There is a version of eating disorders that most people recognise: a young woman, severely underweight, refusing food. That image — partial, gendered, and in many ways misleading even as a description of female eating disorders — has shaped clinical training, diagnostic criteria and public awareness in ways that have had serious consequences for men. Eating disorders in men are common, significantly undertreated, and often not recognised at all — by the men themselves, by their families, or by the clinicians they encounter.
The Prevalence Problem
Estimates suggest that around one in three people with an eating disorder is male, with some studies placing the proportion higher for binge eating disorder and lower for anorexia nervosa. But these figures almost certainly undercount. Men are less likely to seek help for an eating disorder, partly because the cultural script for this illness does not include them. A man who restricts his food intake, exercises compulsively, or binges and purges is more likely to have his behaviour understood as discipline, athleticism or stress than as disordered eating. The illness hides in plain sight.
How Eating Disorders Present Differently in Men
The clinical presentations are not identical. Men with anorexia nervosa are more likely to have an athletic history and may frame their restriction in terms of performance or body composition rather than weight loss per se. The drive is often toward muscularity rather than thinness — a distinction that existing diagnostic criteria were not designed to capture. Muscle dysmorphia, sometimes described as ‘reverse anorexia,’ affects almost exclusively men and involves a preoccupation with being insufficiently muscular regardless of actual body composition.
Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder in men and the one where the gender distribution is closest to equal — yet it receives the least clinical attention in relation to male patients. Men who binge eat are more likely to use alcohol or substances around their binge episodes and more likely to have comorbid mood disorders. The eating behaviour is often completely hidden.
Why Men Do Not Seek Help
Shame operates differently in men with eating disorders. The shame is not only about the eating behaviour itself but about having an illness that feels feminising, or that appears to contradict a self-image of competence and control. Many men in clinical settings describe years of not naming what they were doing as an eating disorder — not because they lacked insight, but because the category did not seem to apply to them.
Clinicians are not always better equipped. Men presenting with weight loss, food restriction or purging behaviours may not be asked the right questions. Screening tools were developed on predominantly female populations. The clinical literature on male eating disorders remains thin — which is partly what prompted the doctoral research that led to the practice’s specialisation in this area.
What Treatment Looks Like
Effective treatment for eating disorders in men requires the same core elements as treatment for women — a careful formulation of the function the eating behaviour is serving, engagement with the underlying psychological structures, nutritional rehabilitation where needed — but delivered within a clinical relationship that does not require a man to fit a female template. The shame of not fitting the expected patient profile can itself become a barrier to engagement if the treatment frame does not address it explicitly.
This practice offers specialist psychotherapy for eating disorders in men at offices in Harley Street and Central London, and via secure video internationally. Dr Jacquet holds a Doctorate of Professional Practice specifically focused on male eating disorders — the only practitioner in Europe to have completed doctoral-level research in this area.
This practice has a specialist focus on eating disorders in men. Dr Jacquet is the only person in Europe to have completed doctoral-level research on male eating disorders — the treatment page gives a full overview of the approach.