Wednesday, 16 September 2009
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Muscle Dysmorphia: Male Body-Image & Eating Disorders
I talk a lot about feminine beauty, self-esteem, and health for women because I am a woman myself. I experience this kind of stuff first hand. This post is for the men. Society puts harsh ideals and standards for slimness in women, but people may not realize that men have it tough too!
Some people think that Barbie has produced impossible body standards for women to live up to. But just look at how GI Joe has transformed in the last 50 years! GI Joe now has noticeably more muscular legs and defined abdominals.
Muscle dysmorphia is like the opposite of anorexia. With anorexia, individuals believe that they are completely overweight even though they may be unhealthily thin. With muscle dysmorphia, the individual fears that his muscles are not big enough. He may overtrain his muscles, rely on protein supplements or resort to steroids.
Even if the individual's body is quite normal or already very large compared to average, muscle dysmorphia becomes an obessive-compulsive disorder as it distorts the individual's body-image perception. This is a relatively new disorder and many people, even health professionals, do not even know it exists!
Even if an individual has very large muscles and upper body, he may still wear lots of baggy clothes to hide himself and avoid taking his shirt off for fear that his body will be ridiculed for being too small.
Muscle dysmorphia is a disorder that needs to be treated just like anorexia does. It may not be as detrimental and cause as much death as anorexia, but there are still large implications on self-esteem and years of a lacking social life. Sometimes irreparable damage to the body can occur.
Now a lot of guys are interested in bulking up and going to the gym, but this does not mean that they have muscle dysmorphia. It depends how much body building consumes your life. If not going to the gym causes great anxieties and fears in you, then perhaps you should look more into this matter.
As a nutrition student, guy friends often ask me how they can bulk up. I have no personal experience with this, so it is a difficult question for me to answer. If you are going to be taking protein supplements or protein shakes, it is not going to be a magic formula to an amazing body. You MUST work hard and exercise! If you do not, then the extra calories you are consuming will start to build around your abdominal area. This is the most dangerous place to store fat as it is highly associated with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and much more.
Protein supplements are mainly used for an asthetic appeal. They are not a requirement for a healthy life.
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Comments (16)
both GI Joes need makeovers..
@ordinary_gir1 - they look nothing like the movie!
@i_Nutrition - It looked like 60's GI Joe Went on roids and worked out a little WAYY too much to get to current GI JOE XD
better than anorexia!
I don't wanna get bulky. It becomes hard to play tennis when you're big like that =P
Wow. 60's GI is pretty skinny compared to today's. haha I wouldn't want a guy who's too big though. It's actually gross to me if they have too much muscle action going on. haha
This kind of disorder, along with orthorexia and many other types of nos (not otherwise specified) ones might get added to the next edition of DSM. The last revision from 2000 is pretty outdated. At least this isn't the IT field. They have new things all the time!
It's so true. I see quite a few big tummies from guys at the gym. They're bulking up at the expense of their health. I'm not an advocate of protein supplements, but it's convenient to use right after workout as it immediately help with the muscle repair process just by gulping down the mixture. Timing is important for the guys who are in competition. After taking a sports nutrition course then I realized how badly regulated supplements are. No wonder a lot of athletes get tested positive in drug tests.
I'm training to build some body mass but I'm never going to do it for bodybuilding purposes. I do strength training with normal eating without taking any supplements ... all that in order to increase my metabolism.
I guess that is an extreme, but when I work out.. I tend to see that I'm not big enough or muscular enough.... It tends to take over just a little even though it's not that extreme...
Right now I'm a little obsessed with cutting fat.... But my doctor says that if I cut too much it has negative side affects.. Like being tired, and getting sick a lot easier...
Sigh....
OH MY GOD THIS IS MY BROTHER.
good post I am an olympic weightlifter who trains strictly for performance purposes and I often train alongside people who are much more muscular than I am, but yet I weight 50-80 lbs. more than they do at 12% bodyfat year round. A couple of years ago during my high school days I trained with the intention to compete in bodybuilding. Over the course of 2 years I reached single digit bodyfat and weighed at about 270 lbs (I am a natural, meaning no steroids) and as big as I was it was never enough. Muscle Dysmorphia is a very serious matter especially having have gone through it but thankfully I never resorted to steroids although I was very very close. A couple of years later after playing the size game I began to see the error of my ways and realized there was no point in having all this "show" and no "go" so I changed sport and began powerlifting which later lead me to Olympic weightlifting. My philosophy in that matter is you shouldn't worry about mass, if you focus on strength and performance, size comes along by default. Oh by the way, I am a firm advocate of sports supplements if taken properly and with correct purpose.
y0跑過cm]]*
I think that when it comes to weight, guys have more pressure than girls. Even thick or heavy girls can be seen as curvy and attractive to a lot of men. But most women wouldn't now want to date an overweight guy. I think guys are less judging on female's bodies than women are of men's bodies.
I once did a survey of guys and girls for a school project to see which bodies are desirable to the opposite sex. Most guys said they wanted girls from an "athletic build," to a curvy build, to with "meat on her bones." While girls mainly said they wanted a slim guy, a skinny guy, or a guy with slight muscles, but not too huge. No one would say that they wanted a chubby guy.
We always focus on girls with their weight image becuase girls are sensative and allow their weight to affect them more than it should. Guys, however, we don't focus on because they're suppose to be tough and be able to take anything with a grain of salt. But I feel like guys get more crap if they're overweight than girls do. More like, girls beat themselves up over their weight, but people beat guys up who are overweight.
I've heard of that. I guess G.I. Joe for boys is the same as Barbies for girls. There are also images of these super muscular men on magazines and in soap operas and on wrestling and stuff. We really don't think about body image as being a guy problem as much as a girl problem. But it really is.
Another important point that needed to be made!
Hmm.... I don't take any supplements. Personally a well balanced diet and and active lifestyle should keep most people in good health. Yea some people do get too bulky not for me though, I don't want to look like the Hulk.