From & To Sathish #7 - Page 125

https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/a73248852/health-benefits-cabbage-recipes/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=&position=9&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=3965fefe-a70a-4a52-822c-b8db3addb995&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.menshealth.com%2Fnutrition%2Fa73248852%2Fhealth-benefits-cabbage-recipes%2F

This Inexpensive Vegetable Is Your Secret Weapon to Hitting Your Fiber Goals

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-men-seek-refuge-in-ever-bigger-muscles

Why some men seek refuge in ever bigger muscles

by Tom Wooldridge, psychoanalyst

Diagnoses of muscle dysmorphia or ‘bigorexia’ are rising. A psychoanalytic lens offers an explanation – and a healthier path

Before my first consultation with Daniel – a composite of several young men I’ve worked with – he stands ramrod straight in the waiting room, electric with tension. His T-shirt clings to a body shaped by hours of training. Veins ripple beneath the surface of his arms. Inside my office, he speaks rapidly about his workout plan, the protein shakes he mixes every few hours, the supplements he buys at a store that sells powders in large, plastic tubs. When I ask how he’s been feeling, he smiles, shrugs noncommittally, and says: ‘All right. Trying to stay disciplined.’

Over the coming weeks, I discover that this ‘discipline’ is the organising axis of his life. It has so exacerbated a preexisting tendency toward rigidity and anxiety that his partner insisted that, for their relationship to continue, he must seek treatment. He wakes before dawn each morning to train before school, weighs every portion of food, checks the mirror dozens of times a day. He is paralysed by panic if he misses a workout and intense guilt if he eats something that’s not on the plan. Beneath this rigour lies an unspoken dread. If he relaxes, even for a moment, his body will betray him. Soften. Become ordinary.

Daniel is far from alone. Over the past several decades, a new disorder has taken root among boys and young men – muscle dysmorphia. It’s characterised by the conviction that one’s body is not muscular or lean enough, no matter how large or defined it is. From the outside, it might look like an issue rooted in lack of body confidence or poor self-esteem, but there is something more profound going on.

Of course healthy discipline can be grounding and meaningful. You might go to the gym because moving your body helps you feel more engaged with life or because you value the resulting physique. You take rest days when you’re tired, and pride largely stems from effort instead of outcome. But when workouts can’t be skipped without overwhelming guilt, and meals are ruled by fear, the routine no longer serves the person. In that case, discipline has morphed from a source of strength to self-punishment.

Clinically, muscle dysmorphia lives under the umbrella of body dysmorphic disorders. Its consequences are visceral: punishing diets and hours at the gym each day, often at the expense of social events. Recent studies suggest that as many as one in 10 male gym-goers show significant symptoms; among teenagers, the numbers are rising. Muscle dysmorphia afflicts more males than females, though the exact ratio is contested and many females develop the disorder, too (their experiences also deserve attention but that will have to wait until another essay).

If muscle dysmorphia isn’t a body image problem, what is it? In psychotherapeutic terms, we might say that Daniel’s strength – his muscles – are doing the work that his words cannot. They hold what cannot be thought about, transforming anxiety into motion and muscle mass. What seems to be a narrative about bodies is, underneath, about feelings. There is a cultural equation that connects self-worth with mastery and emotional control. From an early age, many boys learn, to one degree or another, that their safety depends on strength and their sense of belonging on invulnerability. ‘Man up,’ ‘don’t be soft’: the language is so ordinary for many of us that we barely hear it. By adolescence, many have already taken on a simple, if mostly unconscious, creed: it’s better to be numb than to be vulnerable.

Early in life, they equated tenderness with danger and vulnerability, and they passed down this emotional lesson like an heirloom

For most men, the command to be strong is subtle. It comes from a look, a silence, many small lessons absorbed throughout development. At times, it is the father who cannot stand the sight of his son’s tears. At others, it is the coach who conflates humiliation and motivation. Or it is the online influencer whose sculpted body and confident voice holds out the possibility of transcendence. However it comes, the message is the same: don’t be vulnerable.

In psychoanalytic terms, these figures embody the paternal function (problematically named because it can be carried by people of any sex), which helps a child separate and individuate, and discover his own agency. When that works well, it fosters a sense of confidence and curiosity. When it fails, though, this autonomy becomes terror, and the wish for safety morphs into shame. At its best, the paternal function also models endurance. The grit that helps one to face hardship without denial. But when that function is shorn of tenderness, strength degenerates into suppression of one’s feelings.

In our culture, the father still most often carries the bulk of the paternal function. Many of my patients grew up with fathers who were certainly not monsters. They were men frightened by their own softness. Early in life, they equated tenderness with danger and vulnerability, and they passed down this emotional lesson like an heirloom. The son’s strength served as the father’s reassurance, even as the father’s authority became his son’s prison. Other patients of mine discovered their paternal figures in sport, where affection is rationed and praise mostly earned through pain and competition. ‘Push through it,’ ‘don’t quit,’ ‘play hurt’. These sorts of phrases were likely intended to build resilience but they taught emotional disavowal.

