At gyms across the country, a silent crisis is affecting young men.
Instead of an obsession with losing weight, they are totally preoccupied with building a big, muscular body.
It’s known as bigorexia, or muscle dysmorphia, and it’s on the rise in Australia.
For 23-year-old Alex Rodriguez from Melbourne, the disorder took over his life.
“From the moment I woke up, I was constantly thinking about anything I had to do, eating or exercise wise, to try and grow my muscle,” he told the Feed.
“When I looked in the mirror, I felt inadequate and unattractive. I felt like … I needed to achieve this muscular, quite masculine ideal.”
Lecturer Scott Griffiths from the University of Melbourne, who studies body image, says bigorexia can be viewed as an eating disorder.
Alex Rodriguez at a gym in Melbourne. Source: The Feed
‘’You can think of bigorexia as reverse anorexia - imagine often men who are objectively large and muscular - but when they look in the mirror, they see someone who is either scrawny and thin or really big and overweight,” he said.
“We're talking hours and hours a day, thinking about wanting to be more muscular, about dieting, about training. It's not just tracking calories and spending hours in the gym. It's five, six hours a day to the point where you feel like you can't stop thinking about it.”
He says you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to be suffering from bigorexia.
“You can have an eating disorder or muscle dysmorphia with any kind of body shape or size. It's about how it makes you feel … it has to be making you miserable, that's what makes it a disorder.”
Alex says his life was extremely regimented when he was suffering from bigorexia.
“I was obsessively lifting weights for hours and then obsessively going and trying to run on the treadmill to make sure I wasn't putting on too much body fat, because I was extremely anxious and obsessed with achieving this physique … to have the V taper, broad shoulders, big chest, big arms, commonly represented in movies.”
Ranjani Utpala, clinical director for the Butterfly Foundation, which supports people affected by eating disorders, says muscle dysmorphia is often missed. 
“It is hard to diagnose because ... at times we tend to praise people for their dedication or their commitment to a diet regime or an exercise regime,” she said.
Ranjani Utpala from the Butterfly Foundation Source: The Feed
She says there’s a lack of awareness of how serious and damaging the condition can be.
“We know that suicidal ideation and attempts are quite high in people with muscle dysmorphia. And we know from some of the research that about 50 per cent of people with muscle dysmorphia have had at least one attempt on their life.”
The protein supplements many sufferers take in their quest to gain muscle are also a concern for researcher Zali Yager, from the Institute of Health and Sport at Victoria University.
“We did some research 20 years ago where we asked boys what they were doing to change their weight and shape. And they would say: ‘eating some steak, some eggs, drinking some more milk’. And when we ask that same question, now they tell us the name of the big tub of powder that they're taking,” she told The Feed.
She said many supplement powders contained ingredients that could be harmful to the body, especially if the supplements were taken above recommended dosage levels. Dr Yager is particularly concerned about their potential effects on adolescents.
“There are a lot of young people who are having some pretty serious side effects, but they wouldn't talk about it because they're embarrassing: testicles shrinking, hair coming up in different places, growing breasts. So they're not the sort of things that they're going to be telling all of their friends about.
“There are all sorts of possible things that can happen from using these supplements. But one of the worst things is that people can die. We do have case reports of people having liver failure and heart failure and dying, even though they were really healthy.”
She encouraged young men to try to harbour a broad perspective about their bodies. "As body image researchers, we quite like to tell people to accept their bodies the way that they are, to appreciate the functionality of their body and to enjoy using their bodies, not be held back by the way that they think that their body looks, " she said.
Loneliness and a lack of fulfilment was the turning point for Alex.
Through psychological help, he’s now recovered and is almost a fully qualified dietician.
“I'm able to eat in a way which supports my goals, exercise in a way which supports my goals, but never, ever, ever let my goals in the gym or the way I eat interfere with other aspects of life and I guess take over my life like it previously did, ” Alex said.
“I have so much more to me as a person and so much more in life that I want to achieve and so much more to offer people that has nothing to do with the way I look.
“I've experienced very dark aspects of life and I've experienced very dark places. And I guess everything that isn't dark just looks beautiful after going through those things.”
