Sometimes I look in the mirror and I think, “Yeah, I’d fancy him!” However, today is one of those days when I gaze in the glass, and a pale-skinned, pot-bellied creature looks back at me, shifting his rounded shoulders, and waving his stick arms.
Time to perform the obligatory fat-check. Strip off to underpants, turn head over right shoulder and look downwards. Must be able to read ‘Calvin Klein’ with ease. When any part of the lettering is obscured by spare flesh, then I’m officially fat.
The ‘K’ of the Klein is giving me slight cause for concern. I return my gaze to a full frontal view, and spend a minute or two with some careful re-arranging of aforementioned Y-fronts. Not content with the results, more time is spent by putting one arm behind my back, and pulling up the excess millimetres of flesh on side ‘panniers’, thus producing a wish-like waist. This, however, gives only temporary joy; the offending blubber returns to its natural southward position, and I marvel once more at the horrors I see before me.
Sounds familiar? Oh come on, I can’t be the only one...
Perhaps it’s because I’ve just turned 30, but I catch myself doing this age-old monster-in-the-mirror routine, and burst out laughing. There’s hardly ‘the pickings for a crow’ on my waistline, as my old grandmother would say. But I’d challenge any young gay man in this day and age to feel any different. Or any person for that matter.
For five months last year I worked at London’s finest A-List muscle-boy
gym. Gaggles of god-like bods with washboard stomachs and bulging biceps passed
my way every day. Slowly, but surely, my perception of what was ‘normal’ changed.
It happens to us all. Whenever we open a magazine, the models are just that bit more buff. Or the six packs that fraction more defined. I understand why so many people are happy for one of our larger girls to have won ‘Pop Idol’! I’m crying out for a big tub of lard with a cottage cheese arse to win Mr Gay UK.
I really used to idolise those big muscle boys. How great it must be to look like that, how wonderfully rich their lives must be. Working at the gym has opened my eyes. It’s the ones with the fabulous bodies that are the most insecure!
You see, dear readers, aged 30, I’ve finally worked it out. Duh, it’s the inside you have to change. The thought process. You can have the biggest biceps in Belgravia, but when you don’t feel good inside, you look in that mirror and you see that monster.
People used to tell me this, that you have to feel good on the inside, but I never believed it till now. I thought it was just something skinny queens said because they were jealous.
Suddenly the very people I thought weak-willed for never sticking to workout regimes, I see as the strong ones. They don’t need to develop a killer body, just so everyone tells them how fabulous they look. They like themselves the way they are.
Meanwhile the others are toiling away, trying to get that little bit bigger. Another 10 reps on the pec-dec, 12 more sessions with a trainer, one more course of steroids... Where does it all end?
You think that once that little inch of flab from your tummy is re-distributed to your bicep, everything will be rosy. But then you get there, and you find that your neurosis has simply relocated to a different area of the body.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s great to work out, and I still
have much admiration for those who manage to maintain a healthy body. Just
as long as the mind is healthy too.
Lately I’ve felt angry when I look in the mirror and I hate what I
see. I look at pictures of those early gay pride parades in the 70s, and
long for
those days of normal-sized limbs.
Let’s do it again. Let’s make normal the new muscular. Let’s throw away the dumbbells with gay abandon.
Now pass me another cream slice.
