For almost my entire life I hated how I looked.

I was by no means unhealthy but a youth spent playing video games and eating heaping mounds of white rice meant I was far from the models, superheroes and movie stars I looked up to.

One day my doctor said that while I was still within acceptable levels of body fat, I could stand to lose some centimetres around the waist and drop a few kilos.

To say the motivation there was solely health-related would be a lie. I am after all a gay man and it’s no secret we have always idolised the kind of male body that spends five days a week in the gym. According to research,  for gay men. If my experience on Grindr has taught me anything, it rarely mattered what you had to say or even how handsome you were – the bigger the muscles and leaner the abs, the more attention you got.

So it was on these fertile but perhaps not the most mentally healthy grounds I began my fitness journey. I tracked all my calories. I substituted chicken thigh for breast. I weighed every gram of rice I ate. I started hitting the gym five to six times a week. I lifted heavy and walked more.

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And after a year or so I was seeing results. I had dropped kilos and put on muscle. For the first time, I didn’t hate what I saw in the mirror. I noticed my face was thinner and I filled out the top of my shirts instead of the bottom. Some of my pants were suddenly too big. A follow-up visit to the doctor’s two years after I started exercising confirmed I was now within the waist size I had aspired to.

I felt like I had a new lens on life. I looked at all my meals in terms of their macro nutrients – the protein, carbohydrate and fat content. Food and drink that lacked any protein suddenly no longer appealed to me. I stopped having a snack break at work. I stopped drinking altogether.

As I changed, so did my algorithm. While thirst traps and fitness influencers had always had a home on my FYP (for you page), the flood was yet to come. My new online reality informed my subconscious that this image of masculinity was what I wanted.

Physique inflation has set in: think back more than two decades to 2002, when Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man. A fateful spider bite not only gave him the powers of a spider, it gave him muscles. A new chest, abs, arms and shoulders. He was ripped.

Now, when I look at my socials feed, bodybuilders and fitness influencers could stand up to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger in size and shape. Maguire’s transformation, considered remarkable for the early years of the 2000s, is now barely above average by today’s expectations. Teenagers with enough lean mass to mog (gen Z for outclass) even the most elite professional athlete in the aesthetic department are a dime a dozen.

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It’s no surprise to me then that  and that thousands of students are hopping on performance- and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs). There’s a whole category of slang that comes with it – gear or juice, as the kids call it. Some congregate on a Subreddit dedicated to discerning whether someone is on juice or is a natural athlete – or natty as they call it. But it’s almost impossible to tell who is on gear on social media. There’s every likelihood they are genetically gifted athletes – able to put on muscle and stay lean all year round – but it’s just as likely they turned to PIEDs for their step up.

I sometimes stand in front of the mirror wondering if I will ever achieve the body I’ve always dreamed of. Regardless, I will keep going to the gym diligently because training gives me so much more than just the physique I want. I am more focused and energetic than ever before – even if body dysmorphia lingers in the back of my head.
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