Recently I went on a diet. My weight had begun to creep up and one day I thought: “Enough!” I remember the day. It was in April, during the spring heat wave. I was with my six-year-old son and an old friend. The others were wearing T-shirts but I felt too fat to wear one. I needed the protective armour of a proper shirt. I had crossed a line; the early hot weather had caught me out. Right, I thought, that’s it. I’m on a diet. Starting now.
That was two-and-a-half months ago. Now I’m 1st lighter. I’ll tell you how I did it. Omelette for breakfast. Bowl of soup for lunch, with a handful of salad, and one slice of German rye bread. You know the stuff I mean? It doesn’t really look like bread; it looks more like a bit of leather. Then another bowl of soup for dinner, with another handful of salad, and another slice of rye bread. Sometimes I snacked in between meals: smoked salmon, on its own, or a bit of cottage cheese.
Occasionally I slipped up. Once or twice I had fish and chips. But I didn’t eat many of the chips. Some mornings I had a sandwich but I got used to eating less. If I went out to a restaurant, I would leave food on my plate. That’s the secret, somebody told me. Once you can leave food on your plate you’re home and dry. Other people told me other secrets. You have to stop eating when you’re still hungry. You have to enjoy the feeling of being hungry. You should always think about food when you’re eating and never think about it when you’re not eating, rather than the other way round. The other way round is fatal.
So far, then, so normal. A man goes on a diet. He loses weight. He talks about it. But this would not have happened so easily even in the recent past. A guy on a diet was one thing. Talking about it was quite another. For guys, dieting was something you did in secret, like crying. It was a sign of weakness. Women talked about dieting. That was because women were under huge pressure to look perfect. And they weren’t so afraid about showing weakness. Men weren’t supposed to agonise over the way they looked. That was vanity. That was something you didn’t talk about.
And then something changed. Or rather, lots of things changed. Men began to come under pressure about the way they looked. The six-pack became a fixture — you saw them everywhere. Photographers began to use tricks of light to create the right effect. Men, like women, began to be judged on their bodies.
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I think I know why this happened. The media, driven by advertising, had created an impossible ideal for women. They had gone just about as far as it was possible to go. But capitalism needs growth. So the spotlight turned on men. And it worked. Now men are using beauty products. Now men are spending time and money on grooming. Now men are dieting. And, of course, talking about dieting. Swapping tips in the pub: Is a carb curfew a good idea? Yes, definitely. Does soup make you feel fuller for longer? Again, definitely.
But men aren’t the same as women. That’s because, as John Updike once pointed out, the female body is our prime aesthetic object. Artists and photographers have presented us with gorgeous female bodies for millennia. That’s one reason why women have a complex relationship with their bodies. Men have a much simpler relationship with their bodies. They see them as machines. Either the machine works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you can fix it. Change the fuel. Buy some running shoes. Go to the gym.
Right now men don’t have an impossible ideal to live up to. Just look at the bodies, many of them airbrushed, that are held up as the female ideal; impossibly slim and yet, somehow, impossibly curvaceous, too. As a man you just want a body that looks fit and strong. That’ll do. It’s not impossible to achieve. Almost every guy can have a body like that with enough effort.
For guys, this is the golden age of dieting. We’re no longer frightened to talk about it. We talk about the glycaemic index. We talk about how foods high on the glycaemic index tinker with your blood sugar. We talk about “rebound hunger”. We know that protein fills you up for longer than carbohydrates. We know that, if you diet too intensely, your body just gets better at sucking the calories out of whatever food it does get. This is what I call the Cannon Conundrum, from Geoffrey Cannon, the author of Dieting Makes You Fat. Sometimes we like to get scientific. Guys love getting scientific. We believe that it can work. Success is within our grasp.
The question is, will those ideal bodies we see in the magazines begin to slip out of our reach? Don’t bet against capitalism. But will we let it get to us? That’s the question. As I write, we’re in the balance. It could go either way.