I have people message me on Instagram, saying,
"You're really slim. I like your hair.
"The only problem is, I'd break you."
I'm walking on the beach. Everyone's just turning,
looking at me, like, "Ah."
I'm not even big.
I starve myself... Wow.
..which I have to do, to help my body to eat itself.
All right, fat boy? Oh, hold off. He wants a sausage.
As I've got older, I've come to accept that the one
thing that I can't change on my body is my penis.
Where we stand at the moment in 2018,
for guys, there's a massive, massive
pressure for us all to physically look
like, maybe, a Greek god.
In order to be masculine or attractive,
you should be well-built.
You can't show any weakness.
You can't show any feelings, you can't show any softness.
You have an expectation to be strong.
Flat stomachs, abs, muscles...
Looking great, looking groomed.
The ideal body type is definitely six pack, puffed-out chest.
Oh, yeah. Shredded. "He's ripped."
It was always pushed into my brain, "You have to look a certain way."
It does play with your head quite a lot.
I think, "Nah, I could be bigger."
Me wanting to look a certain way,
that stems from childhood, really.
My dad always said to me, "You have to look physically strong."
And he drilled that into me from a very young age.
I'm kind of OK with my physique, but it's that thing
of striving for perfection
even though I know I'll never have perfection.
I was a 30 waist, then it was a 32, then a 34.
Then, people started making comments about, "Oh, is he pregnant?"
It was always a bit of fun, but somewhere in the back
of the head, rings a bit of truth. It hurts.
I wanted to do something about it.
Just puts that fear into you
of making a change and failing.
People assume that when you've got an eating disorder,
you look skeletal.
That you look incredibly thin.
But I was never like that.
I could look just, like, a perfectly healthy weight
and people wouldn't know that I had bulimia.
When I was young, I was bullied for my appearance.
I was very, very small and skinny and that never ended,
five years at school.
I've eventually weighed 8st now since I was 11, that's not changed.
I've kind of just got taller and stretched out.
Growing up as a black man, I feel that there is
yeah, a sort of, stereotype.
In the way we're seen, as well.
I could come out the gym one day,
I'm in my tracksuit, you know, I'm sweating out,
people just think, like, "Oh, yeah, it's a big black guy
"walking behind me," or something,
and then they cross the road.
I don't know, it's just quite weird.
A couple of times I've been stopped in my car, as well.
Told to come out the car, and then straight away
it's like, "Ah, yeah, you've got a bit of size on you, mate.
"I'll need to put these handcuffs on you."
I am someone who has always struggled with body image.
I was around 15 years old.
My parents were diagnosed with cancer.
I shut myself off from the world, because I didn't want
everyone to see how much my family was in pain.
And I was already dealing with everything else
that a 15-year-old deals with - identity, sexuality.
I was overweight. I did get teased.
People used to say that when I walked, it caused earthquakes
and all these layers just built up on top of me.
I remember one moment after school, I just ate so much food
that I was naturally sick.
Afterwards, I had this feeling of, "I'm empty,"
and that feeling became an addiction.
Kids would tell me in school I was anorexic,
that my parents starved me.
One day there was four lads on both sides of the corridor.
I was on my own. I had just got out a lesson.
Two picked me up by the arms, took me up the stairs,
put me over the banister,
sellotaped me there and left me.
I was so lightweight, I stayed there.
It took two teachers to get me down, but I was
there for about half an hour.
And it was in a crowded corridor, so, obviously, you had everyone
walking past, laughing as they went along and it just felt like torture.
I ended up going home and crying to my mother the whole night.
I turned around to my mum at one point, and said,
"Did you do anything while pregnant with me?
"Why am I this way?"
At the age of 17, I went
to the doctors to get help for my bulimia.
I was turned away because I was a boy.
And I was told that I didn't have an eating disorder,
it was stress.
People assume that teenage boys are just confident,
and that they don't have issues with their image or their body image.
From that, I was just stuck in this spiral
that I just couldn't get out of.
And during that time, when I went to the bathroom to be sick,
I thought, "This is how you will end your life.
"This eating disorder will kill you."
And I was OK with that.
I tried these extreme diets.
I was taking fattening, gaining pills that were costing me
hundreds of pounds a month.
I was eating KFC, McDonald's...
..breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I only gave up after about eight months of doing that.
I was getting nowhere.
My dad, he used to lift weights, as well.
But he wasn't serious about it, like I am.
I used to go in the shed, take his weights.
I was probably about 14.
I just started lifting in my room, and then started getting big.
My training stopped quite dramatically.
I was 25.
I came off my bike.
My leg was literally just broken in three places, like, mangled.
I was in a wheelchair for quite some time.
I went back skinny.
I had to learn to walk again.
I had this determination, like, the doctors, they're saying to me,
"You're not going to walk for 12 months."
I did it in about five.
I was determined. I needed to get back in the gym.
Look at me, like, my clothes are all hanging off me now.
And so that was part of the drive.
When I was younger, I was quite sporty
so I played football five times a week.
I was 9.5st when I was 19, 20.
24, 25 mark is when I just stopped playing football altogether
and never done any exercise after that.
I started eating takeaways.
I stopped looking after myself and the weight just started piling on.
At my heaviest, I was up to 20st.
I had no confidence.
There's a lot of pressure on men to look a certain way,
and that means that we like to put on the front
that we're happy, we're big, we're proud.
And then the "fat boy" names start coming in.
Can say, "Oh, it's just a joke," or banter.
