I Was A Pro Boxer With An Eating Disorder That Almost Killed Me

Rise Above with Kevin Lanning

Danny O'Connor, a former Olympic-team boxer and professional fighter from Boston, shares his harrowing journey with a life-threatening eating disorder

Key takeaways

• Extreme discipline in sports can become a double-edged sword when applied to unhealthy weight control practices.
• Eating disorders are not exclusive to women; male athletes often suffer in silence due to stigma and lack of awareness.

Main topics

• Eating disorders in male athletes
• Weight class manipulation in sports

Notable quotes

I couldn't even talk. I couldn't even make noise. I could barely walk.

Conclusion

Danny O'Connor's story is a powerful testament to resilience, vulnerability, and the importance of breaking

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) At this point, I couldn't even talk. I couldn't even make noise. I could barely walk. And I do remember, like, the water was so scalding, it, like, was burning my ass when I got in the tub. And I couldn't even make a noise. Like, I couldn't even, like... Speaker 5 (0:20) Danny, I want to thank you for coming on. You're living in Colorado by way of Boston. You're originally from Boston. Speaker 4 (0:26) Yeah. Yep. Born and Speaker 5 (0:27) raised. You drove all the way from Colorado here to West Palm Beach. Speaker 4 (0:32) Well, yeah, I drove to Orlando here as a keynote. So I'm going to be speaking there at a conference for four days. But the last month since the book came out, I kind of like, you know, I'm my own publicist. I'm my own salesperson. So like I've. created these trips where I rent a car, I drive, I set up a bunch of media things, newspaper stuff. I try to promote the book. When I went to Texas, I had like a clinic where I taught people boxing and then promoted the book. And, uh, I always bring my oldest kids because it's like a guy's trip. I try to show them what the grind is. And we have, we have real talks about life. My oldest is, you know, as a girlfriend now he's in high school. So we, it's our way to connect, you know, and, uh, Coming down here, I was all over. I had to go to Key West. I had to go to Boca Raton, Palm, Orlando, and St. Augustine. So driving made more sense to me because I could bring a bunch of crap in the back, use them. For sure. I rented a minivan. That thing is sweet. For sure. That Speaker 5 (1:31) thing is Speaker 4 (1:31) sweet. Leather. So like, I don't mind the drive. I don't love flying. I'll do it if I have to. Yeah, dude. I don't love it. So I don't mind the drive. But it was a long one. Speaker 5 (1:39) But you're also creating, I mean, I respect the grind, man. And we'll get into it in a second, but that comes from boxing. That comes from fighting. For Speaker 4 (1:46) sure, for sure. That Speaker 5 (1:47) grind is just, you either have it or you don't have it. Yeah. And it's instilled in you at a young age. What I love, though, about that is you bring your two older ones and those memories that you're creating, that journey from going down to Key West, Orlando, driving back to Colorado, you guys are creating so many memories together. Speaker 4 (2:07) Oh, for sure. I mean. Every step that I take in this life is either directly or indirectly to benefit my kids, my wife, and so that stuff's intentional. You know, I've even had him leave school for a week to come with me because I'd rather him have this time and this moment and learn from me and learn from the world. And, you know, sometimes they come with me and they just sit in the room and watch while I talk or how I conduct my business. I think it's really important, especially for the next generation. It's like they need positive role models, especially in such a crazy world right now. So, you know, the time on the road with them is amazing. I love it. Speaker 5 (2:42) That's awesome. Great Speaker 4 (2:43) connection. You know, it's just us. There's no moms not here. It's just the guys, you know? Speaker 5 (2:47) Yeah, of course. Yeah. So let's take a big step back. Sure. Let's go to early childhood. Oh, yeah. Born in Boston. Speaker 4 (2:53) Yeah, born in Boston. Speaker 5 (2:55) Siblings? Speaker 4 (2:55) Nope, only. Speaker 5 (2:56) Only child? Only. Okay. What was the family dynamic like? Were your parents together? Speaker 4 (3:01) Yep. Parents have been together forever. Married. Great parents. I love my parents. Super supportive. Like, just always there. Speaker 5 (3:11) Addiction doesn't discriminate. Speaker 4 (3:13) Working class. You know what I mean? Like, they tried to hide me from all the harsh realities of life. And the big thing with my childhood is I grew up in a different time. It was like a Sandlot time, right? Some of my friends now are people I grew up with from elementary school, preschool. We had the neighborhoods. We had all the same people. My parents are really good at putting me in stuff. I played every sport you can think of. It wasn't like now when everything is so sports specific and you can play year round. I played soccer, football, baseball, karate, all these different sports, three seasons. You'll find the theme. in my life is like, I'm very extreme. And when I find that thing, it's it's it. And so sports was that when I was a kid, I played every season when we weren't playing organized, I'd be in the neighborhood playing. And, you know, I was really blessed to be pretty good at sports. I made like all the elite teams, travel teams. So that was like really my childhood until everything got narrowed into wrestling. When I found