For over a decade, Kevin Gatti's life revolved around working out and counting calories.

He worked in the health and fitness industry, and trained as often as seven days a week.

His aim was to "build a body that had an idea of superiority or that people would look up to and be amazed at".

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But even at Kevin's "aesthetic best" he still didn't feel he looked good enough.



"I had a very distorted perception of what I actually looked like," he says.



"I didn't think I looked as big, I didn't think I looked as lean, I didn't think I looked anything other than quite normal — in reality I looked much different to the regular Joe Blow."

Compulsively counting calories

Kevin at the peak of his obsession with putting on muscle. ( Supplied: Kevin Gatti )

This obsession with exercise was coupled with what Kevin describes as a distorted relationship with food — clean eating most days and binge-eating junk food on treat days.

"Most people from the outside possibly could've seen it as me having a healthy relationship with food, but it certainly wasn't healthy at all," he says.

"I was very particular with food, counting calories and portion sizes. I rarely went without having a meal that I didn't know the calories."

On top of a hefty exercise regime and strict diet, Kevin began taking steroids, and his relationship with the drug quickly became unhealthy too.

Despite working out daily, Kevin still felt dissatisfied with his appearance. ( ABC RN: Jessica Hinchliffe )

"It sort of gets to the point where they are like a recreational drug, where you don't want to come off them," he recalls.

"You want to try and keep up your physique and because they have helped you to get your physique to a certain level, the idea of coming off them is pretty difficult to handle."

The epiphany



Then one Sunday afternoon in 2012, after obsessing over food and exercise for over a decade, Kevin experienced an epiphany just before sitting down to his weekly food binge.

"I got to a day where it was about to happen again and it was like everything flashed in front of my eyes and I thought 'I'm just binge eating to go and restrict my eating and this cycle will never end'," he says.

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Kevin realised he had developed an unhealthy obsession with fitness and food, and self-diagnosed himself with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD).

BDD is a psychological disorder where a person becomes obsessed with real or perceived flaws in their appearance.

The disorder is listed in the DSM-5 (the manual used by experts to diagnose mental health conditions) under obsessive-compulsive and related disorders.

It's not simple to diagnose, and can be confused with other anxiety-related disorders or eating disorders.

A small minority of the population is believed to experience the condition, with one Australian study finding 2.3 per cent of participants had the condition.

Psychologist Ben Buchanan, who runs a body dysmorphic disorder treatment program, says the situation Kevin found himself in is fairly typical of someone living with BDD or the sub-type of that disorder, muscle dysmorphic disorder.

"Muscle dysmorphia often happens in men where they look in the mirror and they think they're tiny, but in fact they can be of normal physique or actually quite large because they've spent so much time obsessively working out and working on their diet," Dr Buchanan says.

Kevin has realised "there is far more life than the gym and looking a certain way". ( ABC RN: Jessica Hinchliffe )

Dr Buchanan explains that steroid use by people living with BDD is extremely common, and while they are effective for building muscle mass, they can be extremely dangerous.

"What we know is the coming off them, people can become incredibly suicidal, not just because of the physical attributes of the withdrawal from the steroids," he says.

"But also they see their muscles shrinking and when your self esteem is so tightly tied to your muscle mass then it can be devastating."

However, Dr Buchanan says most of his patients don't seek treatment until they've experienced an epiphany, much like Kevin's.

There are two common ways of treating BDD and MDD, Dr Buchanan says — either medication or cognitive behaviour therapy.

Now on the other side of his experience with BDD, Kevin says he no longer has a structured exercise program or diet, instead it's just "whatever, whenever".

"Yoga with the wife a couple of times a week, or the occasional afternoon walk … eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full."