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Eating disorders don’t just affect women; the patterns are emerging in men through fitness and optimization.

Online communities amplify the problem; looksmaxxing and transformation culture mirror diet culture dynamics.

If we wait for eating disorders to be the same in men, we’ll miss them. Their red flags hide as “discipline.”

Decades of media influence have led to the concept that eating disorders are synonymous with women. It’s left an enormous blind spot: the millions of men quietly developing a toxic relationship with their bodies inside the insidious corners of the manconomy, the ever-growing ecosystem of products, influencers, and online communities selling men on the idea that their bodies are problems that need to be solved.

I've spent my career treating eating disorders, and, in the past few years, I've watched something shift in our culture, specifically for men. The obsession isn't only about food; it now includes transformation and optimization. Underneath that is something clinicians need to recognize immediately: disordered eating, compulsive exercise, and an all-consuming relationship with the body as if there is something to be fixed.

New language for an old problem

The vocabulary has changed over the years, but the problem hasn't at all: "Looksmaxxing" is the newest driver within the manconomy that’s now taken over the Zeitgeist. Essentially, it’s trying to pursue physical attractiveness through appearance optimization. There are many forums devoted to the practice that offer advice on everything from jaw exercises and posture correction to bulk-and-cut cycles that would appall any eating disorder clinician. These bulk-and-cut cycles typically involve periods of caloric excess to build muscle mass, followed by severe restriction to eliminate fat, a pattern that mirrors the restrict-binge cycles we see in classic eating disorder presentations. Looksmaxxing joins biohacking, optimization, and wellness—all euphemisms that obfuscate a cultural breeding ground for eating disorders.

What can make these eating disorders particularly difficult to detect and treat is that they don’t match up with the image we’ve been conditioned to expect of what an eating disorder “looks like.” At first glance, it can look like fitness or discipline, leaving parents confused: Their son is eating, lifting weights, and researching protein intake. How is this a problem? It is what follows: the rigidity and the distress as their son's sense of self begins to revolve around the pursuit of “optimization.”

It’s not a lifestyle. It’s a mental health condition.

Muscle dysmorphia is what happens when the drive to get bigger, or the drive to have the lowest possible percentage of body fat, never turns off; no matter how much muscle a person builds, it's never enough. Like anorexia nervosa, it involves a distorted body image, extreme behaviors to change the body, and significant functional impairment. Like anorexia, it carries serious medical risks and is chronically underdiagnosed because cultural norms normalize and even revere the disordered behaviors.

The manconomy accelerates this by commercializing the obsession: monetizing every step of the transformation journey through supplements, programs, and influencers whose business model depends on men believing they are imperfect. But the commercial layer is only part of it: When a young man details his extreme bulk-and-cut cycle to thousands of followers, or when "body transformation" content floods our algorithmic feeds, the community begins to sustain and normalize the pathology. We know how powerful that social reinforcement loop is from decades of research on eating disorders in young women, and yet we aren't treating this with the same gravity.

What we need to be asking

The young men with body image concerns are often the least likely to get flagged by a clinician, mainly because the culture they're embedded in—the manconomy—has reframed disordered behavior as optimization. Here are some questions to ask to discern when exercise is healthy vs maladaptive:

Take our Disordered Eating Test

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How many days/week and hours/day are you exercising? Are you missing social, family, or work obligations to exercise? What happens to you emotionally when you need to miss a workout? When choosing between a workout and anything else (friends, family, work), does exercise always win?

Do you ever exercise through pain or injuries? Do you take rest days?

What are your goals of "optimization"? What do you think will happen if you aren’t optimized?

On a 0-10 scale (10 = all the time; 0 = never), how much time do you spend thinking about your body? About food? And how often do you want to be thinking about your body and food? Does it ever feel like your brain is monopolized by thoughts of your body?

Eating disorders are mental health conditions that don't only happen to girls. As long as we keep treating male body obsession as a fitness story rather than a mental health one, and as long as the manconomy keeps profiting from that confusion, we'll keep missing the men who need us most.

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