I used to wear a bra, wore a thong.
You know, I'd run around naked or I'd draw stuff on my belly,
I'd shave all my hair off.
Just, I wore a gimp suit. Yeah.
If I was taking the mick out myself,
they couldn't do it to me and make me feel crap.
I've watched both my brothers be taken to the gym
and train and get big.
But my dad, if I ever came down
without a T-shirt on, "Your arms getting a bit skinnier."
There would be comments.
So as soon as I hit 16 he took me to the gym, introduced me to training.
To look a certain way you have to sacrifice certain things
and part of that is...pleasure.
You have to eat a certain amount of food, a certain time of day.
When I eat,
I'm so look forward to eating, halfway through the meal,
I start getting depressed because the meal is going
to be over soon and I'm still hungry.
I think I'm more addicted to me pushing me.
That comes from the other insecurities in my life.
I have a disability.
My right foot is three shoe sizes smaller than my left
and I have four toes on my right
foot and my right leg is five
centimetres shorter than my left.
Stopped me joining the police force, stopped me joining the fire brigade
and all those kind of things which test one's self and not
everybody can do. It ain't easy.
Every day I go like that, "What am I doing?
"Can't I just like, just be normal?!"
We all have issues with body image and that's why I think
it's so important to have these conversations.
Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
I see someone who's incredibly confident and got great muscles.
But is there ever a time when you think,
"Hey, do you know what? Give myself a break this year."?
I-I have that thought
literally every day... Yeah.
..that I go, "Is this actually worth it?"
I keep going, "Yeah.
"Yeah, yeah, it is."
Four-five years of my life I had bulimia. OK.
From a teen up until I was 21. Oh, wow. It was for five years.
Everyday was a routine then.
Right. Now I avoid anything that involves controls
over any sort of shift in diet.
I kind of see there's similarities between maybe having an eating
disorder and doing what I do - that I starve myself. Wow.
Which I have to do to get my body to eat itself...
Yeah. ..before I stand on stage, and even though it's unpleasant,
I force myself to do it.
You're talking about stuff that
people don't want to talk about.
Just starting the conversation can be so difficult for everyone
because not everyone wants to talk, not everyone is ready.
We've seen the conversations before.
We've seen it with women over the last ten years or so and now
it's just a natural process.
We can start off in those conversations too.
Women have always had to look a certain way and act a certain way.
Society has now said that men need to look a certain way,
just like women.
Now men are able to talk more about body image.
One thing I've learned is that everybody thinks they're alone.
Everybody thinks what they're going through is, is some unique.
Yeah. And it's just for them and no-one else has experienced it.
And it's not, it's not true.
I mean, it's always down to the same thing, isn't it? Just having an
open and honest conversation. Exactly.
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah.
Guys have become so obsessed with what they look like now.
I never thought there'd be a day where people bothered about
getting hair transplants and veneers and all that sort of stuff.
I think that the pressure on men particularly now
has increased a lot.
We're always presented with images, whether it's online, on TV.
We start comparing ourselves to what's out
there and that comparison is very dangerous.
It's always been around.
The problem with social media is that it becomes so much bigger.
People take out their phones, they're scrolling constantly.
Their brain is absorbing all this information,
they're not actually realising, they're just doing it
and then think, like, "Oh, OK.
"Wonder if I could look like that?"
I know what it takes to get that kind of body.
That's not who the average person is!
You only have to go into shops to see what's left on the shelves.
It's the smalls and the mediums, every size that I want,
large or extra large, is gone.
Am I part of the problem?
Erm...
To be honest, it does my head in.
I recently took a break from my Instagram, I deactivated my account.
Just... I got fed up of it.
Now, I don't feel like I need to change body shape.
It has a massive benefit in the bedroom.
I do like to be thrown about a bit.
Gay dating apps, there's so many categories you can fall into.
Like, I fall into something called a twink,
which is someone that's slim and looks young.
I do use the hashtag twink to my advantage.
I put it in there just to up my followers and my likes.
You get people messaging you on a daily basis saying
you're exactly my type.
Knowing that people are attracted to slim guys like me,
it's like I can accept my body.
I tried to make fun of myself and my body before anybody else could.
And then I met this girl.
She was like, "Well, no, that's not right.
"You shouldn't be doing this.
"You shouldn't be saying that. You've got feelings."
She introduced me to new foods, encouraged me to eat more healthy.
I think my attitude changed and then my body changed after it.
Now I'll go to the gym. I've got a little bit of muscle but I'm by no
means fit or unfit, I'm just average.
I have gone from a bigger guy
that hated himself to a big guy that loves himself.
Do I do this to impress people?
I would say no. I actually train because I just love it.
It's part of my lifestyle.
A lot of people train to have an ego or you know
to make themselves scary.
That's one thing I don't agree on.
My goal originally wasn't, it wasn't to win. It wasn't to make
a career out of it and then literally I put my big toe
on that stage and it felt like I was home.
I was only supposed to do it once!
I'm now doing it again and I will do it again.
So I've definitely got the bug for it.
I feel like I have to be confident myself.
I can't expect other people to be confident in me
if I'm not even confident with the way I look.
People think you can say whatever you want to a man about their body
and they'll just take it.
If you can support somebody that's overweight, if you can be nice
to somebody that's overweight rather than the nasty comments
and the bullying, then half the battle is already won.
It doesn't matter what I'm presenting here externally.
It matters about what I feel inside and that's what shows.