MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
It’s early in the year, and we all know what that means – everyone is on a diet!
Last year an estimated 28 million of us tried to lose weight in January. And as we get increasingly bombarded with slimming messages, it’s increasingly harder to tell when someone has developed an eating disorder.
“The more weight I lost, the more people congratulated me. That gave me a boost, because who doesn’t like being told they’re doing well?”
It’s estimated 1,250,000 people in the UK have an eating disorder. Around 25 per cent of those are male. According to 2018 stats from the NHS, the number of young men in hospital with eating disorders increased by 98 per cent between 2010 and 2018, which means it’s growing at a faster rate for boys than girls. However, until very recently, that’s just not something that has been focused on.
There’s a lot of misconceptions about male anorexia. It can be seen as a ‘female disease’, but that’s odd when you consider that the first medical description of anorexia was actually a bloke. Not only that, but that was well over 300 years ago, so eating disorders
