You’ve seen the telltale signs of anorexia: the emaciated frame, the hollow eyes, the social withdrawal. You’ve seen more pictures of skeletal celebrities and supermodels than you can count. You may even have friends or relatives whom you’ve watched spiral into self-starvation or bingeing and purging as you looked on helplessly. In fact, considering that some eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders, it’s hard to find anyone in this country who hasn’t witnessed or been a victim of one of these devastating illnesses.
Too often, however, we assume that eating disorders are a female problem, largely the domain of insecure adolescent girls and aspiring starlets. Our society has become so focused on protecting this vulnerable demographic from anorexia, bulimia, and other unhealthy relationships with food that we often fail to notice a phenomenon that’s happening right before our eyes: boys across the United States—as many as 25 percent of all people with eating disorders, according to some estimates—are falling prey to these very same diseases. If you or someone you love is part of this group, learn how to begin the healing process.
Recognizing a Silent Killer
Until the turn of the millennium, the general consensus within the medical community was that only 10 percent of disordered eaters were male, although researchers did concede that males were more reluctant than females were to report their abnormal behavior to a mental-health professional. However, a 2007 Harvard study found that this statistic might be misrepresenting the extent of the problem: of three thousand adults surveyed, a full 25 percent of the respondents with eating disorders and 40 percent of binge eaters were male.
Within the male population, specific groups are at greater risk of developing eating disorders than others—namely, athletes (especially those expected to display their bodies prominently as part of their sport, such as bodybuilders, wrestlers, swimmers, and skaters); men who make regular public appearances (models, actors, musicians, and so on); homosexuals; men who were teased as children for being overweight; men who endure extreme parental pressure; and men attempting to avoid weight- and nutrition-related medical conditions to which they are genetically predisposed.
The roots of boys’ eating disorders are wide-ranging; some are similar to the possible reasons girls become anorexic or bulimic (such as depression, control issues, and emerging sexuality), but the primary cause is male-specific: while girls are inundated with media images of the waiflike bodies of female “role models,” archetypes of which include Kate Moss and Nicole Richie, and put undue pressure on themselves to look like those women, boys are receiving their own set of societal signals about what constitutes an “ideal” male body—and those criteria are becoming harder and harder for the average guy to meet.
