Saturday, February 28, 2015

Troy Roness And Zach Stafford Discuss Eating Disorders With HuffPost Live

What's it like to identify as a male and struggle with an eating disorder?

While eating disorders are usually portrayed exclusively as issues that women struggle with in our culture, they also affect a significant number of men.

According to The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), the percentage of college-age men dealing with of eating disorders falls somewhere between 4-10 percent.

And while straight men certainly struggle with eating disorders as well, the gay community can especially place unrealistic expectations of how a man's body should look through body policing and shaming.

In this clip from HuffPost Live, Troy Roness and Zach Stafford share their own experiences with battling eating disorders.

"Even within the gay community, as I came out and I moved to Chicago and went to college, my eating disorder, while I can talk to other gay men about it, was sometimes really celebrated," Stafford told Huff Post Live. "And even now when I go to bars and talk to friends about it, it's joked about as a thing that we should all be doing -- we should all be obsessed with restricting calories, purging etc. So it's really complicated and I think the reason it's so accepted in the gay community, per se, is because so many of us are battling it."

Check out the video above to hear more about eating disorders among men or head here to watch the segment in full.

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