Uniform’s American Standard, binge eating disorder, and me
Marcus Kain, an eating disorder-informed coach who struggled with a nasty circuit of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder throughout his teens and 20s, tells me that the main ways men exhibit their eating disorders is with “silence, secrecy, shame, and compensation.” The topic arises from our conversation about how men cope with eating disorders, and it came to light a few months after Uniform released one of the best albums of the decade. It earned much of its acclaim for its affective portrayal of eating disorders.
That record, American Standard, is fueled by vocalist Michael Berdan’s bulimia nervosa. Around the time of its release, Berdan wrote an essay for The Quietus that discusses his struggles with body weight, self-image, and mental health and their relationship to his eating disorder. He writes, “When it comes to my personal body image, my thinking is critically distorted. When it comes to my personal health, my thinking is critically distorted. When it comes to my personal sense of self worth, my thinking is critically distorted.” By and large, American Standard personalizes that distortion.
By the time that was released this past August, I’d already spent years in my own struggle with a similar condition, binge eating disorder. Since developing it earlier this decade, it has painted every portion of my life, from reorienting my sleep cycle to rewiring how food exists within and around me to perverting the community between myself and others to the degree that I (quite regularly) question whether I exist on the same plane of existence as them. My binge eating disorder, which presents on the best of days as a roving cycle of foods that’d make a nutritionist bloom and on the worst would kill a small Victorian-era child from Red 40 overdose, isolates me from most traditional eating disorder care in that my experiences in these fields, be they support groups or speaking with specialists, revealed that I do not respond to their customary fragility and unrelenting positivity.
Before American Standard, the closest analogue I felt I had to my experience was Homer Simpson in the ironic punishment department of Hell. Besides a shift away from comedy, it required the fewest contortions to fit my schema. In it was also the real fear that I was treading toward looking like Homer if I did not remedy myself. It’s not lost on me that my largest anxiety was simply being bald and overweight, ignoring that Homer has a loving family, a stable job, and happily eats his doughnuts without bated breath. Berdan himself shares a similar anxiety about aging and his condition, writing in The Quietus, “As I get older and my metabolism slows down, coupled with the delightful side effects of the mental health medication that I take to stay alive, delusions about my weight have slowly seeped into the realm of reality. Nobody tells me that I look sick anymore. I suppose that’s a good thing.”
American Standard has taken Homer’s title, to the point that I can ignore that it’s sung by another man and instead, find kinship in it because it projects my experience back onto me, despite the fact that it’s about a different disorder. On its title track, Berdan endures a 16-minute Swansian pummeling then confesses “My throat is raw.” I, on the other hand, come to such conclusions only after I tear through chips, boxes of donuts, sour licorice twists, DoorDash driver tips, eat out of trash cans, pilfer through my roommate’s food, camp out in bathrooms at family Christmas parties to engorge myself, look at bread with distrust, manipulate my friends into leaving their food at my place, or chew through my bottom lip, blood dripping onto the mayonnaise-lathered garlic bread beneath me, then look away so I don’t taste the iron.
My condition and Berdan’s condition are separate but overlap in many facets. They share intense episodes of bingeing in which colossal amounts of food are eaten quickly, often as an escape or a coping mechanism. Binge eating disorder lacks bulimia’s purging behavior, regularly taking the form of starvation, excessive exercising, or, as American Standard makes clear, vomiting. Kain explained the differences between the two disorders as such:
“We’ve got three pillars: emotional dysregulation, overvaluation of weight and shape and diet, and rigidity. Often when they all happen together, that’s the binge eating situation. How that then becomes bulimia is, of course, when we start trying to compensate. So there’s an extra degree of emotional intensity around it. The shame, the guilt, the whatever it is, it’s just too much. Someone with bulimia would think that they need to fix this.”
Binge eating disorder snaked its way into me at the tail end of the pandemic, during which I suffered from the three pillars Kain outlined. I’d been diagnosed with major depressive disorder right before the pandemic started and spent the first quarter of 2020 in a caloric deficit because, after years of viewing myself as pudgy, I wanted to know how I’d look if I cleaned myself up. “Pudgy” was a relative term. I was already at a healthy body weight and by no means overweight. This was a vanity project, but it was not my first time dieting.
