Reflection

The Jail of Discipline: What an Eating Disorder Looks Like in a Man

Most men who end up in my consulting room did not arrive thinking they had an eating disorder. Eating disorders are understood to be a young woman’s illness, so there is no shelf to put it on, and the phrase itself feels absurd applied to a man who trains six days a week and is in the best shape of his life.

So set the words aside, and see whether any of this is familiar.

You are praised for your discipline. People admire it, and say so. What they cannot see is that it is not discipline any more, because discipline is something you choose. This has stopped being optional.

There is the counting, which never quite stops. Somewhere along the way you became an accountant: offsetting, deferring, carrying a deficit forward, working out what this evening will cost and what will have to be done tomorrow to pay for it. There are foods that are no longer merely unhealthy but unsafe, and a running calculation underneath every meal, every menu, every dinner somebody else has cooked for you. The ledger never closes.

There is the voice that starts if you miss a session, and it is not encouraging. It is punitive, and it does not let go until you have made it up. A rest day is not rest. It is a negotiation.

And there is what the voice is measuring you against, which is the part almost nobody notices. It is not other men, and it is not the body you had at twenty. It is a body that does not exist. An imaginary body: the version of you in which everything is finally resolved and you are finally alright. Because it is imaginary it cannot be reached, and because it cannot be reached, arriving changes nothing. Every target met is replaced by another within days. That is not a failure of willpower. It is what happens when the standard is designed, without your knowing it, to be unmeetable.

And there is a question worth sitting with honestly: when you find you are thinking more about your own body than about the body of the person you are in bed with, something has taken over that was supposed to be serving you.

Where it usually starts

It rarely begins in a gym at thirty. It begins much earlier, and almost always in a changing room.

A boy who is a bit heavier than the others. Nothing dramatic, nothing anyone would call a problem. But there is PE, and PE means undressing in front of thirty other boys, and boys that age are precise about weakness. So you learn to arrive first, or last. You change facing the wall. You develop a genuine talent for being somewhere else when shirts come off.

And you learn to be the clown, because it works. If you make the joke about yourself before anyone else can, you own it. You are being laughed with rather than at, and that is a different thing entirely when you are twelve. It is a good solution. It is very often the best one available.

The trouble is that it does not switch off. Thirty years later the humour is still there, the self-deprecation is still automatic, and everybody finds you easy company. You are frequently the most sociable man in the room. Nobody has any idea, because the whole point of what you built was that nobody would.

What also does not switch off is the belief that your body is the thing about you that must be managed, hidden or corrected. Later that belief simply changes uniform. The boy hiding in the changing room becomes the man who trains six days a week and still will not take his shirt off at the beach.

And it never actually stopped

The thing that makes this so hard to shift is that the changing room did not end. It moved inside.

Notice how the relationship works now. There is a mind that issues instructions, and a body that is required to comply. The mind sets the target, decides what is permitted, judges the result and delivers the verdict. The body is the thing being managed. And when the body fails to comply, which it will, because bodies get hungry and tired and are not machines, the mind does not respond with understanding. It responds with contempt.

That is a daily event. Not a bad week or a difficult patch: every day, several times a day, for years, a man conducts a running commentary about his own body that he would not tolerate anyone else directing at a person he cared about.

And it is worth looking at whose voice that is. The tone of it, the particular cruelty of it, the timing of it. It is very often the voice of the changing room, or the father, or whoever it was who first made clear that the body was the problem. That voice did not go away when the school did. It was taken inside and given a permanent post, and now it does the work without any external help at all.

Which means the mind and the body have come apart, and are no longer on the same side. The body is not experienced as you. It is experienced as an object you are saddled with, that lets you down, that must be corrected, hidden and controlled. That split is the real injury here, more than any single behaviour, and it is why bingeing, restricting, purging and compulsive training can all coexist in the same man without contradiction. They are not different problems. They are different moves in the same argument.

The consequence is that a man of forty-five is still, in the part of him that matters, standing in that changing room being told what he is. The eating disorder is not only about food. It is a way of continuing to live inside the drama of a childhood that was never resolved, with the roles now played entirely by himself.

And the mind is not one thing either

It would be simpler if the split were only between a mind that wants control and a body that wants food. It is not. The mind is divided against itself, and on a timescale of seconds.

I want more. I want to be thinner. Both, fully meant, moments apart, and neither one is a passing thought that can be reasoned with. Each arrives with the full force of conviction. Whichever one is obeyed, the other is immediately in the room with its verdict ready.

What makes this so disorientating to live inside is that after a while you can no longer tell where any of it is coming from. Is this hunger, or is it something else wearing hunger’s clothes? Is the urge to restrict a decision, or a physical state that arrived and then found reasons? Was that craving in the stomach or in the mind? The question stops having an answer.

Jung had a word for that region: psychoid. It describes the zone where psyche and body are no longer separable, where something is neither purely mental nor purely physical but both at once and cannot be assigned to either. Eating disorders live there more completely than almost anything else in clinical work. That is precisely why they resist being thought about, and why every attempt to solve them by decision fails. You cannot reason your way out of a place where you cannot tell a thought from a sensation.

It is also why this is not a matter of willpower, and why being told to eat normally, or to train less, is useless advice however kindly meant. The instruction is being issued to a part of you that is no longer in charge, by a part of you that is itself divided.

