Eh, it doesn’t start out about looks, based on my experience and talking with the serious lifters I used to lift with.

A lot of the guys that end up roided out like that don’t start with that look as the goal. Some do, yeah. The ones that do tend to come from a place of wanting to look like their fictional heroes (wrestlers lol), or from having looked up to previous body builders.

But a lot of them start out ranging low wanting to get strong. It starts because you can feel and see the progression from being a fairly normal strength to being the person people call when a fridge needs moved.

But you always hit a wall. How far you can go is mostly genetic, with nutrition being the next biggest factor. The way over that wall is hormones. You bypass your genetics and push.

Along the path of getting strong you end up seeing so much change in your body. And you’re getting all those move chemicals from pushing your body harder and harder. It turns into a form of addiction and part of the “fix” is seeing your work in your body.

So lifters start out getting strong and getting natural big as the goal. This kind of extreme, steroid driven body is what happens when that becomes an obsession.

Now, my ass was not willing to use steroids, so I didn’t get to this extreme. But I know guys, and a few gals, that did. I’ve never actually met anyone that started out wanting to go this far, but plenty that ended up there. But I can tell you from my personal experience that once you start feeling your body develop, the thought of maybe trying to go there is an easy one to have.

No bullshit, once I hit my personal wall power lifting, it was disappointing to not really be able to make major gains the way I could the first few years. And I was never into the bodybuilding side of things, and definitely wasn’t competitive.

Now, body dysmorphia also factors in. Can’t say otherwise because it’s a massive thing with the folks that go to this extreme. This guy might not see himself in the mirror the same way other people do. Tbh, at my peak, I sure as hell didn’t see myself accurately. There was still that kid inside my brain that was never strong enough, never big enough. I had to have my suits custom made, but I never saw myself as being as big as I was. My personal self view wasn’t as skewed as it gets with some of the serious guys that go to this extreme.

It isn’t that you don’t look in the mirror and see a lot of muscle, you do. It’s just that it never looks right. Again, my version of this was mild as hell, but you can’t imagine how often you’d see a dude like this, flexing into a mirror and saying something like “man, I just can’t get my pecs big. They’re so flat.” It can be so extreme a disconnection between self image and external reality that this dude could possibly think he’s too small still, that he needs to get bigger. I don’t know this guy, so please don’t think I’m speaking for him in specific, I’m coming from a general place.

When they look in the mirror they don’t see it like that. They see that their left deltoid development is lagging behind the right, and the triceps didn’t grow by the 2 inches they had set as their goal for this year, so they need to keep eating clen and tren harder.

It’s a mental illness not unlike what’s causing anorexia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_dysmorphic_disorder)

maybe you didn’t grow up watching professional wrestling and burying he-man dolls and getting beat up by bigger kids?

maybe some girl teased him for not filling out his shirt? maybe the football team kept calling him kicker?

maybe he had to grow up fast in a rough neighborhood?

or maybe he just wanted to have a meat security blanket?

And they don’t understand why anybody would want to be skinny fat or have the shape of a marathon runner or…

I love having to wear shirts that hang down to my knees because they’re made for fat people a foot taller than me. Betas wouldn’t understand the joy of being so muscle bound that you need help getting a belt through the loops in the back of your Affliction jeans.