I’ve cut weight countless times throughout high school and university because I wrestled. It got to the point where a four-kilogram weight fluctuation within a week was formulaic and frictionless. At worst, I’ve dropped 10 kilograms in three weeks a handful of times. Those were hell, but they fostered my neutrality towards numbers on the scale. I could see them as products of an equation. The only difference between 66 kilograms and 72 kilograms was how my abs looked.
I attached my value to my appearance because, in my mind, what else did I have? My depressive thoughts circled around the idea that I held no weight in the minds of others, but perhaps if I looked good enough, I’d stick around in their conscious thoughts. Someone would see me, I thought, so I weighed and counted every morsel I ate and dieted everything off during the pandemic until my skin was riddled with veins and sores. It was the first time I saw myself how I wanted to, and, in a warped logic, proud that I had this much control over something.
Ironically, my binge eating episodes fed off of the lack of significance I felt about myself. As pandemic restrictions eased, I moved to Toronto from my hometown an hour away, tried to join social circles, pissed off the people I lived with enough that they kicked me out, and felt the weightless that I’d run from. One night, something snapped, like a circuit breaking in the middle of the night, and I ate through my freezer and my roommate’s pantry. I believed it was a one-off mistake until my etiquette disintegrated and I was ordering food on an hourly basis two weeks later. I quickly added 20 kilograms to my waist and lower back in less than a month, and my days were spent offsetting the donuts and pizza I inhaled with hours-long walks and extra large coffees.
Berdan’s history before the onset of bulimia is not too dissimilar to mine. We both struggled with sports—with my relative success owing more to stubbornness than talent—and were too loud. There’s one crucial distorted thoughts he and I share; we both starve for acceptance, and any remark that even tiptoes towards what our idea of that concept involves is internalized as praise. In his words, “In time, people told me that I looked sick as my skin turned gray. I took it as a compliment.”
While I could detail my bingeing episodes, musically, “American Standard” interpolates them into a song, containing a triggering incident, the nigh-euphoric rush in which my consciousness persuades me into fighting against my best wishes and to “just have a bite,” and the protracted binge itself. Most of the track is a handful of chords wielded like a nail gun, somehow both taxing and effortless. This is a quality it shares with bingeing, in that both are never ending yet over in a moment. With each, there is a hyperpalatable rush and a back-breaking experience, one that feels like it can run for hours but, in reality, is much shorter. Furthermore, both present as perceived life-or-death scenarios. They create their own momentum out of thin air (“American Standard” conjures itself with little foreplay and my bingeing episodes can give rise just as suddenly) and to stop their momentum would spell death, if only because I cannot see myself living outside of their highs. Although, such a death is apparent on the back half of American Standard.
If “American Standard” is the act of a binge, “This is Not a Prayer,” “Clemency,” and “Permanent Embrace” are the prowling thoughts that follow. Much of what Berdan recites is indistinct from utterances I’ve spat at myself. From “Clemency,” “You can’t change/ Who you are/ You can’t begin to take back/ What you have already done,” and from “This is Not a Prayer,” “I’ve got a wish to be as lithe as a sapling/ Waist pulled back into spine/ Arms and legs wrung thin as reeds/ Skin sucked right to ribs until ivory cracked.” These lines are unfettered, although B.R. Yeager and Maggie Siebert, two small-press indie horror authors Berdan collaborated with for their imagery, refined them by trimming all but the most frightened phrases and slicing off any noodling.
Returning to Kain’s comments about shame, it’s apparent that they ring true for Uniform when looking back through the band’s catalog. For instance, their 2020 record is literally titled Shame and begins with the refrain, “You are what you’ve done. You are what’s been done to you.” In his Quietus essay, Berdan contrasted the shame his bulimia conjures in him with the ease at which he speaks about his alcoholism. “Hi, my name is Mike, and I’m an alcoholic,” he writes. “See… that was easy. I’ve uttered that sentence thousands upon thousands of times over the years, either verbatim or loose approximation. It’s an admission that has long since become second nature, depending on the company.”
