153. 221. 223. These are the numbers that Bryon MacWilliams recites to me, as instinctively as some people might recall important dates or phone numbers. Except these numbers represent cross-sections at different points in his life, some of the highs and lows in his long journey with his weight. Bryon first recognized a problem with overeating early in his life when he started working in high school. He would buy food and snacks after work, only to binge-eat all of it before he got home. He remembers being relatively healthy at 153 pounds when he graduated from high school, but his struggle with overeating escalated in his early 20’s, especially as he began working as a journalist with a demanding schedule. He describes himself during this period of his life as a “workaholic”, grinding 14-hour days and almost exclusively eating out. By the time Bryon was 30 years old in 1996, he weighed 221 pounds at 5’8”—the heaviest he had been in his life.
Bryon became a member of support groups for eating disorders, including Overeaters Anonymous. At the time, he was one of only a few men in these groups, but the communities were comprised of members of diverse ages and stages of life. As Bryon met other members who were decades older or settled into marriage and parenthood, he vowed, “I’m going to have this together before I get to that age.” Today, now 54 years old, Bryon recognizes that his relationship with his weight has been much more complicated than he once believed or, perhaps, hoped.
After a few years of attending Overeaters Anonymous, Bryon decided to leave the group, although he acknowledges that it is helpful for many others.
“In the end, I couldn’t get past—you know, it’s a label. When you have to say ‘I’m Bryon, and I’m a compulsive overeater’ or something like that, it’s like a label. It was maybe good at arresting behavior, but it didn’t feel like it was going to get me closer to the core of whatever was behind the behavior.”
Bryon did not want his struggle with overeating to become an indelible part of his identity, a name assigned to him for the rest of his life. Even more than that, he was beginning to recognize that the overeating might actually be a symptom of a deeper problem, not the problem itself. It was around this time that a history of emotional and sexual abuse within his family that occurred when he was younger finally surfaced. This was a significant period of reflection for Bryon, as he felt that these new stories of past trauma helped solidify the idea that his overeating was not an isolated issue.
“Until that point, I thought everything was my fault, my weakness. I just wasn’t strong enough or working hard enough or brave enough to fix this. And I was very hard on myself… But once the abuse came out, it gave me some legitimacy, like ‘okay, well maybe this isn’t all just me. Maybe I didn’t have to just look toward myself, I could look toward other things.”
Bryon sought private therapy in his 20’s and found that it gave him the opportunity to see his situation from a new perspective. He echoes a truth that many of us can relate to: it is often very difficult to fully understand the battle that you are in until you step outside of it. Rather than continue to be swept up in a cycle of overeating, self-blame, and self-destruction, therapy became a way for Bryon to pause the process and self-reflect.
Part of Bryon’s self-exploration happened during August 2020, when he was a writer-in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts in the Berkshires, New York. This residency is an opportunity for artists and creatives of diverse backgrounds to live and create on a private property secluded by nature. At Millay, Bryon began to pay more attention to dreaming as a way to learn more about himself and open himself to “receiving information” from his unconscious. He kept a journal during this time to record and reflect on his dreams. In one of these dreams, Bryon envisioned a crawl space in his bedroom ceiling, similar to one that might lead to an attic or a roof. The passageway of the crawl space looked very deep, with an illuminated light beyond it. Looking back on the dream, he came to understand that the door to the crawl space was a metaphor for how overeating had become a barrier—a way to protect himself from pain and trauma, but also a struggle that has isolated him.
“If you grow up being told and feeling that whatever you do isn’t good enough or that you’re not enough… there might be a lot of reasons to avoid yourself. I remember in the dream, I woke myself up because I was saying out loud in my sleep, ‘Come out, come out’. When I woke up, I wrote it down, and I realized it meant me. I thought it meant me, perhaps, telling myself ‘It’s safe to come out.’”
