Which is what evolutionary psychologist William Costello did, posting before-and-after photos of the singer Olly Murs, either side of a “12-week gym transformation”. In picture one, Murs has visible muscles but is a little on the chunky side — a classic “dad bod”, in the thirsty language of the internet. In picture two, he’s straight-up ripped, body fat stripped away and every muscle on show — a lean, honed Adonis at the pinnacle of his physical development.

And yet: almost four times as many women chose the “before” over the “after”. But nearly twice as many men chose the “after” over the “before”, and a lot of them seemed as baffled by the “feminine soul” as Freud ever was. The moment Costello’s post went mega-viral was when another user screen-grabbed the results and shared the image with the caption, “why are women lying about this? like what’s the actual cause?”

In other words: even when several women tell you outright what they want, some men simply can’t believe it. Women must be being dishonest, said aggrieved men in the replies — or if not that, then they must be deceived by lighting or repulsed by after-Olly’s tiny shorts or anything, anything rather than being authentically more attracted to a body that doesn’t look like you could break a nail on it.

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The gods of the discourse are capricious, but the gods of the discourse must be served. Did I ever think I would have an opinion on the sex appeal of Murs, arguably the most inoffensive man in pop? I did not, and yet I nevertheless have an opinion: the before is hotter. “Before” looks solid. “Before” looks like he could pick up a few heavy things without fainting. “Before” looks like someone you could hang out and eat pizza with. “After” looks like someone whose only concern is when it’s time to eat his next egg white omelette.

A ripped physique is for sure impressive, if only because of the obsessive effort it takes to achieve it. But obsessive is not the same as attractive. Competitive bodybuilders alternate “cuts” (fat-loss programs) with “bulks” (which involve taking on extra calories to build mass), meticulously timing the cycle to ensure that they hit the stage at the point of optimum body composition. In fact, it’s impossible to cut indefinitely: at some point, if you keep losing weight, you’ll start losing a noticeable amount of muscle.

Achieving the perfect look for flexing is too brutally restrictive to do for very long. As Murs’ wife Amelia (herself not exactly a slouch in the fitness stakes) commented on his Instagram: “So proud of you… does this mean we get to eat the same dinners again now?!” Which is funny and sweet, but also points to part of the problem with the super-lean male body from the female point of view: any man who attains it isn’t going to have much attention left over for you after he’s given his all to meal prep. Women, on the whole, are looking for relationship material, and relationship material has time for you.

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A woman doesn’t need to know anything about the quest for macros to know what she likes, though. All she has to know is that a man with a reasonable proportion of body fat — not obese, but with a little in reserve — looks healthy, at ease in himself and capable. The evolutionary explanation might involve something about a well-fed man looking like a reliable provider. Maybe part of the reason after-Murs is off-putting to most women is that they can see he’s effectively starving.

The bigger questions are why men can’t take a woman at her word — and why men themselves should be so attached to a wrong opinion about what constitutes an ideal body. Now, I’m not accusing the men of lying about what they like. That would be unnecessary. But I am fascinated by the lengths men will go to in order to acquire a physique that most women find a comprehensive turnoff.

Out in the incel wilds, men discuss the mythical “Gigachad”: a man so humongously swole (and charming and confident, but mostly swole) that he’s irresistible to women. In the sexual theology of the manosphere, the Gigachad is the counterpart to the female Gigastacy — meaning he has exclusive access to the most attractive women. Young men in forums sincerely discuss how they can achieve Gigachaddom, swapping tips on achieving calorie deficit while hitting protein goals in order to achieve that elusive washboard stomach.

The longer you spend reading those forums, though, the more obvious it becomes that the primary audience these men have in mind isn’t female at all. The meticulous dissection of delts, lats and abdominals (and even more importantly, the display of delts, lats and abdominals for the purposes of feedback) is for each other. This is a subculture of men looking at men, and projecting their preferences onto women. If it wasn’t for that last part, the supposed hotbed of frustrated heterosexuality would actually look pretty gay.

Gymmaxxing, as the incels call it, is not politically neutral. It’s Right-coded — so much so that when The New York Times recently profiled streamer Hasan Piker, a socialist who also (gasp) lifts weights, the headline described him as “a progressive mind in a MAGA body”. On the face of it, this is ludicrous, not least because no one who’s seen a MAGA rally is likely to confuse it with Mr Universe. But it is true all the same that the subcultures that are most concerned with traditional masculinity are also the most concerned with the arduous maintenance of a masculine aesthetic, however much they might deny that “masculine” and “aesthetic” belong in the same sentence.

