Men Get Eating Disorders Too

About us

Men Get Eating Disorders Too is a Brighton-based charity working on a national scale. We are dedicated to representing and supporting the needs of men with eating disorders. As a charity, we campaign to raise awareness so that men affected by eating disorders can seek support whenever they feel they need it.

The main way in which we do this is by providing essential information about eating disorders through our website including definitions, symptoms, the kind of treatments you would expect and links to support services for sufferers. In addition, we provide an online space for men affected by eating disorders to share their stories and offer/receive peer support through the forum and live chat. This online community helps ease the isolation and secrecy men with eating disorders often experience, mostly due to the stigma associated with eating disorders and the difficulty they face seeking help. Another part of our work is to raise awareness of eating disorders through the use of media and online awareness involving social media and blogs.

To further improve the treatment men receive, we deliver training to professionals from across all sectors to help them gain a better understanding into male eating disorders so that they can be more responsive to men's needs by improving provision and encouraging better professional practice. We regularly attend health promotion events and community events to raise the profile of male eating disorders. As part of our outreach we distribute campaigning and informational resources in community settings.

Over the past eighteen months we have developed a local arm to the charity. For instance, from Sept 2009 to Jan 2010, we piloted a Peer Support Group for male sufferers. Earlier this year we held an exhibition to challenge the myths and misconceptions of eating disorders at Brighton Jubilee Library and held our first conference in May, which coincided with the official launch of our new look website.

Eating disorders in men - the issue

Typically eating disorders are perceived to be illnesses that only affect women, with the most common association being with young girls. This is a common assumption and the fact is anyone can suffer from eating disorders including people of any age, social background, ethnicity, race, sexuality and gender. The issue of men and eating disorders is widely under-represented and misunderstood and at present men with eating disorders represent a marginalised group, with a lot of stigma attached.

How a donation from Sunshine bank will help

We plan to increase the service user-led element of our work. We already have small network of case study contacts who undertake media work and awareness-raising, which raises the profile of both the issue and the organisation. We also have a small online steering group to guide the way we deliver our projects and services.

We intend to build on this by developing our user-involvement work by recruiting ‘Campaigners’ who will be male sufferers or others who are affected by male eating disorders. The campaigners will help us to live up to our ethos of being an organisation that acts as a platform from which men can have their voices heard. We will invite the campaigners who have more time to work with the charity to join a Steering Group and participate in day-long, once a month over six months, to help develop the vision, strategy and projects of the charity as well as sitting in on board meetings so the management committee gets a sense of how they should be managing the organisation. This approach of integrating and embedding service users in all the work the charity does is core to the way the charity runs and delivers its objectives. By doing this, we hope to achieve our goal of being user-led at every level of our work.

Why support MGEDT?

We are the only national charity nationwide that addresses the specific needs of men with eating disorders and has a good standing in the mental health and men’s health communities as being the preferred resource for men, carers, parents and friends alike to access information and advice about the topic.

We believe our user-led approach makes us best placed to deal with this unique topic. This approach provides us with the experiences and collective voice of sufferers and associated people, enabling us to deal with the topic in a sensitive, yet realistic way. This real experience is backed by clinical experts who support the work of the project. Users of our services often feel that they find it very easy to approach the charity knowing that the project was founded and is now run by men who have themselves suffered from eating disorders, and recovered.

Since our inception in 2008, we have been involved in media campaigns and feature frequently in major press surrounding eating disorders including coverage with the BBC, ITV, The Mirror and many others. We already have the reputation of being a successful campaigning and support organisation and we have close links with several other not-for-profits including Body Gossip, Diabetics With Eating Disorders and NotED, giving us a strong base of working partnerships to draw from. This reputation is proven by our robust fundraising track record with grants from several major funders and awards for campaigning and the use of digital media in not-for-profit organisations.

For more information about the charity please see our website or email Sam Thomas (Project Leader) at: sam@mengetedstoo.co.uk. See also our Facebook Page.