Are eating disorders more common among females than males? If so, why?
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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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