If you want to get not merely ripped but really big, it takes more than diet and exercise. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, adheres to an “anti-aging” testosterone regimen that has enabled him to stay unnervingly hench into his seventies: “its most obvious effects,” wrote Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic, “look a lot like juicing.” Podcasting king Joe Rogan has similarly described taking testosterone replacement therapy, and in both cases there’s a squeamish insistence on a health alibi for an appearance intervention that is not unlike me insisting I want Botox to cure my headaches rather than to fix my wrinkles.

But because masculinity is, supposedly, natural, admitting to taking hormones can seem high stakes. Which is how the fitness influencer known as the Liver King ended up, ludicrously, pretending that his gains were all down to a “primal” diet of organ meat. Even though he had a chest like two basketballs and the tell-tale corned beef complexion of the steroid user — neither of which, it should be noted, are considered particularly desirable by women. Nonetheless, he had a dedicated following of men who bought his supplements in the hope of looking more like him.

One reason for the coyness about steroids is to protect the idea that the ripped body is the product of concerted labor. No shortcuts. To the male gaze, it’s a good thing that the ripped body looks like hard work: it suggests effort that deserves reward, in the form of female attention. Meanwhile, there’s often a distaste for the effort women have to put into hotness maintenance: according to incel lore, Gigastacys can work out, but they don’t need to. Girls aren’t meant to sweat, just to be perfect objects without trying.

Men’s taste in men has nothing to do with what women want. The masculine dream of the ultimate six-pack isn’t about getting the chicks. It’s a fantasy of marble perfection: no softness, no flab. It’s also a cope: if you can convince yourself that women will only fall for the most extreme physique, you’ve already explained away your own sexual failures. Meanwhile, women will carry on preferring the man who looks like he can both flip a tire and eat a cookie without having a panic attack. Despite what Freud thought, women really are pretty basic.

I was training for a bodybuilding competition, and it had been weeks since I had eaten fruit, because fruit contained sugar, and sugar was off-limits. The only time I was allowed it was immediately after workouts, in the form of half a Gatorade mixed with a scoop of protein powder, gulped down to prevent my starving body from consuming its own lean mass.

There are few pictures of me from this time in my life, except the ones I took weekly to track my progress. I posed in a sports bra and underwear with my muscles tensed, and sent the results to my trainer. Your midsection is showing more separation every week!, he wrote, as my abdomen morphed from a smooth, flat expanse to a rippling six-pack. (The sports bra was a mere formality by then; breasts consist mainly of fat, and mine had shrunk down to nothing.) Ten years later, the thing I remember most is not how great I looked but how much work it was. If I wasn’t eating or exercising, I was thinking about these things: planning, prepping, setting timers so that I’d remember to swallow whatever was on the menu within however many minutes of a workout. By the time I abandoned my training regimen — around the time I found myself weeping over fruit on the internet — my body had become a vehicle whose maintenance was my full-time job.

All of which is to say, when I read about Ozempic patients who are losing weight not just without trying, but without having to think about trying — the ones who, to quote one user, “just don’t think about food anymore” — I want to squawk with indignation. What do you mean, you don’t think about it?! That’s not fair; it’s cheating. But even among people who don’t share my peculiar history (okay, obsession) with manipulating the size and shape of their bodies, that instinctive reaction is commonplace. Whatever one’s reasons for losing weight, the common wisdom is that it’s not supposed to be easy, physically or mentally.

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Indeed, any experience to the contrary tends to inspire suspicion, even among those who believe wholeheartedly that being able to effectively cure obesity, and its litany of associated health conditions, would be an extremely good thing. The impulse to view Ozempic and other medicines of its ilk with mistrust, even derision — the equivalent of buying indulgences instead of performing atonement — has been compared with the taboo against Suboxone among former addicts, who “were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological”.

It’s not a bad analogy; Suboxone and Ozempic both work in their own way to suppress a person’s appetite, curbing an undesirable behaviour by eliminating the basic urge to engage in it. Another comparison might be the contemptuous moralising aimed at people who quit smoking by substituting tasty-flavoured vapes for combustible tobacco. It’s not that vaping doesn’t work; it’s that it’s too easy, too enjoyable. If smoking is a sin, quitting should be a crucible — or at the very least, it should not taste like cake. And in a world where an overweight body is seen as a sign of moral failure, thinness is seen as the just reward for those who atone through deprivation.

