Fan favourite: Shirtless Aidan Turner as Poldark in the BBC hit series

There was no doubt that the man sitting before me had an eating disorder. But, unlike many of the women I see with anorexia, he wasn’t painfully thin. Far from it.

He was in his late 20s and had only come to see me on the insistence of his mother, who was very worried about him.

He shrugged when I asked him what the problem was, and flexed his biceps. ‘Everyone wants arms like mine,’ he bragged.

But when I questioned him further, he explained how he obsessively weighed everything he consumed, and became anxious if he hadn’t planned what he was going to eat. He could never dine out because he didn’t feel he could trust someone else to prepare his food.

He had a very limited range of things he felt comfortable eating, and avoided nearly all carbohydrates. He was obsessed with his body fat percentage and became depressed if it went above the very low level of 6 per cent.

While claiming he was interested in fitness, he confessed he bought harmful steroids and hormones over the internet, which he injected. He was convinced his legs weren’t muscular enough, despite them being nearly as big as my waist.

While he was obsessed with being bigger, rather than smaller, there was no difference between his underlying obsession with diet and the way it controlled his life, and the women I meet who have their own profound struggles with body image.

Yet an ever-increasing number of men like him are hidden in plain sight. We don’t think of them as being unwell because, on the surface, their bodies seem to reflect our warped ideas of what being ‘healthy’ is.

We are, thankfully, becoming more savvy about the effect that images of unattainably thin models and celebrities can have on girls’ self-worth.

Men are now bombarded with images of the perfect male physique. Just look at the number of times that famous picture of Daniel Craig on the beach as James Bond is used

And no one would consider it remotely healthy for a girl to be dieting to get a model’s ‘thigh gap’. (This is when a woman’s legs are so thin that the thighs don’t touch at the top when she stands with her knees together.) In fact, there is even something of a backlash. This week, the Mail reported how women are rebelling against the social media obsession for thigh gaps, and celebrating instead ‘mermaid thighs’ — the typical ‘Y’ shape made when legs (shock, horror) touch at the top.

But what is not discussed at all is the way men are now bombarded with images of the perfect male physique. Just look at the number of times that famous picture of Daniel Craig on the beach as James Bond is used, or Aidan Turner scything shirtless in Poldark. Just as women suffer when they compare themselves to top models, so men’s self-esteem can be corroded, too. But instead of being driven to create a thigh gap, men become obsessed with ‘getting lean’ or ‘shredded’.

It’s said that only about 5-10 per cent of people with eating disorders are men. But I think this is grossly misleading. It’s true that this is the percentage of men being seen in eating disorder clinics, which represents those with anorexia or bulimia. However, I believe there is an epidemic of men with eating disorders: it’s just that doctors never see them because it takes a different form.

Such people aren’t sitting in eating disorder outpatient clinics. They are in the gym, lifting weights, or at home drinking protein shakes.

Many of the men and teenage boys who go to gyms and aspire to the ‘ideal’ muscled body, complete with six-pack, exhibit behaviours and psychology identical to women with anorexia.

It’s been termed ‘bigorexia’ because they are fixated on boosting their muscles rather than losing weight. Exercise and obsessively controlling their diet take over their lives.

A nd just like any other eating disorder, it isn’t really so much about what they look like, but about the need to be in control.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be trim and toned, or going to the gym. It’s only when this turns into an obsession, to the exclusion of everything else, that it becomes a problem.

It’s when someone panics without it and becomes depressed, and when their view of their body becomes distorted.

Yet on social media and in ‘fitness’ magazines, men are bombarded with images of buff, muscle-bound hulks, just as women face a barrage of skinny female bodies.

The truth is that for most men to look like a male fitness model requires the same psychologically unhealthy relationship with food and your body as it does for most women to get a thigh gap. The fact that society doesn’t recognise these men as being seriously unwell doesn’t mean they aren’t.

The real reason clowns are so scary

Coulrophobia is the proper medical term for fear of clowns, and it’s very common

I read this week that residents of a small town in South Carolina have been put on alert after a series of mysterious sightings of people dressed as clowns.

Exactly why they are dressed this way is unclear, but it seems to have spooked the town, with some inhabitants gripped by fear.

It got me thinking about clowns and how so many people are scared of them. And, for sure, there is something strangely unnerving about them.

Coulrophobia is the proper medical term for fear of clowns, and it’s very common, even if it’s not an outright pathological fear. How many times have you heard someone tell you that clowns are ‘creepy’?

Psychologists think it’s partly because their behaviour can be ‘transgressive’ — that is, it’s unpredictable and antisocial (that’d be the custard-pie flinging, and the flower-in-the-buttonhole that squirts water).

But neurobiology also suggests the reasons go much deeper. By exaggerating certain facial features and body parts — the red nose, the unnatural make-up, the outsize shoes — the clown enters the so-called ‘uncanny valley’. This is a fascinating phenomenon first identified by a Japanese robotics professor called Masahiro Mori in 1970. It is used to describe the feeling people have when something appears human — but not quite.

So, while people feel comfortable towards things — robots, for example — that look either exactly like a human or not like one at all, they feel very uncomfortable when something looks a bit like one.

If you plot how comfortable they feel on a graph, this sudden dip in their comfort levels is the ‘valley’ from which the term gets its name. It is thought to be the reason why we see depictions of aliens with big bulging eyes as being so menacing. They look a bit like us, but not quite the same.

Precisely why this phenomenon exists isn’t clear, but it is thought that when we look at non-human faces, certain, very specific, parts of our brain process the information. When we look at human faces, another entirely different but also very specific part is involved instead.

For faces that look a bit human but not quite, the brain isn’t sure how to process this, and neither part knows which one should be involved.

And if something doesn’t quite move in the way we would expect, this also sets alarm bells ringing in the brain where normal, fluid, human movement is identified and processed. So a clown’s silly walk just compounds the problem.

So if you find yourself making excuses to avoid a trip to the circus, blame your brain.

A study this week suggested vaping is as ‘bad for your heart as cigarettes’. What utter tosh. It showed nothing of the sort. It was a tiny study on just 24 people and looked only at the immediate after-effect of e‑cigarettes on the aorta (the main blood vessel in the body).

It said nothing about the heart disease and strokes that we know are caused by smoking and which kill so many.

There’s simply no clear evidence that e-cigarettes cause any definite harm to health. Studies like this risk putting people off making the switch to vaping — a decision which we know, incontrovertibly, could save their lives.