wrestling, which was freshman year of high school. That's when everything narrowed. I stopped doing the other sports. And that was like, wrestling was my thing. I've never felt about boxing the way that I felt like about wrestling. I loved it from the second I stepped on the mat. I had a whole vision of going to NCAAs, winning a national title at Iowa, like the next Dan Gable. Like I had a whole path. Speaker 5 (4:44) Yeah. You know what I mean? It's crazy because wrestling is a different type of sport. Yeah. You have team sports. And then wrestling, I mean, also you have tennis and other ones, but wrestling, the physical aspect of it, and it's one-on-one, and it's you're winning or you're losing. It's not a team loss. It's not, yeah, you have the meets, right? You have the meets, and your team has more wins than the other team. Okay, but it's one-on-one. Speaker 4 (5:10) So Speaker 5 (5:10) you were pretty courageous at a young age. Speaker 4 (5:15) Yeah, I mean, I excelled in sports and I like to be out there. I had never, like karate was with a bunch of people at the studio. So it was like, I never competed like you would in wrestling when you go out there one-on-one. So I wasn't really accustomed to individual sports. It was always like group sports. But I just felt like I was made to wrestle. Like the second I stepped on it and I achieved success right away. Like I became a state champion in Massachusetts right away, a year after I stepped on the mat. So right away. 10th grade? 10th grade, sophomore year, right after I stepped on the mat. So that's when I realized like, oh, I want to do this like for as long as I can. I love this. And like we talked about the extremes, once I stepped on that mat, it was all day, every day. I wrestled in season. I wrestled after practice. I wrestled off season. I went to tournaments in Florida and nationals. Like it was my life, everything about it in a very short amount of time. Freshman year when I first started wrestling until I stopped wrestling basically junior year. Speaker 5 (6:19) So Speaker 4 (6:19) you Speaker 5 (6:20) stopped wrestling junior year? I stopped wrestling. Okay. Actually, before you go into that story, you were devoted to sports, but were you like hanging out with kids, smoking weed, drinking here and there socially, or were you just determined like, I'm not drinking, I'm good? So focused on sports. I Speaker 4 (6:39) was a merit student. So basically I was on a roll. So I was a student athlete. I drank a little bit. Speaker 4 (6:47) outside of like competition but you know i was i was locked in my discipline and focus um is second to none when it comes to what i'm trying to achieve um and it's a double-edged sword not it is really good but it also became my demise when it came to putting that discipline towards making a weight class okay Speaker 5 (7:10) yeah Speaker 4 (7:11) all Speaker 5 (7:11) right so junior year you stop wrestling what happens One thing I've learned in my own recovery is that you can't do this alone, and you don't have to. I know that firsthand. I went through inpatient treatment at Karen Treatment Centers, and it changed the course of my life. That's why I am proud to announce that I have partnered with Karen. For nearly 70 years, they've helped people and families not just break free from addiction, but actually heal and transform their lives. They're in network with all major insurance providers. and same day admission is available. So if you or someone you love is struggling, don't wait. Call Karen at 855-352-0103. That's 855-352-0103. Help starts with taking that first step. Speaker 4 (8:03) So when I first started wrestling, I didn't know anything about weight class. And I was a child. I didn't know anything about nutrition. I didn't know anything about my body or about life or adulthood. I just knew that I had to be this number on a scale. And, you know, to be that number was what was going to take me to my dreams, right? If I can't be this weight, I can't wrestle. So I created all these horrible habits when it came to making my weight class. And, I mean, I put my life at risk throughout my whole life, and we'll talk about it. At that time, I always look back and I'm like, oh, because I, you know, I aggressively starve for weeks and months. I use pharmaceutical laxatives on a nightly basis, sometimes three times the limit of what you're supposed to take. And that's after not eating for a week, right? So there's nothing in my body other than, you know, bile and all these things. So, you know, I use sauna suits. I didn't drink water for days. I didn't know anything about nutrition and the fluctuations and my hormones. And so as soon as I learned how to wrestle, there was no off season. It was doing that every day, making weight every day, cutting weight every day, trying to keep the number on the scale every day, weighing myself 70 times a day, understanding the fluctuations in my body and doing it mostly behind closed doors, right? Like I didn't tell parents. I used to go to Walgreens down the street. I'd walk home from practice. I'd go to Walgreens. I'd steal the laxatives because I thought the pharmacy guy, if he knew that I was buying them, I wouldn't be able to wrestle. Speaker 5 (9:37) And Speaker 4 (9:38) then I'd go back the next day and use that bathroom. And sometimes I'd lay on the ground in the bathroom for an hour because I felt like I was dying from the cramps, right? And so I still wrestled. I still gained the success. And the problem was is... I treated my body so unhealthy trying to make