This ascetic immiseration is a chief characteristic of what social critics refer to as diet culture, which is adjacent to but separate from losing weight. Consider how many people are either perpetually on a diet — or at least, say they are — or just off one with little to show for it: it’s almost as if the point is not successful weight loss, but the show of compliance. You are depriving yourself of food not because it will make you thin — often, it does not do this — but because you are performing, for yourself and for the world, the role of a person who wants to be thin and is willing to hurt for it. Ordering the salad instead of the steak is a form of virtue signalling: “I am trying to be good.”

This entanglement of the moral with the biological has a long history, in which even doctors have been unable to entirely separate the two. The Victorian era, a time of ground-breaking advancement in the medical sciences, was also a time of great permeability between the social zeitgeist and the scientific community, in which cultural notions of beauty and femininity often reappeared in a doctor’s office disguised as medical advice. Among these dictums was the notion that appetite, particularly for women, was a signpost of both poor health and poor character. Then, as now, a slender figure was valued — and then, as now, achieving one was supposed to be accomplished through exquisite self-control. The ideal woman in the eyes of society and science alike not only ate very little, but made a show of it, demonstrating sovereignty over her appetites one dainty nibble at a time.

Those who took pleasure in eating, meanwhile, were viewed as courting disaster, an idea widely reflected in the medical wisdom of the era. John Harvey Kellogg, who in the late 1800s was considered America’s foremost pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, was convinced that robust appetites were inextricably linked with sexual depravity. “Candies, spices, cinnamon, cloves, peppermint, and all strong essences, powerfully excite the genital organs,” he warned in the 1880s. His guidelines for good gastrointestinal health, which included not just a bland vegetarian diet but a regular regimen of yoghurt enemas, were designed with the goal of curbing the desire for food and sex alike.

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This sense — that a healthy body is a thin body under control — recurs throughout history. At the turn of the 20th century, Kellogg pumps his patients full of bran flakes at one end and yoghurt at the other; at the dawn of the 21st, a fitness influencer dutifully crams exactly four ounces of chicken breast down her throat before heading to the gym. At the same time, to lose weight in other, easier ways — via liposuction or diet pills or, today, Ozempic — has long been viewed as not just unearned, not just cheating, but perhaps even a sort of devil’s bargain for which a harsh price will soon be paid. The history of scandals in the world of medically-assisted weight loss — the withdrawal of fen-phen from the market in the Nineties after research revealed that it could cause heart valve damage in up to a third of patients, or the rare but ghastly side effects of treatments like Coolsculpting — only serves to validate the moral superiority of the nay-sayers. We told you it couldn’t be that easy.

Of course, maybe this time it is that easy. Sure, there’s the occasional (albeit rare) horror story of Ozempic patients suffering stomach paralysis as a result of the drug — or the less ghastly, more quotidian concern that its appetite-suppressing effects cause the loss of not just fat but precious lean mass. But even if these apprehensions prove unfounded, the capacity of Ozempic to make weight loss not just effective but thoughtless is why it will almost certainly continue to occupy an important place in the medical consciousness, but a fraught place in our moral one.

Imagine: instead of sweating through gruelling workouts at the gym, the only effort you have to make is a weekly jab with a slender needle. Instead of battling your appetite at every meal, it retreats to a quiet corner on its own, until you’ve forgotten it ever existed. This doesn’t just flout the conventional wisdom, the studied science, of what it takes to lose weight; it flies in the face of every narrative in which weight loss is synonymous with redemption, in which every pound lost is a demon conquered.

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Time and research may reveal that Ozempic really is the future of weight loss, but I suspect that the stories we tell about it — and the perverse pride of having a body moulded by diet and exercise, yes, but also by focus and discipline and pain and tears — will be far harder to shed. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that my own brief foray into amateur bodybuilding was preceded by about 15 years of a more traditional eating disorder: the common thread in these experiences was not just a longing to be thin, but the satisfaction of putting in work here and seeing results there, of wrestling my body and its appetites alike into submission. Would I have felt so satisfied, so in control, if I had been able to simply neuter myself of those appetites with a weekly shot? Is self-deprivation still a triumph if there’s no desire to triumph over?

Here, it becomes important to note that in at least one way, Ozempic does suffer the same pitfalls as any other weight loss method that relies on eating less: people who stop using it tend to regain the weight. But unlike a diet, the idea of being on Ozempic permanently doesn’t inspire existential dread, evoking the dire image of spending the rest of your life tormented by raging and insatiable hunger. Indeed, one of the things that makes the drug so intriguing is that it curbs all manner of appetites. For food, yes, but also for alcohol, nicotine, gambling, sex — in short, for the pleasures that straddle the line between needing and craving. Ozempic patients will not burst into tears over a picture of a fruit salad. Instead, a lifetime on the drug will be characterised not by desire, but the absence of it. And this is perhaps its own sort of tragedy.

