Men In Denial About Their Own Eating Disorders

Men who have suffered from an eating disorder report that it took years and even a life-threatening event to convince them that they had a problem. Most of the time this was because the men were convinced that eating disorders only affected women, according to a recent study.

The study, which was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open, identified key similarities between the behavioral history and beliefs of men who had previously suffered from an eating disorder.

Researchers from  the University of Oxford and the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom interviewed 39 individuals between the ages of 16 and 26, all of whom had suffered from an eating disorder at some point in their life. Ten of these participants were men.

The interviews generally involved questions designed to determine a series of key factors including, when the subject recognized of early signs and symptoms of an eating disorder, when they generally recognized they had an eating problem, and when they decided to get help.

Initial interviews quickly revealed an obvious trend. While a decision to get help and/or make contact with health care and support services varied largely among all the participants, on average, men reported taking significantly longer than women to recognize even the symptoms of their problem.

Paying close attention to male responses, the researcher were able to determine that one of the main reasons that the male participants took so much longer to acknowledge that they had an eating disorder had a lot to do with the social stigma that only women suffer from eating disorders.

According to the study, one man said he initially thought that eating disorders only affected "fragile teenage girls," even though he himself was going days without eating and obsessively counting calories.

Other men reported that they took a significantly long time to seek help even acknowledging that they had a problem because they believed that they would not be taken seriously by professionals, or were simply unaware of where to seek help.

The researchers concluded their work stating that male eating disorders are an "underrated and under-researched" problem that has been thickly veiled by the incorrect belief that only females suffer from these dangerous conditions. More effort, the authors of the study write, needs to be taken to reach out to men suffering from eating disorders so that treatment and even acknowledgement of the problem can be seen in a more timely manner.

The study was published in the April issue of the BMJ Open.