Reflection
Body Number 2: What a Male Eating Disorder Really Is
Many men who develop an eating disorder were, as boys, a little heavy — a child carrying a bit too much weight. What the disorder then does, in one form or another, is narrow a life. The whole of existence contracts around a single idea: the body. If I were slimmer. If I were leaner. If I were more muscular, stronger — then my life would be happy. The promise is that a perfect body would sort everything out.
Body Number 2
I call that perfect body the imaginary body — Body Number 2. It is usually the body of a young god: muscular, very lean, without an ounce of fat. And the chase never ends, because the problem was never really the body. A life is meant to be broad — you go after what you desire, you build something: a vocation, a diploma, a love, your princess, your kingdom. In a male eating disorder, all of that disappears. The kingdom shrinks to a single sentence: I just need to be more muscular. The imaginary body becomes the place where a whole life is meant to be won — and never can be.
It was never really about the food
Beneath the body is the thing the body is hiding. An eating disorder is, at bottom, a way not to feel. For the man caught in bulimia, or in overeating, food is used to numb — to change how he feels, to blunt the pain of today. Even the fantasy of the perfect body does this work: it offers a future in which everything is finally sorted, so that the present, with its real and unbearable emotion, never has to be met. It is, in its way, a creative mechanism — but what it creates is a way of avoiding reality, above all the reality of one’s own emotion.
The father, and the blueprint of masculinity
Ask a child growing up in the jungle what he wants to become, and he will never say “an IT specialist” — he has never seen one; he cannot even imagine one. A boy becomes what he has seen. And what he sees, above all, is his father: the father is the image through which a son learns what it is to be a man — the very blueprint of masculinity.
So if a father cannot express his emotion, does not take care of himself, does not live in his body or in his desire, the son will struggle to do any of these things either. Worse: a boy who never sees his father feel grows up believing that to feel is unmanly — that emotion is feminine, girlish, a weakness. He learns to do something with the unbearable rather than feel it. And very often, the something he finds is done with food, and with the body.
Why male eating disorders are missed
Men ask for help less, and later. But the deeper reason the disorder is missed is that it disguises itself as virtue. A man arrives training four times a week, eating “clean”, fiercely disciplined about food — and everyone around him, including his doctor, reads it as health, as dedication, as an athlete’s focus. Yet the four gym sessions can be a way of purging calories; the discipline can be an obsession with weight and shape. The eating disorder sits underneath, unseen.
It is missed even by professionals. When I carried out the survey for my doctorate, the answer I heard again and again from experienced male analysts and psychotherapists was: “I have never seen a man with an eating disorder.” They had — they simply had not recognised it. And I have come to think the blindness is not accidental. To see an eating disorder in a man is to come uncomfortably close to one’s own relationship with food, body and control. It is easier not to see.
How men recover — a continuum of care
Treating a man is not a single technique but a continuum, walked alongside him. It often begins almost as hands-on coaching: practical help to loosen the grip of the behaviour. From there it becomes psychotherapy — understanding his relationship to himself and to the world. And further along it becomes analytic work, where the questions turn to meaning, to purpose, sometimes to spirituality. These are not tidy stages; the territory is always larger than the map. But there is a direction of travel, and part of the work is simply to accompany a man along it — helping him accept his own emotion, and find images of masculinity larger than the ones the culture hands him. Rambo, the strongman, the tycoon, the masked hero: these are one kind of man, not all men. There are heroic lives that look nothing like that — the man who writes the book, who pursues a quiet mastery — and a boy needs to know they exist.
The body is the envelope; the personality is the letter
The same is true of the body itself. Our culture sells men a single body — defined, lean, muscular — and rewards it everywhere: the hero is lean, the successful man is lean, the man with the beautiful woman is lean. But not everyone is built for that body, and a boy does not grow up in a vacuum; the ideal is imposed on him. Society has real work to do here — the films, the stories, the images that could give us heroes of every shape, so that a young man might feel there is room for his.
Because the body is only the envelope. The personality is the letter. The body matters — but what matters is a body that lets you act, and live your life, rather than a body that becomes the whole of it.
What recovery actually is
Recovery does not mean that one day the problems are gone. It means something more precise: no longer using food to manage emotion. Food is fuel — petrol in a car. You do not fill the tank because you are sad, add more because you are angry, or siphon some off because you are happy. The petrol has nothing to do with your feelings. Nutrition, in the same way, has to be separated from emotion. Recovery, for a man, is finally this: however I feel, it no longer decides what I eat.
An eating disorder is a serious illness, in men as in women, and is treated as one. But naming what it is really doing — and giving the feeling underneath it somewhere else to go — is where recovery begins. It is also the body-side of a larger story: the energy a young man must learn to master, turned, for want of a channel, against himself.
If you or someone you love is struggling, Dr Jacquet offers specialist eating disorder therapy in London and online.
Part of the series One Energy, a Whole Life — masculine development across a lifespan.
