In Control of Everything
Except Your Body

Most men who reach us did not come about food. They came because they were exhausted, drinking too much at client dinners, anxious, or simply not comfortable in their own skin. The eating and body piece only surfaced later. In the pressure cooker of Singapore and Hong Kong finance, law and consulting, that piece often gets louder, because control is the currency, and the body is the one place a man feels he can still win.

The performance trap

Banking, law, consulting, the trading floor. These are worlds that select for exactly the traits an eating disorder feeds on: discipline, self-denial, the ability to override the body's signals and keep going. Out here that is not a warning sign, it is the culture. The 6am workout, the macro tracking, the "clean" discipline, all of it reads as elite performance. So the disorder hides in plain sight, applauded rather than questioned.

Underneath, the driver is usually comparison and the fear of not being enough. Everyone around you is impressive. The body becomes the arena where you try to close that gap, and where a bad day can be punished and a good day rewarded.

How it actually shows up, in the body

In men this is rarely about wanting to be thin. It is about control, and it lives in the body:

• You do not feel good in your body, and hitting the target never fixes it
• Shame when you eat "badly", relief and control when you restrict or train
• The gym is not a choice; missing it creates real anxiety
• Rigid rules around protein, fasting, "clean" eating, macros
• Your body stops you doing what you want, avoiding the pool, dating, being seen
• Bingeing alone after a day of control, often with alcohol
• Constant mirror-checking, or avoiding mirrors entirely

Why Singapore and Hong Kong make it worse

The intensity is relentless and presenteeism is total, so there is no off switch and control becomes the coping tool. The entertaining and drinking culture adds another way to numb, then punish. The expat bubble is crowded but strangely isolating, close friends and family who might have noticed are thousands of miles away. And the aesthetic, status-conscious environment keeps body shame permanently mirrored back at you. The result is a comfortable cage: the very habits that look like winning are what keep the disorder in place. We wrote about that mechanism in bigorexia, and about how it fuels relapse in recovery.

It is not vanity. It is control.

The reason "just eat normally" never works is that food and the body were never the real problem. They became the place where anxiety, comparison and the fear of not being enough get managed. Remove that without understanding what it was doing, and the distress just finds another route. Real change means working with the whole man, the body and what it carries, which is what our approach is built for. If the pattern is more about leanness and restriction, male anorexia may fit better.

Help that follows you

You do not have to step off the treadmill or be seen walking into a local clinic. The work is done online, confidentially, wherever you are based, and it is designed for men specifically. It is led by Dr Philippe Jacquet, whose doctorate is on male eating disorders, through individual therapy and male-only groups. See his online pages for Singapore and Hong Kong.

I came about stress and drinking, not eating. Could this still be me?

Very possibly. Most men arrive that way. The eating and body piece usually surfaces once someone finally asks the right questions, and it is often what sits underneath the rest.

Can you work with me from Singapore or Hong Kong?

Yes. Sessions are held online across Asia and internationally, in complete confidence, in English or French.