Personal Essay: Male Body Image

What It's Like Being a Thin Guy Who Hates His Body

By Zack Budryk
QuailBellMagazine.com

It’s 10 P.M. and I’m shirtless in front of the bathroom mirror. I have to remember to put my shoulders back, and then I like what I see a little better. I’ve still got traces of love handles but my abs are visible and my stomach flat. I step forward a bit and I swear to God my reflection grows several inches in either direction.

Am I hallucinating? Are my body image issues some form of literal madness?

“You’re NOT FAT,” my wife Raychel, who’s already in bed and reading, calls from the bedroom.

This is true, of course. I’m not. But I’m not sure if that’s what I really want, is not to be fat. I want to not fear being fat.
I was on Cape Cod with my family in the summer of 1999 when my dad told me, as delicately as he could, that I looked like I’d gained some weight. I may eventually forget the feeling of crushing humiliation that came over me when he told me that, but I haven’t yet. I started running. My dad had told me running on sand was a good workout so I kept running back and forth along the beach. Even after I lost the weight that feeling stayed with me, for years afterward, and eventually it collided with the experience of falling in love with a fat woman and wanting to do everything in my power to support her and, more importantly, not behaving as though being like her was some horrible fate I had to do everything in my power to escape.

Trying to be body-positive, like a lot of other things, is different for a man. The stakes are not entirely, but largely, in my head. Are a lot of men treated like shit for their bodies? Absolutely. But men whose bodies aren’t the ideal have visibility plus-size women could never dream of. James Gandolfini, God rest him, spent the better part of a decade as the face of quality TV drama and became a sex symbol over the course of it. Meanwhile, try to remember the last fat woman you saw as a drama lead. I’ll wait. Men, for the most part, don’t have to worry about finding quality clothing that fits them, or said clothing only occupying a single rack in the corner of the store, because even as we debate what it means for a woman to be “plus-sized” or if the term should even be used, men’s clothing just generally doesn’t get siloed like that.

I don’t say any of this to trivialize men’s struggles with body image, because I’ve been there—hell, I live there.  If anything, this is what makes it an entirely different struggle: I’m neither fat nor a woman, but if I were, I would know where the voices telling me to hate my body came from; they’d be coming from all sides most every day. So I find myself in the position not just of beating back the body-hate but of figuring out where the hell it comes from.

A lot of my closest, dearest friends are fat women, and I’ve had some remarkable conversations on body image with them, but I don’t think I’ve ever discussed my own issues with them. Part of the reason why is because I’m far too clumsy with words to broach the subject without sounding like I’m presenting these beautiful, classy women as my worst-case scenario—“So my nightmare is looking like you. Thoughts?” Another aspect of it is that I know that as a man involved in these conversations about largely, but not exclusively, women’s issues, I run the risk of being the worst kind of That Guy if I drag us into “but what about men?” territory.

So I work out when I can. I still run. I do situps in sets of 75 and pushups in sets of 40. I generally don’t eat breakfast. I stand at my desk the entire workday. There have been points where, when I felt I wasn’t doing well at work, I skipped lunch to punish myself. I haven’t done that in a year or so but on the tough days I still find myself waiting as long as I possibly can. I continue these rituals even as I understand the weird, irrational complex I outlined above is what drives them, because above all else, I fear inertia. As for my friends, I may have this conversation with them one of these days, but as ever, writing about it comes much easier for me.

Raychel calls again and I come to bed, but even as I enter the bedroom and close the door behind me, I’m still running down Nauset Beach, my bare toes pushing their way through the sand as the sun makes it way down toward the Atlantic.

#Real #PersonalEssay #MaleBodyImage #BodyHate #Masculinity 

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