weight, not realizing that like, it was like this false persona, like, oh, I'm going to make this weight. You know, I'm going to be stronger. I'm going to wrestle. When in actuality, it was the opposite. I was crushing myself. How can you compete at 100 % when I hadn't eaten or I wasn't, I had no nutrition or I lost six pounds because I was spitting in a bottle one night. Like, and so I got so burnt out. from the weight cuts that I stopped doing in school. So I went from a merit student to failing every single class like that. And that's another theme that you'll see. I do a lot of like that. Speaker 5 (10:37) You Speaker 4 (10:37) know what I mean? Like I step on the mat, I become a wrestler like that. I blow it up like that. I learned to box. I made the Olympic team two years later. You know what I mean? There's a lot of very high highs. And even with... dropping out of school and the substance that we'll talk about that comes right it may have my energy may have not been directed in the right stuff but i still did it big everything i do is big whether it's blowing it up or building it up big Speaker 5 (11:05) white or black white Speaker 4 (11:07) and black yeah Speaker 5 (11:07) that's like that that is like addiction mindset 101 it's it's wild yeah okay so you fell out of your classes yeah so you can't wrestle they if you're not making grades that's usually how it goes in high school so you fail out but what do you do from that point on do you then okay i gotta now get my grades back up to potentially wrestle again what happens next they Speaker 4 (11:38) And academically, they took wrestling away maybe like once or twice. And, you know, I made like attempts and there were people in my community that were trying to help like, but ultimately, then academically, I lost wrestling forever. And I blew it up, blew it up. I dropped out of school. I left home, started living on the street. And that's when substance came into play. And when we talk about substance, I don't want you to think like, I had this one habit and this one substance that I was using on a daily basis. And then it came a problem where I needed that. It was more like I blew up so much that I was using overnight, right? I never had used anything hardcore. And now I'm using every hardcore thing you can think of in a crazy manner. Some days I would have a concoction of chemicals and pills in my hands and I'd take them. I didn't even know what they were. You know what I mean? One time I took a couple hundred milligrams of Adderall. And I didn't even really know what it was. And so I had all these crazy experiences with substance that half of the time I didn't know what it was. And there was no of choice. There was just an array of everything. One time I drank multiple bottles of Robitussin and I will tell you that shit was wild, wild. And so I look back at, and it was a very short period of time, right? I blew up and then now I'm on the street. a bad influence on myself. I'm around bad influences. Now I started getting in trouble and I had never been arrested in my life. Speaker 5 (13:10) Up to that point. Up Speaker 4 (13:11) to Speaker 5 (13:11) that Speaker 4 (13:11) point. Speaker 5 (13:12) What was your first arrest? Speaker 4 (13:14) Assault and battery of a deadly weapon. Speaker 5 (13:16) Can you tell us the story of what had happened? Speaker 4 (13:19) I mean, there were so many and they were such a haze, right? I think I had 20... total charges in like a very small, you know, from the time that I blew up, left high school, substance and getting in trouble to the time I stopped was like only a year or two. And in that time, like I said before, it was crazy. I know I got arrested multiple times. I had open cases in this court and then I was getting in trouble while I was in trouble. I had another open case here and they were crazy things like, you know, unarmed robbery, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, assaults, like. I was just, the hooliganism was, it always led back to fighting. Speaker 5 (14:02) It Speaker 4 (14:03) always led back to fighting, drinking, partying. And then finally I got in a, like a mass altercation. Speaker 4 (14:16) And I got arrested and I got charged and I thought it was the end. I thought I was going to jail because I had all these open cases. What was the mass Speaker 5 (14:25) altercation? Speaker 4 (14:26) It was a huge fight. It was out of college. I didn't even go to the college. I didn't even, I was there visiting someone. It was just a huge, like there could have been, you know, it was like 300, a sea of people on the front lawn. There's like frat row and everyone was fighting and cops came, everybody ran. And then all of a sudden I got a summons in the mail, you know, a little while later, hey, you got to show up to court. And then I got charged with a bunch of stuff. Speaker 5 (14:50) He took you in. Speaker 4 (14:51) Took me in. And I thought, all right, well, this is it. These are serious charges. They don't know me here. I wasn't even in Boston. It was outside. So like nobody knew me. And I thought like, you know, this is it, you know, and I didn't want it. Like I wasn't a bad kid. I didn't want to spend my life in a jail cell. Like I just didn't know. Speaker 4 (15:11) I was just a mess from like, you know, my whole world was being a wrestler at a very young age. Right. Like I didn't have a good understanding of anything. I just wrestling was my thing. And then when it got taken away or, you know, I wasn't able to fulfill the requirements, whichever way you want to look at