Men's renewed focus on diet has come with a greater awareness of exercise, in particular on building muscles. Photo / Logan Weaver, Unsplash
OPINION:
"Nil by mouth till 1pm," my friend Etiene declared at lunch in Spain last week. My friends and I nodded along. There was nothing surprising about his statement. He wasn't dieting or preparing for surgery. In 2022, who still eats breakfast? The "most important meal of the day" is on its way out.
Another friend, Janan, only eats one meal per day, in the evening. It's a habit he is proud to share with the US General Stanley McChrystal and the rapper Sisqo.
The idea is to create a gap between meals. This has been called intermittent fasting or restricted time eating, in its more recent incarnation. The theory is that it gives the body more time to reset, with various benefits for health and weight management beyond the skipped calories. I'm not much of a dieter, and certainly not a muscled hunk, but I tend not to eat breakfast because anything bigger than a piece of fruit makes me slump at my desk by 11am.
In recent years, this kind of fasting has become commonplace among my friends. Even the least health-conscious can't help but be aware of the general contemporary advice about nutrition, which I broadly think of as "protein good; carbs bad". Bread in the morning is the enemy. But the new rules are rife with paradox. The ideal is to alternate monk-like self-control with Rabelaisian indulgence, and break long fasts with piles of red meat, cheese and – horror of horrors – carbohydrates. To not have your cake until 6pm, but then to eat piles of the stuff.
Men – or rather a certain kind of middle-class professional man under 40 – have quietly become very weird about food. Many women, buffeted by a diet culture for decades, have relaxed about it and many would be embarrassed to admit they are dieting, skipping carbs, replacing traditional meals with milkshakes, or worrying about how many grams of protein they have eaten that day. Men have picked up the dieting baton, spurred on by rippling muscles on social media, a raft of new apps and a tech-bro culture that treats nutrition as yet another engineering problem to be solved. Upfront and unashamed about their fitness and physique goals, they inhabit a new world of diet and exercise in which it is not only fine to talk about your diet, but actively encouraged. Gordon Gekko might have said "lunch was for wimps" back in the 1980s. Now breakfast is, too.
"[Diet] used not to be considered men's domain at all," says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology and author of several best-selling books on nutrition, who has built a career out of advising people to eschew prescriptive diets in favour of seeking an approach that works for them. "No adverts were geared towards [men]. There has been a change. Advertisers have realised that there is a huge market. There's a thirst for knowledge, a recognition that the single most important thing you can do [for your health] is to alter your diet."
Addressing the Cheltenham Science Festival over the weekend, Spector gave more ammunition to us breakfast-dodgers. As we tend to have dinner later, he said, a first meal after 11am might be advisable for regulating weight. "Evidence has shown that having a 14-hour window from dinner to breakfast is beneficial for the majority of us," he said. "This helps our metabolism regulate its blood sugar response, and it also gives our microbiome time to create beneficial postbiotics such as butyrate to repair our gut. Waiting a bit longer to have breakfast is the easiest way to achieve this for most of us who like to have dinner around 8pm."
Diet culture, like bankruptcy and love, has crept up on men slowly and then all at once. Blokes who would never have opened a copy of Men's Health are now doing intermittent fasting or the Keto diet, or counting their calories in and out like a zealous bouncer. Even those who do not make a habit of fasting know their 'macros' – macronutrients, which is to say carbohydrates, proteins and fats – from their matcha – a special type of finely ground tea. Rather than something you did in private, diet is becoming a new arena of competition.
John Chapman, 34, who with his business partner Leon Bustin comprises The Lean Machines, a personal training and nutrition business with 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, agrees that there has been a marked shift in men's eating habits. "[Clients] are better informed than ever," he says. "The government's advice was to eat three meals a day and that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. We now know that's not the case. People can explore what works for them.
"Before, if you talked about your diet in the pub, people would have called you names for even thinking about that stuff," he adds. "Men are thinking more about their food, which is great, but it is a double-edged sword, because you can become obsessive or focus on the wrong things. You want to be doing it for the right reasons."