In addition to his experience at Millay, writing has been a lifelong therapeutic practice in Bryon’s journey with his weight. Bryon is a professional writer and a self-described “crisis journal keeper”. He often journals through the extreme highs and lows in his life. Similar to when he was attending private therapy, Bryon looks back through the journals he kept in the past, now with the distance of time, to gain new perspectives. He finds that the opportunity to step back from himself in this way has been revealing, showing him repeating themes and patterns related to his relationship with himself and overeating.
Bryon continues to see his issues with overeating at a deeper level. He believes that the core of his experiences lies in an “unconscious place” where his true self is found. He calls this his “mystery”—what others may call their gut, intuition, or soul.
Like many people who have had to overcome struggles, Bryon’s journey has been dynamic, sometimes involving as many steps forward as backward. At his heaviest point in 1996, he moved to Moscow, Russia where he lived for the next 12 years. There, he seemed to turn over a new leaf. His daily lifestyle required a lot of walking and he also supplemented his exercise with yoga. Without recalling an exact weight, he remembers being physically fit during that time. Since moving back to his home in New Jersey, Bryon has learned other ways to manage his health. For example, he knows that he needs to mentally prepare what he will eat each day ahead of time and tries to cook his own food as much as he can. He has learned from experience the exact number of calories and the amount of energy and patience it takes for him to lose weight.
While Bryon has made significant progress both in his weight journey and in his relationship with himself, he has experienced incremental gains and losses, the natural “ebb and flow” of dealing with a chronic struggle, over the past 20 years. Oftentimes, he has felt the weariness of constantly fighting against his body and its drive to push him back toward unhealthy eating behaviors.
Last year in 2019, Bryon’s weight climbed to 223 pounds—two pounds heavier than his heaviest point in 1996. He called it a “pretty big failure” and felt that he had “broken a promise” to himself. Even more, he felt like it had erased all the work he had put in to not only manage his weight but also develop a better relationship with himself.
“It’s hard to sound like it means anything when, over all these years, I eventually put on all that weight. There was so much success during those years, but if you measure it according to weight, it’s a lot of failure.”
Yet Bryon does not define resilience by a certain number of pounds or calories. What ultimately motivates Bryon is getting in touch with the “unconscious place”, or “mystery”, within himself that he believes is at the heart of his behavior. To Bryon, resilience is not only learning to listen to and receive that inner wisdom but also “being honest with myself, especially when it’s not something I want to hear or welcome, and addressing it”. In this way, Bryon shows us that resilience is owning failure even when it is hard, and allowing ourselves to fail as we keep getting closer to where we want to be.
Bryon relied on his resilience and past methods once again to return to a healthier state in both his body and mind. Since last year, he has brought his weight down to 191 pounds. Again, although a number doesn’t necessarily represent success by Bryon’s standards of resilience, he has learned that his personal journey is inextricably linked to his symptoms of overeating.
“I believe that journey is tied to the food and the eating journey. When I’m more distant from myself, when I’m not spending my hours doing what is calling me or being asked of me by the universe, when I’m not taking care of being kind to myself, that’s when I’m more inclined to eat that way…When I’m getting closer to [myself], my eating is better, writing is better, I’m better and kinder to myself. So that’s the place I try to be aware of and stay close to. And every day, I succeed and fail.”
Currently, Bryon’s personal journey has led him to start writing what he calls an “anti-memoir memoir”, a nontraditional approach to an autobiographical memoir that will include a combination of personal truth, secrets, and fiction. As Dr. Atul Gawande writes in Being Mortal, “the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.” For Bryon MacWilliams, writing his memoir carries profound meaning, as it represents a culmination of his experiences thus far to seek his true self and process the issues underlying his struggles with overeating and body image.
“It’s something I have to do before I die, my fear is I’m going to die before I finish this… I’m still, in some ways, trying to get at the core. And I think I never will. I don’t know that anyone ever does, because some of it’s a mystery. There’s always a part of us that’s a mystery.”
Justine Wang is a MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine. Justine can be reached by email at [email protected].
