Orthorexia Nervosa and Exercise Addiction: Clinical Impairment and Distress Independent from Disordered and Muscularity-Oriented Eating Behaviours

The clinical relevance of the excessive health behaviors Orthorexia nervosa and Exercise Addiction has been controversially discussed, not least because of their overlaps with disordered eating behavior. Underlying motives may differ between men and women. Next to drive for thinness, muscularity increasingly gains attention in clinical research. The aim is to examine the associations of excessive health behaviors with clinical impairment and distress while controlling for symptoms of disordered and muscularity-oriented pathological eating behavior in men and women. The muscularity-oriented eating test (Murray et al., 2019) will be validated in German. Implicit attitudes towards same-sex body shapes (underweight, normal weight, overweight, muscular) and sports motives will be linked to exercise addiction. A minimum of 210 participants (105 men) will be recruited via convenience sampling. The cross-sectional online survey is followed by an affective priming paradigm, in which four prime stimuli are combined with negative and positive target words.