The renewed focus on diet has come with a greater awareness of exercise, in particular on building muscles.
"Men are increasingly affected by body image questions," says Clare Chambers, a professor of political philosophy at Cambridge and the author of Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body. "For men it's all about the sculpted body. Body is within men's control, so perhaps it is used to compensate for lack of success in other traditional masculine ideals," she says. "If you feel you're not succeeding economically, you can put in work on your body and see results."
At 35 I am a geriatric compared with the contestants on Love Island, but even I can tell when it is back on TV because I feel a strange urge to do press-ups and stop eating bread. It is impossible to be unaware of the rippling, bulging men, whose bodies, in earlier times, would have marked them out for an exhibition of strongmen. No longer. The Love Island look is becoming the default aspirational body for men under 40.
To look like a condom full of walnuts, as broadcaster and writer Clive James described Arnold Schwarzenegger's muscular body, means huge amounts of weight training but also a minuscule body-fat percentage. For marketers, this means they can flog the young Love Island audience the gym membership, protein shake and supplements, as well the theory. Apps abound, like Noom, Lumen and MyFitnessPal, which use techniques developed in video games to help nudge users into healthier habits.
For dysfunctional diet role models, look no further than Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs found that fasting created feelings of "euphoria and ecstasy", and hoped his vegan diet would reduce his need for deodorant. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder, swore off paleo after he found the excess beta-carotene was turning him orange. Products like Huel, the powdered meal replacement product, promise to enable the would-be billionaire on the go to give their body what it needs without having to cook.
There are risks to all this body consciousness. Body dysmorphia and eating disorders are on the rise in men. Last November a study by Better, the UK fitness providers, found that 81 per cent of 18-24-year olds showed signs of body dysmorphia, while more than half of the same age range admitted to skipping work obligations or social activities to maintain a workout regime. While it might be unhealthy to obsessively strive for the Love Island look, in the broader population, obesity is still on the rise. As the cost of living crisis bites, a recent survey for yfood, a Huel-type "smart-food", found that 41 per cent of men associated healthy or nutritious food with unaffordable prices.
For Spector, the young men at the frontiers of diet and exercise are pointing the way to a future in which we have moved away from the highly processed food industry which has dominated in the West. He has launched a tech product himself, Zoe, which promises to analyse a user's "gut, blood fat and blood sugar responses" to help them tailor their diet to suit them.
"[The Western diet] over the past 50 years has been a disaster," says Spector. "Food companies have got very good at producing these very tasty, ultra-processed foods very cheaply. And general government advice, which is misleading, is that eating regularly and snacking often is good for you, whereas most of the evidence is that it's bad for you. The only government obesity measure to go through in the past five years has been calorie counts in restaurants, which is a complete waste of time and probably counter-productive because people will eat more of the low-calorie rubbish foods.
"I hope opinion is shifting," Spector adds. "It could be that the younger men will teach the older ones."
Just not at breakfast.
Know yourself
Any sustainable long-term weight loss strategy must be based on your individual needs. Take time to learn some basics about nutrition and how to balance macro and micronutrients and your own body, and develop eating and exercise patterns that are enjoyable.
Consistency is key
Any strategy that creates a large calorie deficit can be successful in shifting the pounds in the short term. The trick is keeping the weight off. That means a regime you can maintain after the initial motivation wears off.
80:20
Consider an 80:20 approach, where you eat healthily 80 per cent of the time and do what you want the other 20 per cent. Don't beat yourself up about lapses.
Exercise is not just for fanatics
Moderate cardiovascular activity for a prolonged period is often better for weight loss than shorter but more intense HIIT types of training. To aid weight loss, aim to increase your moderate intensity exercise (jogging, walking, swimming or cycling briskly) to one hour three times a week.
Watch the clock
Try to eat within an eight-hour window. Research has shown that leaving several hours between your last meal of the day and your first of the morning can help with blood sugar and insulin levels.
Ideal for morning or afternoon tea, served with greek yoghurt and berries.