CHANGING SIZE AND SHAPE: LIKING YOUR BODY

March 2009
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Bodies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: short and tall, thin and plump, narrow and wide, muscular and not so muscular. To some extent you can change the shape of your body by diet and exercise. If you’re thin, you can put on weight. If you’re fat, you can diet so that your body loses some of its fat tissue. If you’d like your body to be more muscular, you can lift weights or work out in a gym once you’ve started puberty. Doing slow, repetitious exercises in which you lift weights or use your muscles to push against a heavy piece of gym equipment will cause your muscles to become thicker and shorter and to bulge out more. (You have to wait until you’ve started puberty, though, because without the hormones your body produces during this time your muscles won’t respond to the exercise.) But remember that you do have a basic body shape that can’t be changed no matter how much or how little you eat or what type of exercise you do.

If you aren’t satisfied with your body and are under- or overweight, perhaps you need to see a doctor and start a diet and exercise programme to help you gain or lose weight. If you are not sure whether you’re under- or overweight, your doctor can help you decide whether your weight is within the normal ranges for your age, height and body build. If you fall within the normal ranges and still aren’t satisfied with the way your body looks, maybe you need to think about where you’ve got these ideas about how your body should look, ideas that are making you feel dissatisfied with the way you do look.

It would be nice if we could all look at our bodies without having to compare them to someone else’s and say, ‘Hey, I like the way I look.’ But we live in a society where there’s a lot of competition among people, companies and even countries. We’re always comparing and competing to see who’s best. So who decides what’s best?

Most of us get our ideas about what’s the ‘best’ or ‘most attractive’ type of male body from the pictures we see in magazines and people on television and in films. Right now these pictures and programmes often show tall men with big, bulging muscles, handsome, regular features, no spots, slim waists, small bottoms and hairy chests. As you may have noticed, not too many men actually look like this.

When we are constantly bombarded with pictures of tall, muscular, handsome men, we can get the feeling that there’s something about our bodies that is somehow not right. If we don’t look like these men, we may be unhappy with the way we do look. After all, if these are the men who are always the heroes in the movies, always getting the girls or being successful, what message does that send to those of us who aren’t tall, muscular or good-looking in that particular way? With all these images of perfect ‘hunks’, it’s easy to start thinking that their bodies actually are better or more attractive. If you feel this way sometimes, it helps to remember that these bodies seem more desirable only because they are in fashion in our particular culture at this particular time. Being in fashion doesn’t make a miniskirt ‘better’ than a knee-length skirt, and being in fashion doesn’t make one body type better than another.

It helps, too, to remember that fashions change and that they vary from culture to culture.

Polynesian king-Most people in our society would find him overweight, yet in his culture he’s considered a fine figure of a man. His huge stomach is taken as a sign of his masculinity. The seventeenth-century German mayor would also be considered a bit chunky by our standards, yet in his own day and age his bulk was considered attractive, a sign of his success and prosperity. The third man is an Englishman from the nineteenth century. His thin, narrow body and lack of muscles make him look rather fragile in comparison to the kind of body now in fashion. Yet then, he was the type of man who had women swooning over him. In fact, back then one of our modern-day hunks might have been considered a real barbarian and not at all attractive.

It also helps to remember that not everyone agrees with or goes along with the fashions of the day. For instance, there are plenty of women who find men with huge “muscles very unattractive. Many women prefer thin men. And for most people, it’s not what kind of body you have but what kind of person you are that really counts.

Learning to appreciate yourself and to like your own body whether or not it matches up to what’s in fashion is a big step in growing up. If you find your own body attractive, other people will too.

Of course, it isn’t always easy to learn to like your own body. Even though most of the boys we talked to were pleased about the fact that their bodies were changing and becoming adult, they sometimes wished that they were taller or wider across the chest, more muscular or more something else. We asked the men we interviewed, ‘Have you ever wished your body were different in some way, and if so, how?’ or ‘What’s the one thing you would most like to change about your body?’ We got many different answers, but two topics came up more than the others, so we’d like to talk a bit about them.

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