By Daniel Schmidt

 

AUBURN, Alabama — Seba Bakoyema’s road to self-acceptance was a long — and at times lonely — journey.

He was noticeably skinnier than the vast majority of his peers. Snide comments and insults hurled his way about his frame ensured what was already a sore subject became a deeper insecurity. While a student at Montgomery, Alabama’s famed Loveless Academic Magnet Program, the taunts eventually induced “multiple low points” as he navigated his early teenage years while contending with self-image and body acceptance issues.

 

Several years later, Bakoyema, now a junior studying psychology at Auburn University, leads small group sessions as a research assistant and peer interventionist for the school’s ACCEPT Lab, a research and intervention program focused on reducing body image and eating disorder health disparities within men ages 18 to 30 and understudied populations including LGBTQ+ individuals. 

It is an academic and clinical psychology program held through virtual group therapy sessions that rides the cutting edge of research on the subject all while primarily being led by former participants in the program.

 

According to Dr. Tiffany Brown, an assistant psychology professor and principal investigator at the ACCEPT Lab, this is by design.

“A lot of the times for men when you're talking about already a stigmatized area of concern: body image-related issues, that having to come into a clinic or into a group where you might not feel super comfortable, just removing that barrier of being able to jump on Zoom and do it has been a lot easier to get people to actually end up showing up,” Brown said while explaining the benefits of holding session via Zoom. “And then the more that you allow other people to say, ‘Hey, I've actually struggled with that too.’”

Whether it’s removing real or perceived barriers to receiving such care, allowing participants to face their struggles from the comfort of their homes is beneficial according to Brown.

The leadership also provided by those who have already successfully completed the program also brings an extra degree of comfort for first-time participants not sure of what to expect while exposing one of their most vulnerable sides.

Having experienced first-hand the program himself, Bakoyema attested to ACCEPT’s effectiveness in working with people who have traditionally been an afterthought in this area of clinical research.

“It actually helped a lot with [my] mental health and how I viewed my own body, which is what our main goal is: to help men be able to be more comfortable in their bodies without having to change it,” Bakoyema claimed while speaking about his own past experiences.

While scientific data reveals eating disorders develop more frequently in females than males, those same studies show male eating disorder mortality rates are higher. Reasons for that include misdiagnosis (or no diagnosis at all), deep-seated social stigma and seemingly inescapable personal insecurities, which can all prevent men from seeking help altogether.

Some studies also show gay and bisexual men are also more than three times more likely to have an eating disorder in their lifetimes than heterosexual men, and that Black and Hispanic teenagers are upwards of 50% more likely than white teenagers to binge eat and purge.

Those factors, among other reasons, are why the ACCEPT Lab also pays particular attention to LGBTQ+ individuals, underrepresented ethnicities and across the gender spectrum.

They were all also why Brown decided to extend her work with the University of California San Diego’s More Than Muscles program to Auburn’s campus through the ACCEPT Lab once she arrived in the fall of 2021.

“Typically, I think when most people think about an eating disorder, they think about a young, white, maybe affluent, probably straight woman, and so a lot of our work has been trying to help expand that definition a little bit about what folks with body image concerns or eating disorders look like,” Brown said.

With those misconceptions deeply rooted throughout society, many people fall through the cracks. Cracks Brown intends to close through what could be considered an unprecedented pilot program now being implemented nationally and globally.

Despite primarily operating out of a handful of offices barely large enough to fit an office desk and chair and a conference room in Cary Hall’s basement, ACCEPT’s research of eating disorders and body image issues is gaining widespread notoriety. In fact, the research and protocol the lab helped developed has been implemented globally, with researchers in Brazil having already hosted their own small groups and other universities across the United States looking to implement similar programs of their own.

“We developed this because there was basically an unmet need, that there weren't any kinds of programs like this for young men in college,” Brown said when asked about why the program focuses specifically on young men. “Since we've published some of those results in prior trials and prior studies, we've had a lot of interest from colleges across the country wanting to actually implement the program because there is really nothing out there.”

For the roughly 200 participants evenly divided across both campuses of the collaboration between UCSD and Auburn, acceptance is hard won. In cohorts of three to six, they take part in two 2-hour-long sessions over the course of two weeks. Sometimes they will be issued goals such as wearing clothing that is tighter than what they typically wear in a public area, or eating a food they enjoy without binge eating whatever it is. It can be a deeply intimate experience that fundamentally challenges and pushes them out of their comfort zone.

Should the participants successfully complete the program, the results can be stunning.

 
“A common thing that we've had young men share after going through the program is just that it has changed the way that they think about their body and the way they relate to their body,” Brown said.

From the perspective of the participants, that change runs deeper than Brown’s characterization.

“Sitting down and talking with other people [that have participated], I can definitely tell that they have also experienced something similar,” Bakoyema said when asked about the effectiveness of ACCEPT’s structure. “It just feels like a healthier environment, even in the small Zoom sessions.”

Researchers at the lab hope this increased awareness will bring about a larger fundamental change.

“It's not as addressed usually, even though the research is mostly done in men outside of eating disorder research. It's still not talked about much and I hope that people seeing studies like this are more willing and open to talk about their own mental health,” Jorge Castro Lebron, a researcher employed by ACCEPT, said about the intersection of eating disorders, body image issues and mental health. “People [today] are more receptive and open and curious because I think that's the best way we can learn from one another.”