Breaking the Mold: How Men Can Change Their Relationship with Their Bodies

Written By Bradley Bryk
Image source: Yáñez Piña , V.H. (2020). Self-Made Man. My Modern Met.

Main Takeaway

In shifting the narrative from striving for the perfect body to embracing the one we have, we make room for a healthier, more compassionate self-view. Instead of focusing on how we look, we can focus on how we feel in our skin, how we feel about what we’re doing with our bodies, how we care for them, and how we can continue to listen to their needs.

Image source: Yáñez Piña , V.H. (2020). Self-Made Man. My Modern Met.

How are my abs looking today? How big are my calves? Are my biceps smaller than his? Do my chest and shoulders jut out? Is my waist small enough? Do I have a muscular back? How do my clothes fit? I know these are all questions I have asked myself at some point in my life and it is exhausting!!! Unfortunately, I am aware of how pervasive these questions are for male identified individuals to constantly be pondering, yet they are rarely discussed and reflected upon.

Cultural Ideals or Unhealthy Norms?

We live in our bodies 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and so many of us spend most, if not all, of our days focusing on our body aesthetic and how others might perceive it. American society has created and perpetuated an undue amount of pressure on male identified individuals to seek out the perfect body form from Brad Pitt’s hair to David Beckham’s face to Hugh Jackman’s biceps to Ryan Gosling’s torso, we are consistently inundated with the underlying belief that everyone has full control to reach these impossible standards (Jung, 2011). Social media plays a significant role in amplifying this dynamic, especially with their algorithms to curate personalized content that has become more extreme with less monitoring to keep individuals on these platforms (Harriger, Evans, Thompson, & Tylka, 2022). It is within these supposed body ideals that society then affords privileges to certain people while marginalizing and demonizing those individuals that do not conform to these criteria.

This type of relationship with our bodies, one in which we focus on how our bodies look for others, can lead to several significant mental health challenges in our lives including increased anxiety, disordered eating struggles, body dysmorphia, overexercise, and low-grade constant stress of feeling inadequate or not enough (Bacon & Aphramor, 2011). Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett (1991) have described this dynamic as a form of perfectionism called socially prescribed perfectionism, in which individuals perceive that others demand perfection from them. It leads us to be in a constant state of striving to be validated and reassured by others, seeking to be good enough, and doubting if we are worthy. As a result, we distance ourselves from connecting with our bodies unless we believe that others will like how our bodies are looking in the current moment (see also the psychology of perfectionism).

A Different Relationship to Our Bodies

Given these harms, working to change our relationship with our bodies is imperative to allow for a more effective, caring, and supportive relationship with an aspect of our beings that we are living with every second of every day. In shifting the narrative from striving for the perfect body to embracing the one we have, we make room for a healthier, more compassionate self-view. Instead of focusing on how we look, we can focus on how we feel in our skin, how we feel about what we’re doing with our bodies, how we care for them, and how we can continue to listen to their needs. Our bodies do so much for us, even when we aren’t consciously aware of it: they allow us to move, to interact, to create, to heal, to connect, to think.

This shift in how we appreciate our bodies recognizes that just like any other relationship that we have in our lives our relationship with our bodies is one that will ebb and flow, have its highs and lows, will not be perfect, will include the full spectrum of emotions, and might feel or seem different at the beginning of the day compared to the end of the day. They will change. They will feel strong and weak at different points in time. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. It’s human.

If we can learn to celebrate our bodies for their resilience, their utility, and their complexity, we start to dismantle the damaging belief that our worth is somehow determined by how closely we resemble the latest ideal. Instead, we can create a sense of belonging and peace with the bodies that are uniquely ours.

Self-Reflection

  1. What do I believe my body needs at this moment in time? For example:

    Am I hungry and do I need nourishment?

    Is my body feeling exhausted and needing rest?

    Is my body feeling sluggish and needing movement and energy?

    Am I feeling tension somewhere in my body and needing to practice meditation or deep breathing?

  2. What did my body do today that I am grateful for?

  3. How did I care for my body today?

  4. How would I describe my relationship with my body?

Resources


References

  • Bacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2014). Body respect: What conventional health books get wrong, leave out, and just plain fail to understand about weight. BenBella Books.

  • Bacon, L. & Aphramor, L. (2011). Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift. Nutrition Journal 10 (1), 9.

  • Brady, J., Gingras, J., & Aphramor, L. (2013). Theorizing health at every size as a relational–cultural endeavour. Critical Public Health, 23(3), 345–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2013.797565

  • Harriger, J. A., Evans, J. A., Thompson, J. K., & Tylka, T. L. (2022). The dangers of the Rabbit Hole: Reflections on social media as a portal into a distorted world of edited bodies and eating disorder risk and the role of algorithms. Body Image, 41, 292–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2022.03.007

  • Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.60.3.456

  • Jung, J. (2011). Advertising images of men: Body size and muscularity of men depicted in men’s health magazine. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 2(4), 181–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/20932685.2011.10593096

Bradley Bryk
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