Do more men than women have eating disorders?

Readers who are following my daily weight loss dairy will note that I am a day late posting this---don't worry, I didn't fall into a giant biscuit barrel and find the only escape was to eat my way on one gorgeous chocolate digestive biscuit at a time.

I wanted to touch upon eating disorders in this post and some of the gender politics of weight. In the late seventies the psychotherapist and campaigner Susie Orbach coined the phrase "fat is a feminist issue" in her pioneering anti-diet book which put forward the argument that gender inequality makes women fat. 

So what about the fat men? There are more of us than fat women after all. Are man boobs a masculist issue? And who calls themselves a masculist anyway? I know I don't!

Emily Wilson asked this question when The Guardian revisited Orbach's book in 2005. "What about fat men?" she asked. "Is male fat a feminist issue too?" before concluding that "Orbach is writing in the days before men had issues: she doesn't attempt to go there."

Just like being fat, having an Eating Disorder has also been claimed by feminism as a women’s only issue most recently by Emer O Toole in The Guardian who made the bizarre argument that you can't be a feminist and hold the perfectly reasonable view that gender inequality affects men and women in different ways. No, to be a Tooleian feminist you have to subscribe to the fundamentalist, gender binary view that women always suffer more. 

The fact about eating disorders, as with so many issues, is that it doesn’t matter whether men or women are the main sufferers, the average male sufferer experiences the gender inequality of being less likely to access the help and support he needs than the average female sufferer (a fact that should concern any feminist who is genuinely committed to tackling gender inequality). 

Men and boys do suffer from anorexia and bulimia and also experience different disorders such as “bigorexia” (the obsession with bulking up) and binge eating (without the bulimic tendency to throw up afterwards).

Sam Thomas of Men Get Eating Disorders Too, who isn't prone to hyperbole, wrote in the Huffington Post recently that when you accept that binge eating is a disorder, “for the first time men are more likely than women to fit the criteria for an eating disorder”. So to answer the question posed in the headline of his post, true figures for men with eating disorders are hard to come by but when you take all disorders into account then the male/female split is a lot closer to equal than we are led to believe. 

Sadly, years of experience shows that any attempt to tackle the problems that men and boys face will be met at some point with feminist resistant as it challenges one of the key pre-suppositions of the mainstream gender discourse that “women HAVE problems and men ARE problems”.

Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue supported this notion by claiming that the problem that women have with fat is caused (at least in part) by both individual men and men as a group.

Orbach has engaged in many different projects since 1978 and is credited as a co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. In 2011 it was reported in The Times that she is now exploring how our obsession with appearance affects both women and men. 

But feminists like Emer O’Toole continue to create and support a narrative about eating disorders and body confidence that seeks to make anything to do with body image, weight and disordered eating a problem that women have and men cause (eg the “male dominated media” causes women to have eating disorders).

And so I guess that one of things I'm trying to understand as I blog about my own struggle with with weight is how Fat is a Men's Issue? Watch this space, there's a good chance that won't be the last time I ask this question.   

If you’re interested in my previous writings on gender, body image and eating disorders see:

• Eating Disorders: How do we improve the body image of boys and girls? (Guardian)
• Memo to Jo Swinson: men have body image issues, too (New Statesman)
• Because we hate the body of men (Good Men Project)

DAY NINE NOTES

WEIGHT: 14 stone 6lb (healthy range 9 stone 7lb to 12 stone 12lb)

WAIST: 36-39 inches/94-99 cms (depends if I'm breathing in or out) 

BMI: 28.1 (healthy range 18.5 to 25) 

ACTION: Walked and ran 3-4, did a little yoga, 12 "pull downs" drank lots of water, stayed off the biscuits, snacked on fruit and seeds

Next: Am I a closet binge eater? 

Previous: Why real men are overweight