Kennedy, who is 69 years old, recently shared videos of himself lifting weights and doing press-ups shirtless. Alongside these, he pledged that should he become President, he will “restore America as the global example of health and well-being. Not through pills or syringes, but through character and self-discipline.”

The idea that physical and moral vigour go together is ancient. The first Olympic Games were held nearly three millennia ago, around 776BC, and many athletic-looking Greek statues survive to this day that vividly celebrate male physical beauty and strength as shorthand for good character.

This association persisted. In his 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”, Walt Whitman celebrated human beauty as a fusion of character and embodiment, where flesh and gesture “are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul”. According to Whitman, the “well-made man” expresses his character in both body and movement — all of which offers a clue as to character.

But fusing beauty and value lands differently today. The modern progressive mainstream has set itself firmly against the idea that our bodies say anything moral. Kennedy’s videos prompted a flurry of accusations that in showing off his muscular torso, he’s mired in toxic masculinity, dog-whistling body fascism and eugenics, and implicitly promoting discrimination against disabled people. And – perhaps most damningly of all for someone who promotes natural health – that he’s faking it: of using unnatural means to pump his muscles when in reality he’s old and weak.

Kennedy has not responded to the rumours about steroid use. But the argument hits a live and divisive issue on the Right: biotech. A significant chunk of his support comes from a cluster of emerging popular movements whose common theme is resistance to “unnatural” biotech innovations. He was a prominent opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, one such innovation; other issues in the same cluster include medical gender transition, and artificial meat – all of which inspire strong opposition as unacceptable incursions of technology into our nature.

So we might ask: how can Kennedy advocate health and wellbeing via character and self-discipline, and show off his ripped physique to underline the point, if he attained that physique with the help of synthetic hormones? It’s a fair question. But the collective shrug from Kennedy supporters suggests that what was gleefully pointed out as an inconsistency — an advocate of “natural” health possibly using medical tech to attain that health — is not, in fact, seen as contradictory in the slightest.

We take the opposition between tech and nature for granted today — not least because we’ve spent two centuries using tech to escape the limits of nature, and told ourselves this was a story of moral progress. This forms the backdrop — among other things — to the women’s movement, a story that wouldn’t have been possible without a host of now near-invisible technologies that underwrite women’s relative autonomy.

Beyond this, it forms the backdrop to progressivism in general. It’s not just women who now seek to escape the idea that our bodies say something about us: it’s everyone. From the disability rights movement to “body positivity”, the driving idea is that any judgement or constraint imposed by our contingent physical form should be challenged. Perhaps the logical endpoint of this challenge has been gender medicine’s all-out resistance to embodied limits, a politics that’s centrally about “pills and syringes” as liberation.

This utopian drive to break the bounds of human nature, then, began in earnest with the industrial era. As the world modernised, technology and a Protestant work ethic were applied not just to escaping our limits, but also to resisting our waning strength as physical work became less important. With the freshly-minted Land of the Free roaring from agrarian colonial backwater into industrial superpower, new anxieties proliferated about health, vitality and masculinity. In response, a “muscular Christianity” emerged which framed manly fitness as an expression of religious devotion — and whose many legacies include the still wildly popular sport of American football.

But it wasn’t just the Christians. As industrialisation made life easier and people richer and freer, so this new wealth and leisure drove an explosion in social and cultural experimentation in how to live well. In this free-for-all, a dizzying array of health entrepreneurs flourished, offering “water cures”, physiology lectures, anti-masturbation campaigns, sanatoria, and diets and lifestyles of such experimental weirdness, they make our 21st-century keto diets, NoFap forums and jade yoni eggs look positively normie.

Even Walt Whitman contributed to this emerging culture. Just three years after “I Sing The Body Electric” was published, he wrote a 13-instalment guide to Manly Health and Training in a New York newspaper, under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor”. In it, he sets out the intimate link between physical fitness, moral virtue — and also personal efficacy and performance. Training doesn’t just deliver a “perfect physique” but also helps a man “exalt the intensity of his personal force” — a transformation that will, in turn, “attract to him attention, friendship and respect”.

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This mania for self-improvement tracked the wider transition in American culture, from largely agrarian to increasingly wealthy, entrepreneurial and technologically advanced. To succeed in this new era, the ambitious man had to grind. In other words, the fitness culture that emerged with modernity serves as a mirror of the machine age that spawned it: a “body electric” for the age of electrification, in which our physical forms become sites of industry-like labour and competition.