As a boy grows up, these voices come to live inside his psyche. I think of this internalised father figure as a kind of ghost who watches over the boy’s every movement, every feeling. It pushes him to lift heavier, run farther, suppress a little more. It echoes in catchy slogans about ‘grind’ and ‘discipline’, in locker-room back-and-forth, and through the contempt many men feel toward their own dependence. It is the cultural atmosphere that tells boys that needing comfort is unmanly.

The first language we speak is the body’s. Before we can give hunger a name, we cry out. Before we can say ‘I’m scared,’ our stomachs feel empty. In an ideal situation, someone helps us translate these sensations into meaning. By putting feelings into words, we can reflect upon them and, thus, obtain a degree of choice in relation to them. If I know that I am sad, then I might seek out a friend’s sympathetic ear or offer myself time and space to grieve. But if I don’t know I’m sad, I’m more likely to engage in behaviours that have a driven quality, because that’s the only way that I can find to evacuate the uncomfortable feeling beneath.

Many boys aren’t taught this act of translation. Certain feelings, such as fear, shame and longing, remain largely unspoken. Not because they don’t have these emotions, but because they learned that expressing them will lead to ridicule or withdrawal. So their body becomes the only medium of expression. It becomes rigid where speech should flow and hardens where tenderness is needed. The gym, with its repetitive rituals of tension and release, becomes both refuge and language.

Muscle dysmorphia can feel deeply compelling, even righteous, to those caught by its grip

In my clinical work, I see this process play out in front of me. A young man starts to describe a conflict with his father or coach, and just as the recollection approaches the edges of his feelings, his jaw tightens, his breath becomes clipped, his shoulders rise with invisible tension. Within moments, the emotion is displaced into his muscles. The illusion of control stands in for dependency. In the space where words might have unfolded, action surges in.

Muscle dysmorphia can feel deeply compelling, even righteous, to those caught by its grip. The clearly laid-out structure, the counting, the visible progress all foster a sense of coherence in a chaotic emotional life. In psychoanalytic language, we might say these men are trying to elaborate affect through action rather than in words. They are trying to manage difficult feelings with the tools they have. The bench press stands in for the conversation that never took place; the ache of lactic acid distracts from the pain of abandonment.

Over time, this language becomes self-perpetuating. The more it seems to work, the harder it is to surrender. Muscles, after all, do not seem to betray us. They do not argue, they do not abandon, they do not disappoint. And so the body becomes a refuge. The one relationship that feels safe.

When Daniel feels sad, he goes to the gym. After his workout, whatever feelings he had before have dissipated, replaced by the pride in the hardness he feels in his body. There’s nothing wrong with managing feelings this way from time to time, but for Daniel and others like him, it becomes compulsive. It empties out their inner lives so that any complicated or difficult emotions are replaced by anxiety and the drive for physical discipline and muscular strength.

In therapy, the work begins with small permissions: to rest, to feel tired, to admit that seeking strength has become exhausting. For many, this feels like a radical shift. They are used to understanding fatigue as weakness, vulnerability as collapse. Over time, my aim is not to get them to replace strength with softness, but to integrate them, to find a form of power that can remain open and flexible.

To be strong enough to feel weak is the paradox every man must eventually contend with

When a young man like Daniel can give voice to his anger instead of channelling it into lifting ever-heavier weights, or if he can allow himself to feel his grief, the muscles of the psyche, rather than the body, can develop. This is psychic elaboration: the transformation of emotional sensation into meaning. In less technical terms, it is learning to see that feelings are not dangerous. The energy that once went into physical discipline becomes available for curiosity, relationships and other aspects of life. In our therapy together, I help Daniel learn to give voice to his feelings of fear and sadness, among others, and while he remains an avid gym-goer, his emotional repertoire begins to deepen.

Therapy, in this sense, is about reworking one’s attitude to strength. I teach Daniel and other patients that the art of maturity lies in holding both strength and vulnerability. I tell them that strength without vulnerability becomes rigidity; vulnerability without strength becomes collapse. To be strong enough to feel weak is the paradox every man must eventually contend with. It is only through finding the strength to break open their armour that men can begin to foster a sense of connection to themselves and others.

Of course, none of this is limited to men with muscle dysmorphia, or even to men more generally. We all build fortresses – whether through our bodies, careers or identities – to keep our emotional fragility out of sight. Yet every fortress, however elegant, has a price: isolation, rigidity, the ache of disconnection. Life itself asks for something more porous. More human.

The goal is not to vanquish our vulnerability but to develop a different relationship to it. To see it as a marker of depth instead of a defect, as the path through which intimacy and connection, empathy and true, grounded courage enter. The body, when no longer forced to speak for what the mind cannot, becomes gentler – not a fortress, but a home: strong enough to shelter, soft enough to breathe.

Tom Wooldridge is a psychoanalyst, founding dean of the School of Psychology at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and director of the Human Systems Lab, which explores the roles of AI and other emergent technologies in human systems. He is the author of Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction (2023) and Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males (2016), and the editor of Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak (2018). His forthcoming book End the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder will be published by Guilford in 2026.