Summer is coming. The world is heating up at an alarming rate. The long run consequences will undoubtedly be devastating. Within the short term, this implies I’m going to want a beach body to feel comfortable in my local park, let alone on holiday. Love Island is back on the TV; regardless that I resolutely refuse to look at the show, my social media feeds are populated by sculpted arms and washboard abs. The pressure I feel from this may be very real and really destructive.

As a 32-year-old man, I’m taken back to the world of my childhood, where fierce physiques felt ubiquitous. This was a world of Gladiators and Ultimate Warriors. My Motion Man was stacked. Even the Biker Mice from Mars were packing serious muscle. Could I be blamed for believing a chiselled frame was a guaranteed staple of manhood?

After I began secondary school, I had a bowl cut, chubby cheeks and a paunch, poorly hidden by my oversized blazer. Naturally, my friends rinsed me for this because that’s one among the numerous healthy ways boys express affection towards each other. Puberty modified this. I became tallish and slim, with absolutely no sign of the body I assumed was my birthright as a person. So I began training in a boxing gym. Exercise coupled with maturity meant my body thickened and strengthened, and yet, I remained deeply unhappy with what I saw within the mirror.

The one respite I feel from this unhappiness nowadays is after I’m training for a boxing match, and manage to get my body down from the 83 kilos I walk around at, to an impossible-to-maintain 70 kilos. I finally see in myself the pictures of the lads that populate my feeds and people I’d spent my childhood looking as much as. For these periods, I’m at peace. Topless selfies abound.

While the ladies in my life express concern about how gaunt I look, my guys are like, “you’re looking cut you already know, I’m attempting to be such as you, bro.” I dismiss the concerns and lap up the approval. What does that say about my sexism? As a cis-het man, what does that say about who sets the expectation of how my body ‘should’ look, and who I’m attempting to impress?

The moment I loosen up and resume a standard weight loss plan, a voice says, “wave goodbye to your abs, you’ve fucked it now.” I turn into trapped in a destructive cycle of cruel self-criticism and big blowouts on food, booze and medicines. Worse yet, I’ve never felt in a position to talk candidly about these body image issues, and the way summer, specifically, is a shitty time to navigate. And I do know I’m not alone. Men have gotten increasingly higher at discussing our vulnerabilities, but how we feel about our bodies is a frontier we’re yet to cross. I’m certain a number of us feel pressured to seem like the immaculately groomed, shredded men populating our screens and online spaces, but we rarely get the possibility to speak about this – and the impact it has on our mental health. 

Caleb Femi is a poet and director. He’s also my guy and we play football together. He told me that insecurity about being skinny was the initial thing that got him within the gym as a boy, but he’s since found sanctuary amongst the dumbbells: “I find that I’m going to the gym more for the therapeutic effects and a few alone time to think reasonably than sculpt my body.”

I’m quietly jealous of this balanced approach towards training. Caleb doesn’t necessarily feel huge pressure to look a specific way, because his physique is one which is “generally socially validated,” as he put it, but reckons there may be a definite pressure to keep up it in the summertime.

Nonetheless, while I lament my childhood, and the way in it, I attached my notions of manhood to muscle-bound heroes, I did a minimum of have alternatives; for each Schwarzenegger, there was a scrawny but cool Leo Di Caprio type. Caleb didn’t have that growing up. He told me seeing black men within the mainstream – like 50 Cent, Wesley Snipes and Will Smith – led him to imagine the perfect black man needed to be muscular and hyper-masculine. Watching porn reinforced that belief, he said. “Historically the black body is hyper-sexualised and held as an emblem of toxic masculinity. For much of my teenage years, I internalised that rhetoric, which affected the way in which that I viewed myself.”

Until last yr, my friend Ben identified as a gay man of color, now they discover as nonbinary. After they were younger, they were bullied for not looking how a boy ‘should look’ and didn’t have people within the media they might aspire to be like.

