The following is excerpted from an online article posted by NPR
Body dissatisfaction among young people is on the rise, and clinicians like Dr. Jason Nagata say it’s a trend that’s starting to affect more boys. That’s challenging a long-held tendency in medicine — and more broadly by society — to associate body image concerns mainly with girls.
Nagata, an eating disorder researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, says negative body image attitudes in boys often stem from the feeling that they aren’t muscular enough. A small share of those young men develop an obsession with getting bigger and more muscular — also called bigorexia.
Nagata estimated that a third of teenage boys in the U.S. are trying to bulk up. But how many go on to develop bigorexia is harder to pin down.
That challenge stems from a lack of awareness of the condition, which was first added to the DSM — a handbook used by clinicians to diagnose mental health conditions — in 2013. Diagnosing young men with bigorexia is also difficult because they’re less likely to seek out help and experts disagree on how to diagnose it.
Source: NPR
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5671789/bigorexia-dysmorphia-eating-disorder-boys