Are eating disorders more common among females than males? If so, why?
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On top of some of the replies here talking about how society will frequently pressure women into eating discorders, men with eating disorders are also under-diagnosed. Since it is commonly seen as a thing that only women get/only women are pressured into (men are certainly pressured into it as well, though maybe not as visibly for most people), this leads to many people thinking men just can’t/don’t get them, and for different reasons they can be discouraged from getting a diagnosis or treatment.
There has historically been a lot more pressure on women to look a certain way. One of the main influences in recent times is Barbie. A body shape that is actually unhealthy becomes the “goal” subconsciously implanted into little girls’ minds.
Forward a few years and the makeup and beauty industries play on someone else’s definition of beauty to say you don’t look good enough. You need to put a bunch of makeup on, diet, and have the “one” look that will make you happy.
Likely because there is enormous societal pressure for girls to be thin at this particular moment in time.
But guys can have eating disorders, too, including those more stereotypically female, like anorexia and bulimia. But you tend to see in guys more problems relating to pressures that guys in particular are under, such as bigorexia where guys can develop an obsession with getting bigger and bigger muscles.
Eating disorders is a very wide spectrum of various conditions. Different eating disorders affect men and women at different rates.
Women are more prone to eating disorders like Bulimia and Anorexia as well as self body shaming. While men are more prone to over eating.
Obesity meanwhile affects everyone regardless of background, sex, or age.
A lot of this is cultural. Women are under a lot of pressure to look a certain way and many eating disorders stem from pressure to lose weight and maintain a small figure.
Overeating can often be a sign of depression and stress but not always the case.
Obesity meanwhile is a pandemic in the US and is caused by a variety of factors including wide availability of low-cost high-calorie processed foods, lack of emphasis on physical activity, lack of affordable healthcare, and genetics among others.
Yes they are more common in women;
From memory, more than 95% of cases of anorexia are female patients.
Why ? We don’t really know. There is a paper made by Catherine Preston where they studied how men and women perceive their body at different weights in terms of positive or negative value. They produce the illusion for subjects to be fatter than they are (don’t remember how) and they found out, through questionning, that women valued a slim body more positively than men and valued negatively a fat body more than men.
So it seems that women are more prone to self criticism than men in terms of body shape and that could be one of the reason why eating disorders are more prevalent in women.
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