Ben said that “within the gay community, there is unquestionably a pressure for gay men to be built and muscular.” While an identical pressure propelled me towards an unhealthy relationship with exercise, this was hurtful for Ben another way. They told me they’d all the time tried to minimise their masculine features, and that meant wanting be healthy but not wanting to bulk out their physique. They said, “tasks like figuring out made me feel dysphoric about my body.”

Moving to London from West Yorkshire and dealing in an environment which champions all LGBTQ+ people, together with having daring women of color like Laverne Cox and Munroe Bergdorf to look towards, helped Ben on their very own journey. Nonetheless, pressure surrounding their body image hasn’t gone away. They feel it’s exacerbated by scrolling through social media and watching television. Ben steers clear of Love Island though since it doesn’t represent them or their community: “It’s a man-made environment stuffed with hyper-masculinity.” They said, “I struggle every day with body image. I also experience a insecurity about my body and body shape, because I reject a number of the more masculine features.” Ben feels that not wanting to have a historically masculine body appears to be a taboo or radical statement in our society.

Anthony Astbury, co-founder of Whole Man Academy (WMA), a mental health service which provides an inclusive space for men to get together and share their experiences, has had his own struggles with body image: “I now realise I linked my self-worth with my physique, and perhaps still do to an extent. If I hadn’t been to the gym for a number of days, I felt rubbish.”

He asked WMA’s Instagram audience if shows like Love Island add further pressure on men to have muscular, toned physiques: 81% said yes. He then asked what number of struggled with body image: 77% said they did. Anthony argues that being inundated with images of men with the identical, supposedly ideal body type by the media at large is a major consider male body image issues and might account for why the broader picture of men and their body image issues is a bleak one.

On the entire, it suggests our struggles begin during adolescence. Of 1000 eight to 18-year olds polled in a 2016 study, 55% said they’d change their weight loss plan to look higher. 23% said they believed there was an ideal male body. Over half the boys polled said they would not seek advice from their teachers about their concerns, while greater than 1 / 4 would not seek advice from their parents about it. The boys pointed to friends, social media and promoting because the primary explanation for their worries.

However it’s not only young boys. In research commissioned by menswear brand Jacamo, 48% of two,500 adult men polled said they desperately desired to drop pounds, and 54% said they don’t love their stomachs. What might surprise those that naively associate body image struggles with femininity is that of the 1.25 million people in Britain living with an eating disorder, 25% are men. Between 2010 and 2017, the variety of men admitted to hospital with an eating disorder increased by 70%. If you happen to couple this with a wild increase in steroid use amongst young men, it is obvious that our body image issues are snowballing.

Anthony offers advice for men who’re battling body image: “I’d start by being aware of what you might be specializing in, because it might be your confidence and self-esteem that’s the difficulty, not your body. This stuff don’t change overnight, identical to your body shape, but could be improved, so educating yourself on the incontrovertible fact that your thoughts control your feelings, and understanding what you might be specializing in, can have a big impact.”

Personally, I do know that being built like a renaissance sculpture doesn’t crucial equate to athletic prowess and functionality. Anthony Joshua’s loss to a talented boxer with the last word dad-bod reiterated that fact. Love Islander Mike Thalassitis’s tragic passing was a reminder that looking incredible can also be never an indicator of wellbeing. His death by suicide really hurt me; he went to my secondary school and died within the park where I grew up playing football. Yet despite understanding this stuff, the will to have an Insta-ready beach body is tough to reckon with. Perhaps this means the depths to which images of the muscle-packed heroes from my childhood were absorbed. Perhaps it’s today’s pumped up news-feeds that keep them buried.

As a way to unpick this irrational, unhealthy desire, we’d like to simply accept that our body image issues aren’t separate from the opposite vulnerabilities we’re step by step recovering at discussing. They’re directly impacting our emotional wellbeing. We’d like to maneuver the conversation forward together, in an inclusive way that encompasses all representations of masculinity. Possibly then we’ll feel more at peace with what we see within the mirror.