Thirty-seven.

You can lead a horse to cake, but you can't force it to drink the cake.

"You had abs when I first met you." Those were some of the last words Jim ever spoke to me before we stopped seeing each other.

Throughout my life thus far, my weight has never yo-yoed so drastically that there was a pronounced difference beyond shifting two or three waist sizes. However, because my shapeshifting has been confined to such a small parameter, I believe that's why I feel the changes more acutely. Gaining pounds makes my body seem heavier, more lethargic, and I scrutinize every minutiae of my face's shape. Has my face become rounder? Should I suck in my cheeks? Do I look more rotund? On the flip side, losing weight makes me feel lighter, more limber, as if I've suddenly been freed from earthly restraints. More recently, perhaps as I've aged and my metabolism possibly slowed, I've been wondering whether I'm imagining my body changing with the seasons: I feel heavier in the winter and lighter in the summer. I've never been a dedicated bodybuilder, but I suppose that this is what they mean when they call it bulking or cutting season.

Jim had a great body. He had an Equinox membership and went there almost daily, and it showed. Every day, he spent hours assiduously weight training and balanced his cardiovascular routine. He was also meticulous about his diet. At around 5'5, Jim often explained to me that he needed to watch what he ate; losing control of his portion sizes would have an immediate, outsized impact on his small frame. He only ever ate pre-measured meals from those low-calorie, high-protein meal kit delivery services. They would arrive frozen in black plastic trays, and he would pop one into the microwave for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (I am choosing not to go on a tangent here about ingesting microplastics—I will have to let this sentence suffice in acknowledgement.)

I remember asking Jim how he could stand eating the same thing over and over, day after day after day. I could see some slight variation between each meal, whether the protein of choice was swapped for another or if the vegetables were seasoned slightly differently, but I wanted to know if there was an end date to his excruciating diet.

If there was an end date, he didn't tell me. Instead, he showed me how he used various chili crisp brands (Lao Gan Ma being my favorite, of course) to give his meals a burst of flavor, thereby stimulating his palate, his attempt to break the monotony. On the rare occasions that he did eat anything else, typically when we went out to eat together, he took careful bites, always allowing himself only meager portions. Usually, I would be the one to finish our meals or to take home our leftovers. Because he was so much shorter than me, we knew that I had more freedom with food than he did because my body has six feet of height to allocate those calories.

It's not really my interest to pathologize anyone's behavior but, as his not-boyfriend and as someone who cared about him, I felt that I had enough leeway with him to point out that his eating was disordered. I remember being mildly surprised at his response, which was ready agreement.

Jim showed me pictures of himself through high school, explaining how being overweight made him feel insecure and unattractive. He'd once told me that he didn't start dating until after he'd turned twenty-five; that bit of information was a puzzle piece that fit neatly into the adjoining piece about his teen years. In college, he finally let himself bite the bullet and find a physical trainer, from which point onward his journey began.

I had met Jim on the flip side of his fitness odyssey. I wasn't there for the arduous years wherein he tirelessly exhausted himself, training with only the end goal of his ideal body shape in mind. But, I arrived in his life when his journey began to shift from building his physique to maintaining it, and I watched him remain steadfastly on pace with mulish diligence. However he accomplished it, I didn't—don't—think that I could with the same (almost resigned) equanimity.

When Jim said those words to me, that I had had more defined abdominal muscles back when we met, he wasn't insulting me, he wasn't even teasing me—he was actually trying to placate me as I complained to him about my fitness. I wasn't exactly comparing my physique to his, but I have no qualms admitting that being around him definitely resulted in me thinking about mine much more often. Other times, as encouragement in his own way, he would tell me that he wanted me to be as fit as Jungkook, a K-pop star and member of the boy band BTS, to which I'd laughingly recount the instance around 2015 when two White tween girls approached me at Disneyland because they'd confused me for him. (I think it's because I was, at the time, blond.) As I bemoaned my lack of desired muscle definition to Jim, I was usually half-facetious. Part of me wanted to fit the exacting gay beauty standards, of course, because I wanted to be desirable, desired, but the other part of me just hated what it would take to get there.

Kyle (@beardset). "The pressure I feel as a gay man to get fit is so unhealthy tbh" 10 October 2016. Tumblr post.

I've read the theories that gay beauty standards were born out of the AIDS crisis, which effectively wiped out a generation of gay men. Men who had "healthy" and "strong" bodies were unaffected or survivors, making them desirable partners. There's another train of thought borne out by all of the art from Ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance that men have always loved masculine musculature (Michelangelo was gay, I am a truther), but I'm not European…but I did grow up and currently reside in America, so I guess I too am not immune to the body image propaganda propagated by and for the gays. Shit is fucked.

