Looking back, it was probably when I started checking how many grams of carbohydrates were in red onions and broccoli that my eating disorder began. I say “eating disorder” now, but, of course, as a man, I didn’t think of it as that at the time. It was just “cutting weight”.
I was 22 and had signed up for my first white-collar boxing match. Even though the weight classes were loose and barely enforced, I was determined to get into the best shape of my life – which I believed meant getting down from my natural weight of 90kg to 80kg. That’s like going from 36in to 32in jeans in the space of a month.
My mum – a woman who, when I was a child, used to butter my bread like a mafia boss burying a body in concrete – was aghast. But her protestations over my unnaturally low weight only strengthened my resolve to be as shredded as humanly possible for three two-minute rounds of novice boxing, held in a Holiday Inn off a ring road outside Norwich. Which I lost.
She was, of course, entirely right, as mums invariably end up being. A man brow-furrowing over the nutritional value of a bag of onions under the unholy hum of Tesco Express fluorescent lighting might, to some, hint at a sense of control. He is only concerned about what exactly he is putting into his body, after all.
But, speaking as someone who used to be that furrow-browed man in the Tesco Express, there is a dangerous obstinacy and pride in men. When mixed with the feeling that they lack command in other areas in their lives, it can quietly lead to delirium.
That might go some way to explaining the rapid increase in male body dysmorphia of late. When all other aspects of your life feel as if they’re swirling out of control, there’s a desperation to assert absolute dominance over what little you can, such as what you eat and how much you exercise.
A recent survey 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 body “more muscular or lean”. A government report, meanwhile, noted that 28% of men aged 18 and above felt anxious about how their bodies looked, with 11% even feeling suicidal over body image.
Growing up as a generic cis-het man in the 90s and early 2000s, I only understood concepts such as body dysmorphia and eating disorders through the prism of women’s magazines such as Heat or Cosmopolitan. And I only read them because my sister or girlfriend left them around (I swear).
Sure, there was Men’s Health magazine and Arnold Schwarzenegger films. But while women seemed to be drip-fed a simmering desperation about themselves as if they were undergoing the Ludovico technique, the pressure of the latest diet or the quickest way to get a summer body were concepts that bounced off my head like a tennis ball.
Now social media wriggles freely in our collective consciousness like a family of roundworms, I am a lot more aware of loads of useless information and people I never thought or cared about before. The other day I was lurking on X and saw an article commenting on how American football star Travis Kelce, probably in the top 0.5% of fittest and strongest people on the planet, had a “dad bod”, because there was some pics of him on holiday in which he didn’t look like “a condom full of walnuts”, to quote the late Clive James on Schwarzenegger.
My Instagram feed is awash with self-help/fitness influencers and nutritionists, such as Paul Saladino MD, Liver King and Eddie Abbew, all with millions of followers, all promoting some variation of an extremely high-protein, often carnivorous – only meat, often barely cooked or raw – diet, and all looking so ripped that they basically have abs on their face.
And that is the thing about being a proud, oblivious man. When I see an impossibly shredded guy telling me that the only way to look like him is to follow his exclusive workout plan, eat the diet laid out in his ebook, or take the supplements he’s selling, my first thought isn’t “it’s probably a scam or a quick fix”, as I do with female influencers advertising diet tea, or a six-week booty plan. I don’t feel like my insecurities are being aggressively marketed to, or taken advantage of. And I certainly don’t feel I am being actively manipulated.
And yet me thinking that, 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 been on steroids – is no different from going on a juice detox to achieve size zero. It’s the same unsustainable behaviour in search of an unrealistic goal that will ultimately leave you unhappy.
As I’ve got older, I’ve had my own reckoning with extreme dieting and body image. I know I feel healthiest when my diet is balanced and moderate. I know if I push myself too hard in the gym I’ll get injured or burn out. And as I’ve recently been made aware, many women think Tony Soprano’s dad bod is as sexy as a man can get.
Wanting to work out and watching what you eat to get healthier and feel better is completely normal, and should be actively encouraged. But for decades, maybe centuries, there’s been huge money in making women feel terrible about themselves – so why wouldn’t the fitness and beauty industries now want that from men too? All they have to do is communicate it in a big strong manly way, so it doesn’t insult our egos.
Tom Usher is a freelance writer
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