I do my resistance band exercises every other day. I am noticing, though initially done as a fitness thing to restore muscle mass, it can lean into being a project that has underneath it bulging muscles of vanity running through it. The ideal of having the perfect fit body, whatever you imagine that to be, can take over your much milder ambitions. If this obsession with physical appearance was allowed to grow further, it could become ever more unreal in its assessments. In what it makes of how you look, and what your ambitions for that perfect body appear to be. This may start with the laudable aim of being fitter and healthier, but leave you chasing the mythic dream of the ideal bodily form. And you do see these men on You Tube who are seventy, with the well toned body of a man thirty years younger. What you do not see is how much of their life they have devoted to this aim. And as a sixty eight year old man, obtaining, let alone maintaining, the perfect form with my aging physique, can only be called somewhat delusional. And it's a vanity that is unbecoming, if indulged in. Also, I have better things to do.
How you perceive your actual physical body, is always going to be, to a degree, distorted. Zeroing in and amplifying all those visible imperfections. We can so quickly stop seeing the real body before us with true honesty. We succumb to a disease of the imagination that perverts our perceptions. Fed by psychological insecurities and idiosyncrasies born from our vanity, plus the desire to bolster our self respect. So today, even a perfectly handsome young guy, who might see himself in the mirror as being undesirable, works hard in the gym to have the most attractive body. This attempt to compensate for the apparent 'defect' of feeling ordinary looking, undoubtedly will make him feel better about himself. This is fine, should it stop at that. However, diseases of the imagination can lean into real eating phobias like anorexia and bulemia. I'd say, one could now add the skeletal 'Ozempic' body to that list. Also, at the other end of the spectrum are the sort of muscle bound bodies that have been so excessively pumped up by exercise, their muscle mass resembles clusters of over inflated beach balls, about to explode. These too, seem to me, to be fueled by a similar imaginative defect. Where perceptions of the physical body have become warped.
I'm aware of the need in myself to maintain some clearsightedness about my own physical body image. What I see this body to be, and what I imagine it could be. To apprehend ,appreciate and respect my physical appearance, simply as it is. Imperfect no doubt, when squeezed through the narrow perspective of an ideal. It should remain closely aligned with actuality. Grounded in a frank but humane realism of my advancing age. Do I want to leave behind a beautiful corpse or a beautiful life, when I die?
An edited and further elaborated version of my Study Journal for the 7th February 2026
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