Hey, Athletes! Have you struggled with body image as a male athlete? Listen to the first episode of Ask Me Anything to find out how to tackle this issue and come out the other side.
Episode 01 Of Ask Me Anything Is Up!
Male Body Image Issues
On this first episode we answer a question from Frank. It’s about male body image issues and how men can go down the dark side of fitness. Jerred goes over a study about Body Dismorphic Disorder and gives examples of an athlete who could potentially have this. After sharing his personal experience with this, he then gives tips on how to tackle this body image issue and come out the other side of it.
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Related Resources at End of Three Fitness:
- S2E15: How Firefighter Training Instructor, Evan Halquist, Stays Prepared for the Unknown and Unknowable
- Dr. Matt Jordan on Injury, Science vs. Experience, and Higher-Level Thinking
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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!
To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym athlete. Ask me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to Verragio mathy.com/ama let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Jared moon here. Welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. We’re doing ask me anything. So if you want to be a part of this, if you haven’t already, go to garage gym, athlete.com/ama you can, you can suggest a topic, ask a question, anything that you want really, and that’s what I’m covering here today.
Now, if you’re listening to this via audio only, this is also live on YouTube. If you watch on this YouTube channel, what’s up. Pretty much just me on camera. but another way, you know, I can answer more questions and, and dive into things a little bit deeper with you guys. So I’m going to start, get started right away.
pretty much what we’re going to do in these segments. [00:01:00] Question, I’ll give kind of maybe some of my backstory or help, you know, what I’ve seen with other athletes or, even if there are some studies I can pull when relevant, I would. This first one is from Frank. I’m not going to mention anybody’s last name.
You most likely know if you, you answered the, you asked the question. He specifically wanted to know about male body image issues. He says there seem to be a lot of focus on women, but as a male that has had and still has body image issues, discussing this from a male perspective would be great. Tied in with this is the dark side of fitness that being steroid use.
All right. I think my audio levels are still good. so I actually, I know Frank, we go back a long way. He’s been a part of the community for a long time, and this goes all the way back to a, a better humanology podcast. I think we actually called it the dark side of fitness where we, you know, we talked about steroid use.
I’ve never actually used steroids, but having been in fitness for a long time, I actually had been offered a, you know, performance enhancing drugs, like steroids, [00:02:00] testosterone, like all these different, Testosterone boosters that aren’t quite legal, I mean, and, and all these other things. I’ve, I’ve always strayed away from it, primarily because my focus has been health, and performance, but not performance at the detriment of my health.
So I do want to talk about this because it’s very interesting. but I want to start in a study, specifically. Let’s see, what’s this one called? It’s called body dysmorphic disorder, recognizing and treating imagined ugliness. So this is something I actually suffered with pretty early on. Was body dysmorphia.
So I started in the bodybuilding side of things, and I really did like, you know, if you, if you’ve ever been into body building world, you know, you’re always trying to get bigger and stronger and all these things, but it comes at a downside. Like eventually, you know, how big is big enough? I always chased bigger, bigger, bigger, wanting to grow, you know, bigger biceps, bigger quads, all these things.
But. At some point it becomes like a psychological disorder. If you skip a workout that you know, you start to go down some [00:03:00] really bad paths, you feel small. Like there’s, there’s a lot of negative, and it’s that, that dark side of fitness that you’re talking about. Frank is a very real thing. I think we both know that.
but I wanted to ask the three questions they have in this study for diagnosing, By dysmorphia disorder. So first question is, are you very worried about your parents in any way, or are you unhappy with how you look? If yes, what is your concern? These are, this is the question. Are they using a study to kind of, Get people diagnosed with BDD. The second question, does this concern preoccupy you? That is, do you think about it a lot and wish you could worry about it less? How much time do you spend thinking about, you know, fill in body, area of concern. So whether that’s your bicep size, your weight, whatever it is.
And then third, what effect has this preoccupation with your parents had on your life? Has it significantly interfered with your social life, school, work, job, other activities, or other aspects of your life? Cause a lot of distress affected your family or friends. So obviously, you know, if you answered a lot of those in the affirmative, you’re going to be [00:04:00] headed towards the BDD route.
And like I said, I struggle with this for a long time. I think it’s a good, a great question. I, I can’t speak from a female perspective, but you know, that’s obviously a big thing. as well for females, you know, always worrying about weight on the scale and things that aren’t as important as just being healthy and fit.
But if someone who did struggle with this, what ha, what helped me the most is really focusing on performance and only performance instead of worry. Cause you know, I, I really used to be like. You know, I would do a 12 week cycle, something like that. Measure the size of my biceps measure after. That’s really the only thing that’s your are, I was looking for that time was growth.
And so once I moved to performance mindset, everything was how much weight can I lift? How fast can I run, you know, what are the different things I could do? What event could I tackle? And once I started to focus on that, it wasn’t right away. It took several years, I would say, to really truly be released of not caring about caring at all about how, how big my arms were, or if I was growing or what my weight was.
you know, really focusing on that performance helped me offer [00:05:00] for a very long time. you know, get past what probably was, I would say mild case, ma, mild to moderate case, in my case of, body dysmorphia, dysmorphia, and just really focused on performance. And so maybe you could do that to some degree knowing that it’s not going to go Ry right away.
There’s not, you know, a trigger. Like even in this study, they talk about treating. this, you know, this disorder and the only, the only options they have are, Sri. So serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so medicate or cognitive behavioral therapy. And that’s, you know, the, that can go into a lot of different, different domains, CBT right there.
But. I think what what I’m talking about is along those lines. So trying to focus your goals and your ideas on performance metrics over time, I think can release. You have that mentality of always being focused on your, your body image. And this is something that we’ve been preaching, talking about forever is like.
Move away from, you know, the scale, move away from your waist size [00:06:00] or your, your arm size, whatever, and move just towards a performance metric. Maybe over the course of. A year. You want to, you want to accomplish something in the performance world or over 12 weeks cycle, something like that. But if you can focus on what you can do instead of how you look, it’s going to go a long way.
And what’s cool about it is a lot of people were like, well, what if I actually do want to lose weight? And I’m only focused on this performance metric? If you focused on a performance metric. And say you have an eight minute mile and you want to go down to a six minute mile, you’re typically going to lose weight if you actually achieve that.
There’s no way you’re, you’re morbidly obese and you, you knock off two minutes, you know, down to a six minute mile and you haven’t lost some weight in the process. So what’s cool is chasing performance metrics really goes hand in hand with lower body fat issues and lower body fat most of the time. And in any issues you have with how you look or.
The weight on the scale. So that’s, that’s the only thing I really got. That’s what helped me a ton is focus as much as you can on performance metrics and see where that takes you over a long enough timeline. Give it some time to, to really dial in. But that’s it for this. [00:07:00] Ask me anything, for you, Frank.
And this is garage gym athlete podcast. If you guys liked this on the YouTube channel, go ahead, subscribe. Like comment, let me know what you got. But anyway, thanks for listening. And until next time.
I hope you enjoy today’s ask me anything episode. So one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea, you can do so at garage gym, athlete.com/ama and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already signed up for garage gym, athlete membership, we are the best community and programming on the internet.
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