it, either way it was gone. Yeah. Speaker 5 (15:27) I Speaker 4 (15:28) couldn't handle that. Along with all the pressures of being a 15 year old kid, you know, life grows, you know, I just, it was too much. And, and, and I unraveled in a, in a, in a really big way. And, um, That was kind of the final straw. That was the final straw. Sitting in that courtroom when that judge was like, man, if you ever come back here, you're going away for a long time. I knew like, all right, this is not what I want. And I knew like during that time, it's not what I wanted either. Like I didn't like doing substances. Like I didn't like putting my life at risk. And, you know, every time we're doing substances, now we're in the car driving or somebody else is driving me. sick, you know, 18 year old kid. Like I put my life at so much risk when I look back now. And, you know, I just came from Key West and that kid, I, you know, I grew up from elementary school with him and we just had to walk down memory lane. And we talked about all the kids that are now not here because they went through the childhood with us. And at that time, the art, my child was so crazy in such a chaotic way. It's like I feel blessed that I even made it through it because I have some of these close friends that just aren't here. They're dead now for whatever reason because they didn't get to come through it like that. And so I feel really blessed that I was able to turn it around. And that last time getting in trouble was like the final. Like we got to do Speaker 5 (16:49) something. What year was that? Is that like 04-ish? Speaker 4 (16:52) I graduated. So I dropped out of the traditional high school and I went to like this. feeder school it's like the last stop it's called alternative it's like yeah um and so 2003 is when i graduated high school Speaker 5 (17:05) okay yeah and then the court case thing you had said it 17 roughly right Speaker 4 (17:10) so like junior year to like a little bit after i graduated was like my trouble crazy time crazy just absolutely crazy Speaker 5 (17:17) yep so crazy we'll call it 04 that you went into the courtroom and then they'd actually You had all these open cases. You thought they were going to throw the book at you. And the judge then, I'm assuming, gave you a break and said, if you come back here again, then it's over for you. Speaker 4 (17:33) Yeah. But he did give me a conviction on my record. Speaker 5 (17:37) You got a felony? Speaker 4 (17:38) No. It got bumped down to like a misdemeanor assault and battery. but it goes on your record. Yeah, of course. That's another thing for everyone listening. Like you're 18 years old and you think this, and then all of a sudden now you have something that follows you for the rest of your life, a paper trail. Yeah. Speaker 5 (17:53) You Speaker 4 (17:53) know what I mean? And like I'm fortunate I didn't spend time in jail, but at the same time I look back and I'm like, damn, I wish I didn't make those decisions. I wish I knew better. I wish I could have done better. And I don't really like to be like that because whatever I did made me who I am today. But I was a child, man, and I just wish I had known a little bit better. So, yeah, I mean, I got off for less than what it should have been, I guess you could say. But I still, you know, now I had a conviction on my record, and I'm like, oh, I don't even know what that, you know, what does that mean for the rest of my life, you know? Speaker 5 (18:29) Yeah. And Speaker 4 (18:29) so I knew, like, this is it. We're either going down a path that you're never going to come back from again because you're either going to die or you're going to jail for a long time. where something's got to be different here. Speaker 5 (18:42) Okay. So take us through what path you take following the court. Walked into a boxing gym. Okay. And you had a lot of success. We all know you had a lot of success with that boxing gym in your career. So take us through what happened. You walk into a boxing gym. Speaker 4 (19:02) PAO, Police Athletic League. That's a big thing. And back home where I was. And so they had a gym that was free. You didn't have to pay for it. So it didn't matter like what your, you know, economic status was. You could just go. Speaker 3 (19:20) The Speaker 1 (19:21) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 2 (19:31) The new Speaker 1 (19:36) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 4 (19:45) I knew that I love wrestling. I knew that I love being an athlete. I was an athlete, even though I wasn't on the field, even when I was in trouble, I was still an athlete in my mind, you know? And so, you know, I just, I don't know. Like I always say it, it like found me, you know what I mean? Because it literally saved my life overnight. No, for all the hardships. And I don't even like boxing that much. I don't even like fighting another person. I'll tell you, I do not like. Fighting other people. With Speaker 5 (20:12) your career, you're sitting here saying, I don't really like boxing. It Speaker 4 (20:15) was the training. It was me versus, it's always me versus me, always. And so when I got into the gym and it was the training, it kept me in a safe environment. It changed my life overnight. I wasn't hanging out. I wasn't going out. I wasn't Speaker 5 (20:29) - Speaker 4 (20:29) You felt Speaker 5 (20:29) safe. Speaker 4 (20:30) I felt safe. I wasn't using drugs. I wasn't using, I wasn't doing anything. I was just in here. with a positive role model that was teaching me boxing. And it made me feel good because