Trying To Fix the Inside with The Outside: Muscle Dysmorphia and Men

And How Men's Work Might Help

Photo by omid armin on Unsplash

What Is Muscle Dysmorphia?

It used to be that when people talked about significant body image problems, the focus was almost entirely on girls and women. The media often gets blamed for promoting unrealistic beauty standards, which has been linked to obsessions with appearance, perceived flaws, and disordered eating patterns among young women. But blaming the media alone is an oversimplification—we like to pin everything on the media.

But as Dylan sang, “The times they are a-changin.” Men are catching up, and these struggles are becoming more visible among them. Today, an estimated 40% of those diagnosed with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) are men, with many falling into a subset of BDD called Muscle Dysmorphia (MD).

While we can’t say for sure whether this has always been an issue for men, these struggles were likely just hidden—unspoken due to men’s reluctance to openly discuss body image concerns. What we do know is that it’s now a thing. A quick scroll …