Walking into a gym as a beginner can be intimidating. Seeing huge, muscled men everywhere might be one person’s dream and another’s nightmare. But what a beginner might not realize is the unhealthy methods sometimes used to obtain that physique.
Eating disorders have been silently plaguing the fitness community and bleeding into beauty standards. It’s wrong and irresponsible to promote health and wellness without addressing the severity of altered eating habits.
The stigma associated with eating disorders is typically only linked to women, and the oversaturation of beauty standards in social media and popular culture has led to an increase in eating disorders among teenage girls. Because these disorders often have visible effects on women’s health, the diagnosis occurs more frequently. 
When it comes to men and eating disorders, the topic is usually ignored or forgotten. The National Eating Disorders Association found that 10 million men will have an eating disorder in their lifetime. 
One reason men are underdiagnosed with eating disorders is “because clinical assessment tools emphasize a desire to lose weight as opposed to building muscle,” according to the Center for Discovery Eating Disorder Treatment.
To understand the intensity of this issue, one must look under the massive-body-building rock. Both amateur and professional bodybuilders train and prep for months leading up to a competition. This entails hard workouts, altered eating, dehydration and other lifestyle changes.
It even goes to the extreme of counting how many bites of a food portion the performer can eat. Though this behavior is normalized under the gaze of body gilding, this is disordered eating and exercise addiction.
Men typically experience bigorexia, known more commonly as body dysmorphia. This is a direct result of a toxic gym environment and unrealistic beauty standards. It can also lead to exercise addiction, appearance anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder.
These mental illnesses have become common within the fitness community, and they’re starting to reach the consumer market.
Brands like Gymshark, Bloom, Ghost and more profit off of endorsements from fitness influencers on social media. This practice is misleading and tries to tell consumers that if they use the advertised product or plan, then they will look like the influencer promoting it. There needs to be more transparency; simply providing workout plans may not help the average person.
Genes play a huge role in health and wellness, and the overall effectiveness of exercise can be determined by different genetic variants. These biological components make it difficult to design specific workout plans without a personal background in exercise science. Fitness influencers, therefore, would be better off staying out of offering training advice or teaching they may not be qualified to give.
The use of people’s insecurities for profit is immoral, but fitness influencers aren’t the only group to blame. The fault belongs to greedy supplement and apparel companies, social media and toxic gym culture.
Acknowledging the problems within the fitness community isn’t enough. Eating disorders have become so normalized that it will take active work for people to unlearn these behaviors. Those affected may need to seek eating disorder treatment. 
And what’s certain is that the toxic culture that led to these problems needs uprooting.
Jemiah Clemons is an 18-year-old kinesiology freshman from Miami, Florida.