: hey fella, maybe eat a salad, some protein…how about some Vitamin C?

Next came the fix. At home, with no roommates, that’s when the speed gorging and relief kicks in. I popped those sweet and salty pretzels like a sad circus pelican. I heard that Americans prefer the act of swallowing to chewing, supposedly partly explaining our over-sized portions. I definitely didn’t chew my pretzels. 

Binging is a sport against time. A complete cycle will take hours of mental wrangling, stressful shopping and procurement of food, bad and sickly feelings afterwards, the self-punishing thoughts, maybe throw in some compensatory exercise. The Binge can last hours, but the eating happens in microseconds. All done in rigorous secrecy and privacy. If someone else walked in the room while I was scarfing, the food in my mouth instantly turned to wallpaper glue. 

Alone. Alone. Alone. 

Those are the watchwords of the body and food sufferer. 

As I swallowed my last bites, the soft gooey pretzels fired up every pleasure neuron in my orbitofrontal cortex. You know that study where they found that rats’ brains light up for heroin the same way as sugared water? I was a rodent. Thom Yorke continued his crooning in my headphones. I’m not here, this isn’t happening. 

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What was happening to me? I didn’t know and I certainly couldn’t vocalize it. Eating disorders are called the “silent scream.” In college, I didn’t speak for an entire month. I wore headphones on campus and during grueling workouts at the gym, chomped heaps of dining hall chicken breasts alone, sat in the back of class, and did stealth runs for vending machine candy using cargo pants to hide my shame snacks. No one noticed. 

Besides, men don’t talk about it. Male eating disorders are rising since the pandemic and are silence compounded—men being more lonely and isolated than ever. We bury it in the sneakiest of places—right on the surface. “Ha, yeah bro, no, I totally ate too much last night.” “Dude, I hate hotel food, my diet is shit.” “Yeah, no I totally gotta cut back on sweets.” 

Listen to any casual gym conversation or two guys in line at Five Guys. We talk about it, even as we definitely don’t talk about it. Heaven forbid we actually say: 

I really need comfort. I feel on all the time. I don’t know how to give myself something sweet. So I literally choose sweets. I eat it alone because it makes me feel good. I feel so ashamed and weak. I’m not supposed to be this comforted by something as stupid as a rainbow sprinkled ice cream sandwich. But they look so good on the box picture. 

It's not just men either. No one likes to talk about it. Not the real ugly feeling truth of it. I’m glad there are books, articles, podcasts and spaces for any person to talk about this problem or any other. In that vein, Mr. Rogers’ message was wonderfully simple: anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable. Let’s wind that back for me. Because I couldn’t mention my bullshit back then, it definitely wasn’t manageable, and therefore I was subhuman. And in 2002, that’s exactly how I felt with my pretzels. Subhuman. 

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Years later, one of my first steps to recovery involved a mindfulness retreat for lawyers. The Zen instructor peeled an orange and told me to focus on every sense and sensation (the fragrant smell of the zesty rind, the juicy bubbles of fleshy meat inside). Food as the first proxy to being present, connecting to our visceral existence. Eating makes you feel alive. Bingeing does not. It disconnects you. That was the point. Time to zone out. Numb. 

Holding that zesty orange peel, I eventually realized just how much my problem was not the pretzels or the food (though the processed food industry made it easy—over seventy percent of packaged food is ultra-processed, containing excessive levels of salt, sugar and fat; and the chemical seasonings used to flavor those corn and soy widgets are highly addictive). It was not my muscle tone or my body fat. It was me that I wanted to make disappear.

A practicing lawyer in Vermont, Justin Kolber is a recovered ripped dude, an athlete, activist, and author of Ripped, the first memoir about the dual extremes of muscle and food disorders. Read more at Slate, Newsweek, The Good Men Project, Open Secrets, The Haven, Greener Pastures, and free newsletter at www.justinkolber.com.