Male Eating Disorders — Why Men Don't Seek Help, and What Happens When They Don't
I hold a Doctorate of Professional Practice specifically on male eating disorders. I am, as far as I am aware, the only clinician in Europe to have completed doctoral-level research on this subject. I am also in long-term recovery from an eating disorder myself.
I mention both of these things because they illustrate the central problem: male eating disorders are chronically under-researched, systematically under-diagnosed, and almost never spoken about by men who have experienced them.
The scale of the problem
A 2024 review in Deutsches Ärzteblatt estimated lifetime prevalence in men at 0.2% for anorexia nervosa, 0.6% for bulimia nervosa, and 1% for binge eating disorder. A 2025 global burden of disease study found that approximately one third of individuals with eating disorders are male — and that the burden is increasing more rapidly in males than in females.
A study in JAMA Open Network in December 2023 documented sharp increases in hospitalisation rates for boys with eating disorders. These numbers are almost certainly underestimates. Eating disorder screening tools — the EAT-26, the SCOFF — were validated primarily on female samples and are not calibrated for the way eating disorders present in men.
How male eating disorders look different
Many men with eating disorders are not restricting food in the way the clinical stereotype suggests. They are controlling composition — protein, carbohydrates, macronutrients — in ways that look, from the outside, like health-consciousness or fitness commitment. They are exercising compulsively.
Muscle dysmorphia — the conviction that one is insufficiently muscular regardless of actual muscle mass — shares the same psychological structure as anorexia: the body as never enough, the self as contingent on physical performance, the compulsive behaviour as the only available response to an unbearable internal state.
“The men I see with eating disorders are not doing something strange. They are doing something completely coherent given the psychological pressures they are under. The problem is that nobody — not their GP, not their family, often not they themselves — recognises it as an eating disorder. It is labelled as fitness, or discipline, or dedication. It is none of those things.” — Philippe Jacquet
Why men don’t seek help
The stigma is real. But there is a more specific clinical problem. Alexithymia — the difficulty identifying and putting emotional experience into words — is significantly more common in men with eating disorders. Many men do not know they have an eating disorder because they do not have access to the internal language that would allow them to name what they are experiencing.
What treatment looks like
Treatment for male eating disorders is not the same as treatment for female eating disorders. The entry point is different. The language is different. The specific psychological content — the relationship to muscularity, to competence, to masculine identity — requires a clinical frame that takes it seriously rather than fitting it into a model designed for a different presentation.
Eating disorders in men require a different clinical approach. Dr Philippe Jacquet holds Europe’s only DProf specifically on male eating disorders. Read the full specialist page on male eating disorder treatment.