Sun, Nov-18-12, 03:39
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Boys, now you know why we’re always dieting
Quote:
From The Sunday Times
London, UK
18 November, 2012
Boys, now you know why we’re always dieting
Eleanor Mills
Maybe it’s the age — just past the dreaded four-zero — but every time I bump into a male friend these days I do a double take and then have the same conversation. Me (trying not to express too much surprise): “You look well!” Him, after a smug grin and shimmy of newly slender hips: “I’ve just started running/given up the carbs/taken up military fitness.”
There then ensues a lengthy disquisition on the joy of jogging/press-ups/no pasta in the evenings or the particular sayings of their favourite diet guru.
Some of these guys are getting a little obsessive: one of my colleagues confessed “my sole aim in life is to stay under 15 stone” while another told me he had been on a six-day fast involving consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with cayenne pepper. Two others who overheard him nodded approvingly and proudly proffered their matching copies of Six Weeks to OMG: Get Skinnier Than All Your Friends (this year’s latest diet). It prescribes cold baths, skipping breakfast, drinking black coffee and working out on an empty stomach. The women around them all laughed, but these guys are deadly serious.
Andrew Flintoff, the former England cricket captain, isn’t out in India with the national team but he is with his brethren when it comes to catching the dieting bug. He has recently lost three stone on a strict regime for his latest sporting challenge, trying to be a boxer. But in an interview last week he revealed he had once been bulimic, throwing up regularly in cricket clubs and restaurants around the world in an attempt to lose weight because he was being joshed about “who ate all the pies”.
Having been a skinny boy, he had lagered his way to 20 stone and hated the way he looked — by vomiting, he admitted, he had lost more than two stone. The sad spectre this conjures of a sporting legend reduced to throwing up his dinner because of a poor body image is, I’m afraid, proof that the self-loathing cult of bodily perfection — for so long the scourge mainly of women — is now also a big deal for men.
Reaching for the bread at lunch the other day with a male colleague, I caught him giving me the kind of disapproving look that is usually the territory of my particularly fashion-afflicted girlfriends (the type who eat a side salad and order a mint tea and tell you how full they are, while talking you through their tricks for not eating).
Another male chum has just started working for a company famous for its free canteen (they joke that everyone who joins gains at least 10lb). So desperate is he not to get porky that not only is he shunning the free brownies but he is also sticking religiously to sashimi and edamame beans for lunch: in couple of months he has lost more than a stone and his ribs stick out. While his wife worries he is getting too skinny, he likes his new look.
Expensive, fashionable men’s clothes these days — like top-end female ones — fit only slimline physiques. The cult of the male body beautiful is all around us — from David Beckham in his underpants with a six-pack, to lingering shots of boxer David Haye’s (remarkable) torso in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here.
In a society obsessed by image we are all confronted by how we look all the time. For many years it was women who felt the full force of the lookist culture. In an equality of sorts, men now feel it too. It’s rare these days to meet a successful person (man or woman) who is seriously out of shape — indeed it is striking how thin and fit many of them are. From Tony Blair to David Miliband, Seb Coe to Barack Obama, success looks slim.
Of course the cult of thin is entwined with the cult of health. We all know now there is a good chance we can live well into our eighties, or even nineties, if we stay in shape. Most men are shunning the bread basket, or upping the fitness not just for vanity but also to stay alive. One fortysomething told me rather movingly that he had stopped drinking and lost two stone because his dad had let slip in a conversation that all the bon viveurs he had known had died before they were 60.
When we are young, of course, we all feel immortal. Yet when 40 appears in the rear-view mirror there is a distinct realisation that 60 is not that far away; that, indeed, to be around to see our own children grow up, let alone to hang out with our grandchildren, a serious lifestyle change is required.
Often the diet and fitness regimes are concurrent with a decision to give up, or seriously curtail, drinking and other destructive addictions. My old friend Giles Coren wrote movingly last weekend about how he has given up the booze because now he is a dad and in his forties he just can’t handle the hangovers, mood swings and low-level brain damage he was inflicting on himself all too often. Such habits don’t make old bones.
I am glad he has stopped and that sobriety — or moderation — is the new trend. I’m glad to see the kidults of my generation, the fortysomething men who dressed like teens, those ageing ravers, dubbed “gravers”, who thought they could go on partying like it was 1992 for ever, are finally seeing the light. They needed to.
Heavy bingeing in middle age is a bad look. At a gig last week the main singer (in his late forties) was so wasted that he looked like Keith Richards: flushed but grey, totally toxic. Too many men I knew were headed that way. Gravers might have started as a joke, but it was looking all too true.
Most of my female friends realised in their mid-thirties that the only way to look halfway decent and muster enough energy to do all they wanted to do was to up their fitness and, as the French put it, “pay attention” when it comes to eating. There is a moment for most of us — for women, often after childbirth — when we either give in and accept that it’s elasticated waists, tent-like tops and gradual decline for the next 40 years or we knuckle down, get sweaty several times a week and lay off the cake.
For a while there was a disconnect as the ladies discovered the gym/personal trainer/Dukan diet while the chaps carried on as they always had. At times it got quite comical: I remember a summer party where a group of women all started giggling hysterically as a once fine figure of a chap strolled on to the cricket pitch looking so jowly and middle-aged that he was like a fat-suit parody of his younger self.
Not any more. I saw him at a 40th birthday party last week and these days he’s like a new-look Flintoff: all lean, mean and sculpted abs. So, well done, guys. Forty is the watershed, the great reckoner: get healthy or else.
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http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto...icle1164685.ece |
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