The New England Journal of Medicine reviews Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession by distinguished psychiatrist Harrison Pope.

This interesting and provocative book describes a form of obsession in which otherwise healthy men become absorbed by
compulsive exercising, eating disorders, body-image distortion, and ultimately, abuse of anabolic steroids. In a manner
analogous to the course of anorexia nervosa, the social norm of male “fitness” turns, in these sad men, into an insatiable
obsession with growing “bigger” and more muscular. When exercise and dieting rituals, no matter how fanatical, fail, recourse
to drugs, mostly anabolic steroids, appears to be an easy transition. Body-obsessed men find that drugs are readily available
from underground suppliers who gravitate to gyms like moths to the light. Gripped by unshakable fat phobias as well as
dietary and drug-related rituals, these pathetic men lose touch with reality and become isolated, socially dysfunctional, and
sometimes even dangerous.