Tag Archives: male body image

The Natural Physique

19 May

heston

Astrid was trying to set me up with some girl she works with. Some cunt. I mean, maybe she’s not a cunt but she didn’t want to be set up with me, so, she’s a cunt. She’d been telling Astrid she likes “built” guys, and Astrid showed her a picture of me with my shirt off. And she said:

“Yeah, but he looks like he works out on purpose. I want a guy who’s just burly like he’s been chopping wood.”

Let me tell you something. Nobody looks what is now called “good” through normal activities.  You have to work at it, for the sole purpose of vanity, like it’s a second fucking job.  I was listening to an Opie and Anthony bit with Louis CK, which I now can’t find. They were talking about how every hot male movie star from the past would get laughed the fuck off the screen today if they took their shirt off. Charlton Heston. Steve McQueen. These men who had the “hot” body of their time would be flabby schlumps today. The standards of the male body have gone fucking nuts. Continue reading →

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Male Bulimia Diary 2005: Binge Eating

24 Jun

My binge eating has transcended the point where it brings on euphoria. Now I eat until I experience gut-spliting pain. I eat beyond my physical capacity to eat. Like 10 slices of pound cake at a buffet. 35 chocolate chip cookies at a pilot premiere. And if I need to take a break, if I can’t possibly take in any more, I reach for the booze. Liquid food.

My life is full of buffets now. I can’t take drugs anymore and nobody will fuck me. Grinding my body down to a thin wick on the stairmaster has burned out some central fuse that tells people when to stop eating and I’m left with infinite hunger, a bottomless need to cram anything at all– especially sweet foods– into a hole that will never be filled. Eating is better than fucking, better than masturbating, better than having some great intellectual insight, better than writing or guitar playing or anything constructive. Eating and its horrible guilt, and its corresponding self-flagellatory hours shredding my tendons and bones on the stairmaster… this awful cycle of regret and further self-debasement that happens because I have no girlfriend and very few friends and so quite simply nothing else to do with my time.

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Advice for Anorexics

24 May

Weigh yourself once a week. 2-3 days before your weighing day stop eating salty food of any kind. The morning of your weighing, do not hydrate yourself. Preferably you should have gone out drinking the night before and made yourself piss like crazy and smoked cigarettes and then woken up in the morning and taken a massive acidic liquidy shit. Then do your longest cardio workout of the week without drinking any water, and weigh yourself afterwards. The whole week you will feel thin.

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Salad

3 May

I was eating salads every day at the height of my male anorexia. I thought that salads were this kind of calorie-free bulk. On the back of the monster lawn-and-leaf-bag-sized baby greens package it says that one serving has fifteen calories and there are only five servings per bag. With things like that they inflate the serving size so it looks like you get more vitamin A and shit; not like chips where a vending machine bag of Doritos has enough servings to last a family for a year.

So I was eating big salads, but I stopped losing weight. And this is because I was putting two tablespoons of dressing on there— a reasonable amount— but two tablespoons of dressing has as many calories as a Hershey bar. And I was putting two cubic inches of chopped cheddar cheese on there— and two cubic inches of chopped cheddar cheese has as many calories as a Krispy Kreme doughnut. It was like a goddamn horror movie for me when I finally read the calorie counts on the various condiments and trimmings in my fridge. A tiny amount of food would always turn out to have this hellaciously huge amount of calories—like, if you burned a chunk of cheese it should heat your house for the whole winter. It should change the fucking climate.
Continue reading →

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Diary 2005: The Gym

1 May

I hate the gym. That fucking stairmaster, the endless agony– I’ll have moments when I’m on there, swerving all herky-jerky like a marionette– I space out, follow a thought or daydream along a whole complex sequence for what seems like several minutes, and then I look down and not one second has passed. I can grasp the infinitude of hell this way. The weights– rusty medieval torture devices, the bench press crushing the breath out of my chest, grinding me down into the sweaty staphylococcal pleather… and I never gain one ounce of strength. I’ve been benching 205 on a good day for over a year. Continue reading →

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What to Expect When You’re Getting in Shape

21 Mar

Labor,  agony,  tedium, deprivation.  The shattering damage to your joints and tendons.  The shattering damage to your social and leisure life.  The horrible diminishing returns as you approach the goal– an unholy small percentage of body fat– getting down to like thirteen per cent is manageable but that’s a merely OK body.  To have any real muscle definition whatsoever you need to be below ten per cent body fat, which requires a hideous self-flagellatory cardio routine that makes you unbelievably hungry combined with a stark bare food regimen so that you’re constantly obsessed with food; the smell of food is like a whiff of a teenage girl’s ovulating vagina and a commercial for cookies is like porn.

And then once you get there you need to maintain it with hours upon hours of boredom and pain that you NEVER slack off on, just in case someone should happen to see you shirtless and that one extra millimeter of body fat you’ve accrued is the fulcrum of their decision whether or not to sleep with you. Because you believe that the world is this way– that you will have lifted weights religiously for years and years and years and then suddenly the ONE time you slack off for a few weeks is the time it will matter.  Suddenly a beautiful intelligent interesting woman will be nearby and you will be required to remove your shirt, perhaps for a tourniquet or something.

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