LLooking back, when I started checking how many grams of carbs were in red onions and broccoli, my eating disorder probably started. I now say ‘eating disorder’, but as a man I obviously didn’t think of it that way at the time. It was just “losing weight”.
I was 22 and signed up for my first white-collar boxing match. Even though the weight classes were loose and hardly enforced, I was determined to get into the best shape of my life – which I think meant going from my natural weight of 90kg to 80kg. That’s the same as going from 36 inch to 32 inch jeans in a month.
My mother – a woman who, as a child, buttered my bread like a mafia boss burying a body in concrete – was stunned. But her protests about my unnaturally low weight only strengthened my resolve to be as shredded as humanly possible for three rounds of two-minute novice boxing, held in a Holiday Inn on a ring road outside Norwich. Which I lost.
She was absolutely right, of course, as mothers always are. A man frowning over the nutritional value of a bag of onions under the unholy hum of Tesco Express fluorescent lighting could indicate a sense of control for some. After all, he’s only concerned about what exactly he’s putting into his body.
But speaking as someone who used to be the frowning man in the Tesco Express, there is a dangerous stubbornness and pride in men. When this is combined with feeling out of control in other areas of their lives, it can quietly lead to delirium.
That might go some way to explaining the rapid increase in male body dysmorphia lately. When all other aspects of your life feel like they are spiraling out of control, there is a desperation to exert absolute dominance over the little you can, like what you eat and how much you exercise.
A recent study on body confidence by Better showed that more than half of men (54%) showed signs of body dysmorphia, with a third of men often thinking about making their bodies “more muscular or leaner.” A government reportmeanwhile, noted that 28% of men aged 18 and over were concerned about how their bodies looked, with 11% even feeling suicidal over body image.
Growing up as a regular cis-het man in the 1990s and early 2000s, I only understood concepts like body dysmorphia and eating disorders through the prism of women’s magazines like Heat or Cosmopolitan. And I only read them because my sister or friend left them (I swear).
Of course there was Men’s Health magazine and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. But while women seemed to be fueled with a simmering despair about themselves as if undergoing the Ludovico Technique, the pressure of the latest diet or the fastest way to get a summer body were concepts that bounced around my mind like a tennis ball.
Now that social media is wriggling freely into our collective consciousness like a family of roundworms, I’m much more aware of a lot of useless information and people that I never thought about or cared about before. Recently I was lurking on were on holiday where he didn’t look like “a condom full of walnuts”, to quote the late Clive James about Schwarzenegger.
My Instagram feed is flooded with self-help/fitness influencers and nutritionists like Paul Saladino MD, Liver King and Eddie Abbew, all with millions of followers, all promoting some variation of an extremely high protein, often carnivorous – all-meat diet. often barely cooked or raw diets, and they all look so ripped that they actually have abs on their faces.
And that’s the thing about being a proud, unconscious man. When I see an impossibly torn man telling me that the only way to look like him is to follow his exclusive workout plan, follow the diet outlined in his ebook, or take the supplements he sells, it’s my first thought isn’t, “It’s probably a scam or a quick fix,” like I do with female influencers who promote diet teas or a six-week booty plan. I don’t feel like my insecurities are being aggressively marketed or taken advantage of. And I certainly don’t feel like I’m being actively manipulated.
And yet I think if I eat enough eggs per meal to bury Cool Hand Luke, I’ll look like a bunch of fitness influencers—many of whom have used steroids – no different from a juice detox to reach size zero. It’s the same unsustainable behavior in pursuit of an unrealistic goal that will ultimately make you unhappy.
As I got older, I had my own reckoning with extreme dieting and body image. I know I feel healthiest when my diet is balanced and moderate. I know that if I push myself too hard in the gym, I will get hurt or burn out. And as I recently learned, many women think so Tony SopranoHis daddy’s body is as sexy as a man can get.
Wanting to exercise and watch what you eat to become healthier and feel better is completely normal and should be actively encouraged. But for decades, if not centuries, a huge amount of money has been spent making women feel bad about themselves – so why wouldn’t the fitness and beauty industry now want that from men too? All they have to do is communicate it in a big, strong, masculine way so that it doesn’t offend our ego.
