The incidence of eating disorders among men is about 10% to 15% of women and so in another words for every 10 women I treat I will see one man. With man that would become more like 30% or 40% if you included compulsive overeating/obesity and the reason there is a lower incidence with men is again cultural. With men if you widen the definition manifest eating disorders in the form of jockeys, for instance they frequently find it normative to purge to keep their weight low because its career oriented and they get addicted to that piece. Actors, models, male models, ballet dancers, those are occupations with high incidence of anorexia and bulimia. But if you add the compulsive overeating piece you would find a greater percentage. It is also interesting because men tend to have an onset of an eating disorder later in life and it is sort of like a body image issue in reverse. So if you can picture three men during foot ball season standing up in the stands with humongous blue bellies spelling out the name of the team. The reason they are uninhibited and not you know uncomfortable showing their body is because they have a Polaroid so to speak in their head of when they were 18 or 20 and in college where they were spelt and muscular. Their body image is rooted in a positive body image for later in life to early adult. Whereas a woman's image or that Polaroid is usually a snap shot much earlier when the woman has a negative perception in adolescence of them and tends to have that Polaroid there despite you know being too thin or on the compulsive overeating side to becoming heavy, losing weight and still feeling fat. This is what I call a thin fat person.
