“Body Image, Binge Eating, and Bulimia Nervosa in Male Bodybuilders” (Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 2006)

I was given this article by one of the fat, stinking toads who have employment in my school. “I think you should read this,” he said with a smirk. I skimmed the abstract. “I’d sooner be anorexic than look like you,” I said, keeping my voice low. Ostentatiously, I dropped the article into a bin and walked off. However, I have now downloaded the article, and here is my more considered response.

Unless they are given something obviously useful to look at, it is the function of academic researchers to misunderstand the obvious. Give these people a grant, and they will return with a paper explaining that men who care about their appearance are in danger of mental illness. The article under review is a fine example of this effort. It sets out to compare bodybuilders with men suffering from bulimia nervosa and arrives, with great solemnity, at the conclusion that both groups share “body dissatisfaction,” “weight and shape preoccupation,” and various other supposed pathologies. They might have saved everyone the trouble by pointing out that men who train their bodies tend to think about their bodies.

The paper opens with a tone of mild alarm. Male body dissatisfaction, we are told, has risen sharply, and this is “concerning.” Why? Because dissatisfaction may lead to “disordered eating” and other undesirable behaviours. Already, the ground is prepared: to care about how you look is to stand on the slippery slope towards pathology.

This is nonsense. Men should care about their appearance. They should care a great deal. The body is not an incidental feature of existence. It is the visible expression of discipline and self-respect. A man who has allowed himself to become bloated and foul-smelling has failed in something basic. He may compensate with charm or intellect, but the failure remains. To pretend otherwise is one of the more absurd lies of our time.

The article, however, treats this concern as a problem to be explained away. Bodybuilders are said to exhibit “extreme body modification practices,” including dieting and weight training. You are almost tempted to ask what alternative the authors propose. Should they instead lie on sofas, eating processed rubbish, and console themselves with the thought that they are “valid”?

The study’s findings are presented with an air of quiet horror. Competitive bodybuilders, we learn, show higher rates of binge eating and bulimia than recreational lifters. Some 30% of competitive bodybuilders “met criteria for BN at some point in their lifetime.” This is offered as evidence of a troubling overlap between the pursuit of physical excellence and eating disorders.

It is, in fact, evidence of something much simpler. If you impose strict dietary discipline for extended periods—as competitive bodybuilders do—you will occasionally break it. That is not a psychiatric revelation. It is an observation about human behaviour. The body resists prolonged deprivation. It pushes back. Those who train hard learn to manage this tension. Those who do not, or who approach it without understanding, may fall into cycles of restriction and excess. The solution is not therapy. It is competence.

The best way to avoid eating disorders is not to medicalise eating. It is to eat properly in the first place. Avoid processed rubbish. Eat sufficient protein. Control carbohydrates. Train regularly. Sleep well. These are not secrets. They do not require a clinical interview or a diagnostic framework. They require, at most, a small degree of self-command.

The article, naturally, cannot say this. It is committed to a language in which all behaviour must be explained, contextualised, and—above all—pathologised. Thus we are told that bodybuilders exhibit “body dissatisfaction” similar to those with bulimia. The implication is that both are manifestations of the same underlying disorder.

This is where the argument collapses into absurdity. To look in the mirror and see that you are not yet as strong, as lean, or as well-formed as you might be is not a disorder. It is perception. It is the starting point of improvement. Without dissatisfaction, there is no incentive to change. A man entirely content with his present condition will remain in it. The paper confuses dissatisfaction with dysfunction.

I will pause on this point, because it reveals something deeper about the intellectual climate from which this work emerges. We are no longer permitted to say that some states of the body are better than others. We must speak instead of “differences,” of “variations,” of “personal journeys.” The very idea that one ought to strive for a particular standard—of strength, of leanness, of physical excellence—is treated as suspect. And so the bodybuilder, who takes that standard seriously, must be reinterpreted as a patient.

The comparison with bulimia nervosa is particularly telling. Men with bulimia, the study notes, show higher levels of general psychopathology—depression, “ineffectiveness,” and so forth—than bodybuilders. This is presented as a difference of degree rather than of kind, as though both groups were on the same spectrum.

They are not. The bulimic is engaged in a self-destructive cycle of bingeing and purging that undermines both health and function. The bodybuilder, even at his most obsessive, is engaged in a process aimed—however imperfectly—at improvement. He may err. He may overtrain. He may be overrestrict. He may occasionally overindulge. But his direction of travel is towards order, not chaos. To collapse these two into a single category is not insight. It is intellectual laziness.

There is, however, one respect in which the article is inadvertently revealing. It notes that bodybuilders, both competitive and recreational, place a high value on their physical appearance—so much so that “body shape was as important as friends or work” for many participants. This is presented as further evidence of pathology. It is, in fact, entirely rational.

A man’s body is with him at all times. It affects how he is perceived, how he feels, and what he is capable of doing. To treat it as unimportant is a form of negligence. That many modern men have adopted this negligence—becoming fat, weak, and physically incompetent—is not a sign of health. It is a sign of decline. If anything, the bodybuilders in this study are among the few who have not surrendered entirely.

Now, you must not romanticise the subculture. The use of anabolic steroids, noted in the paper at rates of up to 59% among competitive bodybuilders, is a genuine concern. There are excesses and sometimes outright absurdities. But these are distortions of a fundamentally sound impulse: the desire to improve your physical condition. Compare this with the dominant alternative—the passive acceptance of decay—and the choice is not difficult.

This brings me to the question of eating disorders more generally, and to a point that will not be popular but is nonetheless true. On the whole, anorexia is better than obesity. The anorexic, however misguided, at least recognises that excess is a problem. He errs in the direction of control. The obese errs in the direction of indulgence. One may kill more quickly than the other, but the moral orientation is clear. A society plagued by obesity is one that has abandoned restraint altogether.

The article, of course, cannot entertain such distinctions. It must treat all deviations from a vaguely defined norm as equally concerning. It must avoid judgement at all costs. And so it produces a flattening effect in which everything becomes pathology and nothing becomes responsibility.

In the end, the paper tells us very little about bodybuilders and a great deal about the mindset of those who study them. It reveals a persistent discomfort with excellence, a tendency to interpret discipline as dysfunction, and a refusal to acknowledge that some standards are worth pursuing. It is, in short, another contribution to the growing literature of managed mediocrity.

If men are to avoid both obesity and genuine eating disorders, they will not do so by reading papers like this. They will do so by adopting simple habits: eat properly, train consistently, and refuse the comforting lies of a culture that prefers decay to effort. That is not a research finding. It is common sense. Which is precisely why it is absent here.