Look—I was a child athlete. Through my early teen years, I was a competitive figure skater, which meant that I spent hours and hours each week zooming around the ice. I'm used to that type of cardiovascular exercise, and I quite enjoy it, too. I'm also a (tall) man of East Asian descent, and I have a body type that comes with a certain metabolic standard. I know firsthand that the way my body looks is plainly a function of diet and exercise. Unfortunately, that knowledge has never stopped my brain from chasing irrational trains of thought.

I can't count how many times I've showered in the dark because I didn't want to see my naked body. When I quit figure skating, that coincided with two events: my growth spurt and my eating disorder. I weighed exactly one hundred and seventeen pounds for four years straight, which was problematic because I had shot up to around 5'11. My mental health was in the gutter and my sense of self-worth was lower than low, but I skipped meals and ate only the side-portioned salads from the McDonald's dollar menu. I wanted to be attractive. I wasn't—I was anorexic.

Years later, when I separated from Henry, my mental health cratered again. I had complained to him throughout our relationship of the weight I thought I was gaining; when we broke up, I somehow arrived at the idea that I could win him back if I proved that I could achieve everything I said I would. It was a different sort of mania: I went to the gym almost every single day, in part because I desperately wanted my brain to produce the happy chemicals that it needed to stop me from killing myself. I was nervously depressed and had no appetite for food, and I spent hours on the treadmill. My weight drastically tanked.

As I observed Jim's strict diet, I thought back to my own years of disordered eating and also the years when I managed to strike what I thought was a good balance. In 2017, I had developed a compromise: because I didn't feel like bringing lunch to work in Manhattan, I would allow myself to eat variations of the salaryman's bowl of slop (takeout meals from fast casual chains like Dig [Inn] and Chopt) so long as I stuck to my prescribed, homemade breakfasts and dinner. Every morning, I made myself a breakfast sandwich consisting of egg, avocado, greens, and cheese; every evening, I cooked the same white rice and stir-fried water spinach (with alternating garlic or belacan). Any other meals, such as dinners with friends, needed to be scheduled weeks in advance, and I went to the gym four or five days a week. I looked good, but I was still thin, and I/my palate was extraordinarily bored. I dreamed of becoming a handsome muscle god.

Drew (@hydratedangel). "ppl telling me i’d be more desirable if i worked out and gained muscle….. yeah… desired by people who only desire me because i have muscle. now why the fuck would i want that?" 25 October 2024. Tweet.

I met with a food therapist around that time as part of the corporate wellness incentives offered by my job. I explained to her my routine, my fear of phantom fat, and how desperately I craved but didn't allow myself to purchase things like orange juice because I was afraid of ingesting too much sugar. She took a beat and told me, kindly but firmly, that my mental health should take precedence. Would the orange juice make me happy? If yes, then it would be worth having. I was at no risk of developing diabetes or anything of the sort, and I was being illogical and irrational about the matter. My need to be happy should always be prioritized over whatever body image I had.

I don't think I have a lot of body dysmorphia, at least not nowadays. Granted, I'm also not currently as fit as I have been or could be. Sometimes, I love the gym. Sometimes, I hate it. Sometimes, it just is. Because I was a child athlete, I think my relationship to exercise is one where I need to be engaged beyond the monotony of running on a treadmill, be it writing Yelp reviews while on the bike machine or watching Dragon Ball DAIMA and Real Housewives as I run. Beau and Jim attended Barry's classes with me, and I took up SoulCycle on the side. I even bought a pair of adult figure skates. Still, part of my lingering trauma from that devastating Henry breakup is that I can't spend so much time in the gym—it reminds me too much of when I was fucking miserable.

Despite his careful diet, Jim actually loved food. He was someone who went out of his way to dine at Michelin-recommended and celebrity chef restaurants, once traveling across the country to drop half a grand on a meal prepared by an Italian chef. Top Chef was his favorite show, and him always having it on eventually got me hooked, too. It reminded me of the years spent with Alberto, who taught me about the Food Network shows like Chopped. It doesn’t hurt me to admit that I love food, too.

Ultimately, I've found that it all comes down to a simple aphorism: I gain weight when I'm happy and I lose it when I'm unhappy. When life is good, I eat more, usually with my loved ones; when life sucks, I eat less, typically because I have no appetite. As I get older, I care less and less about having the perfect body. If I'm going to be unattractive or ugly (and, yes, this is very much a frivolous first world problem), so be it—my love life is nonexistent, anyways.