Are there any males who suffer from Body Dysmorphic Disorder or is it only found in women?

According to wikipedia…

“Although originally a mental-illness diagnosis usually applied to women, body dysmorphic disorder occurs equally among men and women, and occasionally in children and older adults.”

and the NY Times…

“Also, unlike eating disorders, which mainly affect women seeking supermodel thinness, nearly as many men as women have body dysmorphic disorder.”

Not exactly medical citations, but all I could find right now.

I grew up fat, my dad actually called me “Fat Boy” as my nickname.

Now I lift weights for my upper body and wear the same size jeans as my friend I think is puny. I am incredibly uncomfortable taking my shirt off at the beach and will leave a t-shirt on during sex. College girls in bars send me drinks, but I assume they are kidding.

So yeah. I mean, I have it, and I go to the gym like 3 times a week. Imagine what is going on in the heads of those guys who go everyday and do steroids?

When I started going to the gym at age 15, I was quite fat. I lost a lot of weight and got in to good shape, but I never really noticed it at the time.

Looking at old photos, I can see I was actually quite ripped, but at the time I always felt fat. That is about the only experience I have had with that.

I always thought I was fat. I look back at pictures from only fifteen years ago now, and I look pretty thin. I can’t believe it, because I remember always feeling way overweight. Now I really am overweight and everyone tells me that. I lose a pound, and people notice. In fact, I don’t lose any weight at all and people ask me if I’m losing. Weird.

I don’t think I have BDD, but I do think my perceptions of myself are screwy. From this conversation, I wonder if a lot of us can’t tell when we’re thin. It’s only later, that we have the perspective.

When it comes to my weight, I have the opposite problem. I think I’m thinner than I actually am. When I saw a recent pic of myself I remember thinking “holy shit, I’m that fat??” Maybe this is one of the reasons I hate having my photo taken.

My husband leans toward having this. Just leans. On the continuum of 1 to 10, 10 being meeting parameters to be diagnosed, maybe he is a 6. He thinks he is fat when he simply isn’t. He was a fat kid (not really, even he says when he looks at a childhood photos he doesn’t think he was fat, but as a child he always felt fat) and he has little tolerance for even the littlest bit of loose skin or pinching an inch somewhere on his body. Luckily, he does not obsesss about it too much.

@JLeslie Was his family critical of his weight growing up?

I say that because people can do a number on you when you were a kid. Like my Dad, being highly critical of people’s looks. That’s probably why I obsess over it now a bit. Even when others tell me that I’m beautiful (stunning, even), I don’t always believe it.

@Mama_Cakes His family does make negative weight comments about people. I don’t know if they did it to each other. Wouldn’t surprise me. I just wrote on another Q how his family will often say, “don’t they look in a mirror before they leave the house?” That sort of thing, and it is usually regarding clothes being tight on someone who is overweight or skin showing when someone is overweight.

His nephew used to tease his little sister about being pudgy. She was just a little thing at the time. She was pudgy in the way very young children sometimes are, but not overweight. I think it affected her. But, he was her brother, not a parent. I doubt her mother said anything of the sort to her daughter. Although, there are stories of her being a big baby. Who knows how that fell on her ears. Big, she was over 9 pounds.