The Weight Trap

We must all watch our waists and our weight. That’s be the prevailing doctrine from health providers and professionals throughout my life. From an obsession with calorie counting in the late 90s through the sugar craze and meat-free lifestyle options of the recent years, the consistent message again and again is that we should keep our weight down and reduce the size of our waists.

Now, on the face of it, that is fairly sensible. In an aging society with rising obesity, common sense tells us that collectively we should work to push ourselves back towards a more ‘healthy’ weight and waist size, which has been strongly linked to reducing disease and other health complications. But on an individual level, should you be worried about your weight?

What does weight mean?

Weight is actually a force. For those of us that can still remember our physics lessons, weight is a force measured in Newtons. Fun fact huh? If we are being technically accurate, what most people mean when they talk about weight is Mass. It is Mass that is measured in kilograms, pounds and stones. But for ease of reading, we’ll stick with weight.

The important thing is that we are talking about how heavy a person is. It is an incredibly easy thing to measure using one tool: scales. We can very quickly and easily obtain a measure of our weight as often as we like, very cheaply.

What is a good weight?

Well, here’s where the trouble starts. Most of us begin to form a reference of good and bad weights based on our family and immediate friends. It is pretty common to grow up in a family where the mother routinely complains about her weight being too high and most kids figure out roughly what weight she is when she says that. This starts to plant an idea in our heads of what is too high, but not what is too low. Since most people complain about being too heavy, we develop a bias that there is such a thing as ‘too heavy’ but no such thing as ‘too light’.

For gay men, there is an added complication here. Without wanting to generalise too much, it’s fair to say that on the whole, a lot of gay men become very closely aligned to their mother’s way of thinking and acting, often emulating the mother more than the father. The old saying that ‘all daughters eventually turn into their mothers’ could well be applied to a lot of gay men too. As a result, gay men will often develop a bias to a lower ‘good’ weight, more in line with their mother’s view of herself than their father’s view of himself.

Most of us will recognise the innate differences between the sexes and that on the whole, men have a higher weight than women of comparable overall health and fitness. This bias in gay men towards a female view of weight has been linked to our tendency to identify ourselves as overweight and ‘too heavy’ when an objective observer might disagree.

If I lose weight I’ll look good right?

Let’s be honest, looking good is one of the main reasons people want to lose weight. Yes, health benefits are important, but whether people will admit it or not, looking good and increasing sex-appeal is almost always the number one reason for wanting to lose weight. So, does it work? Well… sort of. Ultimately this is going to depend on your own idea of what good looks like. A slim twink-like guy or a skinny cover-girl look might be your thing. If so, simply losing fat is probably going to go a long way to helping you feel like you’re looking good.

However, weight loss involves losing weight of both muscle and fat and its pursuit can severely impede the growth of muscle. ‘Ah! But a twink doesn’t have muscle!’ I hear you say. Well… wrong. A core part of the classic slim look of a twink or cover girl is having a good layer of balanced, toned muscle. Muscle like this is crucial for developing and holding a shape, keeping a flat stomach and holding an upright posture with an open chest. So even if this is the look you’re after, you need to recognise that building a certain level of muscle is going to be crucial in maintaining your figure.

Then, for those that prefer a more sculpted or muscular look, your aims of piling on the muscle mass is going to be completely hampered by a fixation on weight.

Muscle growth - the gay man’s trap

This is the major battle that I have personally had to fight. I aspire to a more muscular physique both for improved physical strength and for how it looks in a mirror. Shallow, yes, but honest!

Basic theory tells me I should eat more calories than I’m burning, with a good amount of proteins, carbohydrates and fats to provide the fuel for muscle growth while at the same time pushing harder in the gym on exercises that promote muscle growth. All sounds good right?

No. My inner weight-obsessed gay boy is screaming at me the moment I step on the scales. Weight has gone up?!? You’re fat! Time to starve!

This has proved to be a major psychological barrier to my progress. My severely ingrained aversion to weight gain and my obsession with the scales has held me back from eating the foods I need to eat to develop my body. As a result, my journey to a more muscular body has been painfully slow and while I’m better at it now, this remains an ongoing and challenging battle. I’ve spoken openly about this with friends and found that this has impacted a lot more people than I realised, particularly in the gay community.

So is weight important?

It’s become popular lately to discount weight completely as a measure of a person’s health and fitness. There’s definitely merit in this and I’d argue fiercely that each person needs to identify metrics to monitor their progress based upon whatever their specific goals are, rather than using such an arbitrary measure as weight. After all, using weight as your main measure, it’s possible to be deemed clinically obese despite having a tiny body fat %.

If possible, look for alternatives such as fat mass, muscle mass, body fat %, blood markers, mental health measures and more. Whatever your end goal is, there are usually ways to measure your progress, but be wary of the quality of these measures.

What’s the take-away from this?

Not pizza, sorry. I know I said ‘take away’ but no, not pizza.

The point here is to think more broadly than just weight. Focusing on the scales and basing life choices on them day after day can be an incredibly easy trap to fall into. But most of the time it results in making no progress, while your mental and physical health decline. If you need support in finding alternatives, speak with your PT, your friends and family or ping me a message.

Mark The Masseur