EATING DISORDERS Men's dieting habits raise health concerns

By OVETTA WIGGINS
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Jane Jakubczak, dietitian at the University Health Center at the University of Maryland at College Park, gets the same query from students that she did when she took the job five years ago.
"What can I eat to get the fat off my body?"
What has changed, Jakubczak said, is that male students are posing the questions. With increasing frequency, she said, young men are starving themselves in pursuit of bodies that fulfill a magazine ideal.
"I have students asking, what can I eat to get rid of love handles? And they pinch, and there's nothing there," Jakubczak said.
Three years ago, Jakubczak saw about four male students during the school year who were asking for help to lose weight. These days, she said, she sees at least one a week.
In addition to asking about how to look like someone on the cover of a fitness magazine, male students are doing extreme dieting, exercising compulsively, using food supplements or combining all three.
Randi Wortman, a clinical psychologist who works with men and women with eating disorders at her Bethesda, Md., office, said the increase in male eating disorders is only about five to 10 years old.
"For women it comes from the Twiggy generation," Wortman said. "Since the fitness craze with the glossy health magazines, men have become part of society's overinflated vision of what is the ideal body type."
Jakubczak said some of her male students have taken all of the fat out their diets in an attempt to "get the abs of the guy on the Men's Health cover."