Even if drug addiction carried a certain stigma, it was also fairly common; among the rarefied circles in which I’d grown up in Manhattan (as an upwardly aspirational have-not who among the super-rich, I should say), going to rehab was as predictable an adolescent rite of passage as a bar mitzvah.
But the shame that I associated with my abnormal relationship with food, and with my body, was deeply embedded; drugs were addictive, whereas there should be no inherent abuse potential in food; anyone, I reasoned, could develop a drug addiction, but it took a certain type of profoundly damaged, dysfunctional personality to develop an addiction to food, or stranger yet, starvation.
Males get eating disorders as well.
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-me/male-eating-disorder
