Catching up with an ex recently, I was provided yet another humbling reminder of my own fragile, flabby mortality.
“Did you lose weight?” she asked.
I could only laugh in protest, given the quivering mass of post-holiday indulgence she was speaking to—in fact looking directly at.
“…gain weight?” she tried again—obviously getting warmer now.
“Your shape is different,” she concluded.
She poked disapprovingly at the big blob of skin and fat protruding over my suddenly too-tight sweatpants string—a massive male muffin-top the likes of which is rarely seen in Whistler.
“What is this?” she asked (rhetorically, I can only assume).
Not long after that she said something about her wallet being missing while hurriedly putting on her coat and heading for the door.
I waved a single, sausage-laden palm goodbye.
It wasn’t an altogether unsurprising exchange. Looking at myself in the mirror before she arrived, I knew she’d see the difference—the extra heft up front, clearly visible when viewed from the side; the increasing roundness in the face; the so-much-to-love handles, and the aforementioned unmissable muffin top.
I haven’t yet decided how much to let it bother me. I just wonder if there’s some sort of Resort Municipality of Whistler bylaw I’m now in contravention of. Is being fat allowed in Whistler? At the very least, this torrid rate of mass cultivation is surely running adjacent to, if not outright afoul of some sort of local rule related to homegrown domestic livestock.
I jest, of course. There is nothing wrong with being fat—no matter what your skinny ex says or how fast she leaves after prodding your man muffin.
I’ve been fat before. Lost weight before. But on the eve of my 37th birthday, I’m finding the added heft is just that much harder to get a grip on (both metaphorically and physically).
And it’s all relative, of course. Many might look at me and claim I’m not fat, like reporter Brandon Barrett did last week—until I stood up at my desk and pushed my pregnant man-paunch out as far as it would go.
“OK, yeah,” he conceded, before mumbling something about having to get back to work and hurrying back to his desk.
Like many issues related to men, we don’t talk much about male body image as a society—probably because on the list of important issues we’re currently facing it doesn’t crack the top 500.
But according to research out of the U.K., millions of men struggle with how they look, with almost three in 10 adults (28 per cent) aged 18 and above reporting feeling anxious because of body image issues.
The findings, published in 2019 by the Mental Health Foundation, found one in five (21 per cent) men said concerns about body image had caused them to dress in a way that hid their body or parts of their body in the last year, while one in five also said they had negatively compared themselves to others because of body image in the last year.
More than one in 10 (11 per cent) experienced suicidal thoughts and feelings because of body image issues, and four per cent also said they had deliberately hurt themselves because of body image issues.
According to the federal government, almost two in three adults and one in three children in Canada are overweight or living with obesity. Recent stats for Whistler are hard to come by, but a 2015 survey conducted by Vancouver Coastal Health found Whistler had the lowest obesity rates in Southern B.C., at just 14.2 per cent (Squamish clocked in at 21.1 per cent, just below Metro Vancouver at 21.7 per cent. Powell River was the heftiest of all communities surveyed, with an obesity rate of 37.9 per cent).
So if you’re fat in Whistler, like I currently am, you’re in the clear minority.
Researchers suggest a two-pronged approach to dealing with self-image issues: improving media literacy (teaching about things like photoshop and image altering) and cognitive restructuring—training people to replace negative thought patterns with positive ones.
But like most things, it all comes back to perspective.
While the brain itself is no doubt a solid organ, it can be argued the mind is more akin to a liquid, taking the shape of whatever container it’s poured in to.
Through that lens, all of our personal and social hang-ups and anxieties can be attributed to a reflection of society; how we compare and contrast our life accomplishments and physical vessels based on others, and the “reality” we perceive around us—our mind’s container.
Does it really matter if you’re fatter than others?
Only as far as you let it—and if we’re being realistic, not a single ounce in the great, grand scheme of the universe.
So maybe we should focus more on the shapes of our mind containers than the physical vessels lugging them around.
Of course, that is far easier said than done.
If anybody needs me, I’ll be at the gym.
