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"I'd stuff my face with anything around - any old rubbish, burgers, chocolate, crisps, fish and chips, loads of it - till I felt sick."

By Ann Althouse

"Then there'd be a weird kind of pleasure in vomiting and feeling relieved."

I don't think I want to hear about anybody's eating disorder, but isn't there something especially untoward about a man admitting he's bulimic.

It was associated with stress. I was working too hard....

The only break I took was to eat. Work, and then quickly eat something. It became my main pleasure, having access to my comfort food.

Lame effort to make the problem seem manly.

I could sup a whole tin of Carnation condensed milk, just for the taste, stupid things like that.

Marks & Spencer trifles, I still love them. I can eat them for ever....

Sup a whole tin of.... trifles... Yeah, our bulimiman is English ? the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

Sympathy gushes forth:

[H]is fellow bulimia sufferer William Leith says: "Poor John Prescott. I feel for him. More importantly, though, I feel for the society he lives in."

Uri Geller, another self-confessed bulimic, praises Prescott's "courage" in admitting his condition.

"No one expects a man, especially a successful one, to have an eating disorder," he writes in the Telegraph. "It seems such a weakness. But addiction isn't weak: it's as powerful as a landslide, and it was burying me alive."

Such sentiments are echoed online by bulimia experts. "It is good that man in such a high-powered position has finally come out and said he was a sufferer of this insidious disorder," William Webster writes on the Bulimia Anorexia Blog.

Even the often acerbic Tory blogger Iain Dale feels sorry for Prescott.

"In some ways, his bulimia partly explains his affair with Tracey Temple, and no doubt others," Dale writes. "We all think of politicians as supremely confident and outgoing people who wouldn't recognise shyness and self doubt if they hit them in the face. Many politicians are far from confident."

Partly explains his affair... I await the day when an American politician caught doing something stupid tries to use bulimia as an excuse.

Full post as published by Althouse on April 21, 2008 (boomark / email).