Men with bigorexia think that no matter how hard their body is, it’s never muscular enough. While not yet an Eating Disorder categorized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a text published by the American Psychiatric Association that provides diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, bigorexia is typically found in body-building circles and known as muscle dysmorphia or reverse anorexia.

Bigorexia sufferers constantly worry that they are too small and are willing to take dangerous health risks to increase their muscle mass. They are often preoccupied with their strict, high-protein diets, and take anabolic steroids despite experiencing side effects such as increased aggression and roid rage, acne, baldness, breast enlargement, impotence, and testicular shrinkage.

They exercise excessively, spending long hours lifting weights, compulsively continuing to work out even when they know it could hurt their health, and take time away from their families and jobs.

Unlike some body builders who readily showoff their physiques, bigorexics often avoid social, work-related or recreational activities where their body will be exposed.

At the gym, they constantly compare themselves to others and conclude they are smaller, even if they are the same size or bigger than the other person. They check themselves in the mirror up to 12 times a day, compared to roughly three times a day with other weight lifters.

Bigorexia affects hundreds of thousands of men. Women weight lifters can also be affected.

Collectively, they tend to have low self-esteem and were often teased and bullied as children because of their small size. Studies have found that 29 per cent of men with bigorexia have a history of anxiety disorder, and 59 per cent exhibit some other form of mood disorder.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques that identify and help change patterns of thinking towards more realistic, achievable goals show promise in treating bigorexia, though further research is needed to determine if indeed it is Eating Disorder.

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