For almost my entire life I hated how I looked.

I was by no means unhealthy but a youth spent playing video games and eating heaping mounds of white rice meant I was far from the models, superheroes and movie stars I looked up to.

One day my doctor said that while I was still within acceptable levels of body fat, I could stand to lose some centimetres around the waist and drop a few kilos.

To say the motivation there was solely health-related would be a lie. I am after all a gay man and it’s no secret we have always idolised the kind of male body that spends five days a week in the gym. According to research, physique, apart from race and income, is one of the major sources of compare-and-despair anxieties for gay men. If my experience on Grindr has taught me anything, it rarely mattered what you had to say or even how handsome you were – the bigger the muscles and leaner the abs, the more attention you got.

So it was on these fertile but perhaps not the most mentally healthy grounds I began my fitness journey. I tracked all my calories. I substituted chicken thigh for breast. I weighed every gram of rice I ate. I started hitting the gym five to six times a week. I lifted heavy and walked more.

© The Guardian