He says that only his close friends and family know about his eating disorder because it’s impossible to live with him without noticing his frequent trips to the washroom after meals or the smell of vomit around the toilet. Conversely, I tried to combat the shame borne from my eating disorder by telling everyone I knew about it. I told my family, my friends, and even tortured acquaintances at parties with trauma dumps. I thought it worked, because I could speak about it with anyone without embarrassment. But living with an eating disorder isn’t just talking about it. My dumbass forgot I had to, you know, live with it. Its tangible effects were my shame. The wrestling coach at my gym, a renowned hard-ass, once told me I was moving slowly because I was fat. Objectively, he was correct, and I didn’t take insult from his remarks. I instead felt I insulted myself by not doing a good enough job concealing my weight gain. On another occasion, I’ve pilfered through my mother’s refrigerator while she was in the next room over, my fingers coated in margarine and peanut butter, crumbs braiding my facial hair, more willing to jump in the bathtub with a toaster than have her see what her son had become. I’ve also rummaged through my trash for food enough times that I have to dispose of what remains of my binges in dumpsters down the street, belching and coughing along the way.
But the most sobering incident was when my girlfriend, who has treated my condition better than I could ever treat it myself, found me bingeing on white bread in the kitchen, straight out of the bag. She knew what was happening, especially because I attempted to hide the bread behind the toaster. I crumpled when she asked if I was okay. I felt naked as a grown man reduced to a hedonistic goblin by a bag of Wonder bread. To her, there was nothing incredulous about the incident, but it is plastered in my brain like the inside of a film development lab.
The bluntness of my binges is the same bluntness with which Uniform confront shame and its lingering effects. Crucially, it contradicts most eating disorder representation in music. A cursory search for eating-disorder themed playlists reveals that the most-known tracks reflect both delicateness and femininity. Lana Del Rey, Melania Martinez, and a Birdie cover of “Skinny Love” are all among the most commonly featured, even if they are not always explicitly about eating disorders. They are not intentionally gendered nor exclusionary, but they err on the melodramatic in a manner that does not ring true for me, especially given how I failed to fit into most support groups. My binges are not subtle, no matter how artfully I’ve tried to hide my evidence beneath my pillow case. Nor are they tender. Not only do they beget an overwhelming physical response, but there’s the act of consuming that much food with no regard for cleanliness or civility which appears more animalistic than human. Thus, my initial appreciation and admiration for American Standard blossomed from how much it mirrored these traits.
It was within Kain’s explanation of the differences between binge eating disorder, bulimia, and anorexia nervosa that I found a crucial tidbit, one that tied American Standard to me despite the differences between mine and Berdan’s conditions. “With binge eating and bulimia, you’re still somewhat connected to your body,” Kain said. “There is still somewhat of a connection with thoughts of cravings and wanting or not wanting food. Anorexia is almost like the connection between mind and body just gets severed. And there is almost a high that comes with restrictions.”
What Kain said reoriented everything, in that I could pinpoint the thread that distinguished American Standard from even the eating disorder pieces I loved—Manic Street Preachers’ “4st 7lb,” Sonic Youth’s “Tunic (Song for Karen),” and especially Titus Andronicus’ “Food Fight!/My Eating Disorder”—and the ones that felt foreign to me; the involvement of the body. Binge eating disorder is body-centric, in that it floods you with a bodily high then crashes and leaves you a bloated carcass. I developed such a tight connection with my body, one that definitely impeded my recovery because, as Kain stated earlier, it fostered a panopticon-like consciousness around it in which I couldn’t give my body space to heal. I was my body, and it was my worth. American Standard’s body horror lyrics and clunky rhythms plugged me back into my corporeal form and how my eating disorder creates a three-body problem between itself, my body, and my psyche.
My eating disorder tears away my ability to exist within the same framework as the rest of the world. Eating is not food, nor is it companionship, a language, culture, or romance; it is a dirty word. An always exposed nerve. The basis for human faculty crumbles and the basic way we fuel ourselves is warped. Most music about eating disorders focuses on how distressing this is; American Standard shows how existential it is. And for years, I carried my shame within groups who suffered from eating disorders and shouldered my failure to recover among those without eating disorders because I felt that my case was different. My set of circumstances were specific enough that there had never been a similar sufferer. Uniform kindly slapped me upside the head with American Standard, informing me that I wasn’t inconsolable nor forever fractured. I merely felt shame because I hadn’t found anyone who carried a similar burden. It was not until the line “I staple receipts to my stomach/ So I don’t, so I don’t do it all over again” that I found kinship. Someone in who I could see enough of my own traits to trust that this wasn’t a defect of my own design. If Berdan could trust in his audience enough to stick with him for his 20-minute bulimic opus, then I could trust that there was no shame anyone could inflict on me for my binge eating.
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