Boxer battles bulimia

Eating disorders get most of their media spotlight on young females - the too-typical skinny high school girl squirreling away her lunches, or eating several and then secretly purging in the bathroom. But like osteoporosis, this insidious disease group also takes down males every day, while dodging the mainstream radar. I applaud Kirk Lang for writing a fascinating story on a recent boxer who battled bulimia.

Many physical fitness disciplines are breeding grounds for eating disorders, from anorexia to "bigorexia". Bodybuilders injure themselves and die under unhealthy regiments (see mightykat.net for more information); wrestlers, boxers and weightlifters commonly diet and do outlandish things to "make weight".

On the other hand, extreme disciplines can have just the opposite effect as well. Within an environment with good information, training, guidance and encouragement, people battling these demons have found their cure.

For instance, ex-anorexics make excellent bodybuilders. With the right guidance, bodybuilding can be a life-changing experience that can actually help anorexics recover, because it doesn't try to change them. It gives them the lifestyle they crave but in a healthy structure, bringing it out into the open as a badge of honor. It's a natural progression for them, calling on their unrelenting diet micomanagement, scrupulous discipline that militants dream of, and demanding exhausting, organized exercise. Their efforts are rewarded with social and physical acceptance, health, beauty, and public adoration. Now they look good, are healthy and proud. Mind you, it all hinges on being in the right hands - trainer, dietician, coach, etc.

Anyhow, here is the lead to Lang's article.


Former Fighter’s Toughest Battle was his Bout with Bulimia

By Krik Lang, for EastSideBoxing.com -- Peter Joseph Alindato was a promising contender in the early 1980s. He was a frequent face on ESPN and had a boyish smile that belied his killer instinct in the ring. Great things were expected of the bantamweight with the flying fists. In the prime of his career, he was trained by Tommy Parks and Oscar Suarez and later spent time training at legendary manger Cus D’Amato’s training facility in Catskill, New York, where a young Mike Tyson was transformed from a raw young teenager into a world-class fighter.

Alindato, however, never lived up to his potential. He never achieved his dream of becoming a champion. What the viewers who saw him on television never knew, and what his trainers didn’t even know for years, was that Alindato, also known as the Durango Kid, was battling a far more dangerous opponent than any man he ever met in the ring – bulimia.

Read full story at East Side Boxing