Where the shame goes

Shame about a body does not stay in the body. It quietly organises a life.

You stop going to the pool. You find reasons not to go to the beach, or you go and keep your shirt on. Holidays become something to manage. And underneath it, the conviction that if a woman saw you properly she would not want you, so it is safer not to find out.

What often happens then is that contact with women moves somewhere it cannot be refused. Pornography, or paying for it: both offer access to the feminine with the risk of rejection removed. That is usually what is being sought rather than sex, and it is worth saying plainly, because men in this position often assume their problem is that they want too much. Frequently the opposite is true. What is wanted is closeness, and this is the only version available that cannot end in being turned down.

It does not deliver, of course. The encounter is hollow, or it does not work at all. Difficulty with erections is extremely common here, and it lands exactly where a man is least able to withstand it: not as a physical event but as a verdict on his masculinity. The shame deepens. Approaching a real woman becomes less thinkable than it was before, not more. And so the whole thing turns again.

There is also the part that almost never gets said out loud. That undressing in front of someone has become something to be got through rather than wanted. That you keep your shirt on, or the lights off, or arrange the evening so that it does not arise. That you need two or three drinks before it is bearable, and then a few more, and after a while the drinking is doing a job of its own.

This is worth understanding properly, because it is the single most common reason a man ends up with both problems at once. Alcohol and drugs ease a man’s relationship with his own body. That is what they are doing, and they do it well.

The monitoring quietens. The running calculation stops for a few hours. You can eat something without conducting an internal negotiation about it. You can be looked at, or touched, without wanting to leave the room. For that stretch of the evening you are not at war with the thing you are living in, and if you have been at war with it since you were twelve, that relief is not a small matter. It is the closest thing to peace you have found.

Which is precisely why it becomes indispensable, and why stopping is so much harder than everybody assumes. Remove the drinking and you have not solved anything: you have removed the only reliable way this man has of inhabiting his own body. The shame is still there, entirely undiminished, and now there is nothing between him and it.

This is a loop, not a series of separate failings, and it can be interrupted. But it is not interrupted by stopping the pornography, any more than it is interrupted by losing the weight. Both are the outer edge of it. The shame is the mechanism, and that is what has to be worked with.

The hunger that is not about food

Here is where the whole thing closes on itself, and it is the part that makes it so difficult to escape by effort alone.

Everything described above starves you of closeness. The counting takes up the room where other thoughts would go. The shame keeps you out of the pool, off the beach, dressed, and at a distance. Intimacy is either avoided or arranged so that it cannot reject you, which means it cannot reach you either. Whatever else is happening, a man living like this is not being held, not being known, and not being touched in any way that lands.

That is a real deprivation, and the body registers it. But it arrives without a name, because there is no acceptable way to say I am lonely and I want to be held, and there may never have been. So the psyche does what it does with anything unbearable and unnameable: it translates it into something concrete, something with a shape and a solution.

It arrives as hunger. Not a metaphor, not a manner of speaking. You are genuinely, physically starving, at eleven o’clock at night, and food is the one thing available that answers immediately, requires nobody’s permission and cannot turn you down.

And then, of course, it costs. The eating is followed by the guilt, the guilt by the counting, the counting by more restriction, the restriction by more distance from anybody who might have got close, and the deprivation deepens. The cycle does not merely repeat. It tightens.

Which is why the most useful thing to understand about all this is also the least intuitive: you are not greedy, and you have not failed at self-control. You are starving. Just not of food. Until that is worked with directly, the counting will go on being necessary, because it is managing something that has never been addressed.

And the other hunger

There is a second deprivation underneath the first, and it is usually the one that finally brings a man in.

Look at what the project actually is. Years of attention, discipline, calculation and self-denial, organised around achieving a particular arrangement of a body. And a body is not something that can be achieved. It changes regardless of what you do. It is changed by age, by illness, by time, by nothing at all. Whatever is arrived at will not stay, and the effort to hold it must therefore be permanent and can only ever be lost.

This is not a criticism of caring how you look. It is an observation about what happens when that becomes the organising purpose of a life. A purpose has to be able to hold weight. This one cannot, by its nature, and some part of you has known that for a long time.

So alongside the hunger for closeness there is a hunger for meaning, and it is the more serious of the two. Men often arrive here in their forties or fifties, in visibly good shape, describing a life that looks enviable from outside and feels like nothing from inside. They are not depressed about their body. They are depressed because twenty years went into something that was never able to return anything, and the years are not recoverable.

That is genuinely worth grieving, and it is workable. But it is not addressed by eating differently or training less. It is addressed by asking what all of that was standing in for, and what a life might be arranged around instead.

Why you have not told anyone

Because it is a girl’s problem. Because your mates would not know where to put it and neither would you. Because “I think I might have an eating disorder” is not a sentence that survives being said in a pub, and because the version of you they know is the disciplined one, the one who is on top of it.

So it stays inside, and the isolation becomes part of the illness rather than a side effect of it. Men reach help years later than women do, and this is most of the reason why.

You do not need to accept a diagnosis to begin. You need one conversation with someone who has heard it many times before, from men who looked exactly as capable as you do.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

Related: male eating disorders, eating disorder treatment in London, and Men Who Heal, the dedicated programme for men.

If you are in distress, Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 999.

On the pornography side of this, and why stopping by force so rarely holds, see How to Stop Watching Porn.