What you see is what you get. But what’s the cost for that? Image is all that seems to matter nowadays, and there’s no way one can escape from its manifestations: banners, magazines, web sites and blogs full of beautiful people with beautiful lives with beautiful clothes with beautiful minds. Eating disorders are the secret prize for selling fake images. Manifestations can vary from one person to another, but nevertheless there are 4 major directions for this kind of disorder: bulimia nervosa (BN), anorexia nervosa (AN), binge eating disorder (BED) and Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED). The latter is sort of a combination between the first three.

Men With Eating Disorders can find a complete list of people with eating disorders here, but this article wants to focus on men who struggled with eating disorders throughout their lives. John Goodman, Franz Kafka, Al Roker and Dennis Quaid are our headlines for now.

1. Franz Kafka

The Czech writer Franz Kafka suffered from anorexia. As explained in the article called Franz Kafka’s anorexia nervosa Kafka was slim and underweight throughout his life and showed an ascetic attitude and abjuration of physical enjoyment and pleasure (fasting, vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, emphasis on physical fitness). Among his writings one can find: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle. He is an important precursor of existentialism.

2. Dennis Quaid

Actor Dennis Quaid says he battled against anorexia in the mid-1990s, around the time he shed 40 lbs. for the role of Doc Holliday in the film Wyatt Earp. In the period the film portrays, Holliday was dying of tuberculosis, and Quaid had to loose the weight in order to capture his character. “My arms were so skinny that I couldn’t pull myself out of a pool,” Quaid admits, describing what he suffered from as “manorexia.” “I wasn’t bulimic, but I could understand what people go through with that.” Commonly for eating disorder patients, he also used to have an entirely different image of himself: “I’d look in the mirror and still see a 180-lb. guy, even though I was 138 pounds,” Quaid confessed.

3. John Goodman

This widely adored American actor apparently had his own battle to run against eating disorders.

Four years ago he admitted he had a drinking problem, and the fact that he had lost a lot of weight has been less talked about. But this weight goes on an off and it appears to be a never-ending story. He has been sober since 2007 and by August 2010, Goodman had lost 100 pounds. He has stated that exercising and keeping a journal of food he consumed are what helped him keep the weight off

4. Al Roker

Al Roker, NBC’s most famous weather presenter even wrote a book about his problem: Eating Disorders/ Self Help. Roker underwent gastric bypass surgery in 2002 and lost more than 100 pounds. He shared some less-known side effects of the surgery, which apparently include what both Roker and Snyderman described simply as “pooping your pants.”

In other words, men are also affected by appearance, image, social pressure and un-human standards. It’s hard to say what causes this disorder and it is even harder to imagine that famous people like them have self confidence issues, problems related to acceptance and an absurd strive towards perfection.