Today, we live in a biotech age, in which our flesh appears less in Whitmanesque terms — as union of body and soul — than as organs for donation; DNA for re-writing; a uterus for rent. We are raw material for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With this new turn has come another round of dematerialisation. Work is not just de-sexed, but virtualised. Life is sedentary. Happiness, risk-free sex, even weight management or the appearance of the opposite sex can be obtained in a pill or syringe. There’s no pressing reason to attain any level of physical fitness, except personal desire. And on top of these disintegrating forces, the dominant culture has also set itself (at least overtly) to the dissolution of physiological norms.

And just as industrial technologies spawned egalitarian challenges to our limits, and also new cults of the body beautiful, so today’s biotech age of hormone-enhanced affirmation and “inclusive” body culture has also given rise to a countervailing one, of aggressive physical beauty. One influential aspect of this backlash is a Right-wing subculture of bodybuilding, whose proponents oppose the progressive war on human nature along every possible axis. In general, adherents embrace effortful self-improvement, vitality and individual excellence, while dismissing “body positivity” and egalitarianism of every kind. Centrally, the RWBBs embrace the link expressed so controversially by Kennedy between physical health and moral worth — especially what health implies about individual effort and discipline.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this movement is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Bronze Age Mindset decries egalitarianism as the attempt to abolish excellence and natural hierarchy in favour of meaningless “buglife”. His social media account abounds with “Handsome Thursday” images of honed male physiques, presented as aesthetic resistance to such levelling-down.

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Unlike the 19th-century “muscular Christians”, this 21st-century fitness subculture draws inspiration more from the Hellenistic ancients, especially their sculptures of athletes. This affinity is so closely held that when a historian recently suggested ancient Greek soldiers would have been lean and tough, rather than “ripped”, he was deluged with furious anons, who accused him of self-interestedly attempting to legitimise “dad bods” and emasculation, and undermine men’s aspiration to physical beauty and strength, and — implicitly — to the superior character such beauty and strength have classically been viewed as reflecting.

But when such aspirations are located — as in the contested Greek soldiers — somewhere in the distant past, before the world modernised, what hope does anyone have of holding on to it? Critics sometimes accuse the RWBBs of clinging to a type of masculinity that has simply been rendered obsolete by changing social conditions. And maybe there’s something to that idea. Even “I Sing The Body Electric” expresses a palpable sense of loss at disappearing physical cultures: Whitman eulogises an agrarian grandfather hunting, boating and fishing with his many sons and grandsons. Hale and tan, loved by all, overwhelmingly magnetic, he’s a compelling figure – and was written in an era when that version of America was already disappearing.

Today, much as in the 19th century, we’re embroiled both in a tech-enabled war on human nature and a defence of that nature that is also tech-enabled — not least in how extremely online it is. But one upshot of this entanglement is that it might not, after all, be such a gotcha for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be using testosterone replacement therapy to pursue the body beautiful.

Right-wing body-builders and their fellow travellers may decry the use of synthetic hormones for anti-normative ends, such as “transgender” medical interventions for children. But there’s far more ambivalence where it comes to using biotech to enhance human beauty and performance. For example, there’s no clear consensus in this community on whether using anabolic steroids is OK. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if even those who criticise the use of tech to wage war on our nature might be less troubled about using tech to give nature a helping hand. After all, there’s no going back even to the 19th century, let alone the world of the hale, tanned farmers Whitman eulogises – or indeed of Greek hoplites. And, in theory at least, technology and desire can be turned to ends other than flattening every physical difference between individuals.

So perhaps this is the best we can hope for: diverting our “pills and syringes” from waging war on our nature, toward wielding them in support of human health and beauty. It’s a risky path, with many pitfalls. But with no obvious route back to a supposedly “natural” state, it may be that the only way out is through.

Suffering often means suffering alone and it was this that first inspired the creation of awareness days and, as inflation inevitably happens with these things, weeks. So, although not everybody might be aware of it, this week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, one of a diverse array of awareness weeks on the awareness week calendar.

There is clearly some value in such events. It is good for people to know that they are not alone and to have easy access to resources that might be of help. Still there are aspects of them — specifically those concerning mental health — which annoy me.

As writers like Jonny Gleadell have argued, modern discourse around “mental health” can pathologise quite normal behaviour. “Many issues have become medicalised,” Gleadell says, “No matter how far the symptoms are from meeting the threshold for diagnosis.” Professor Joël Billieux and colleagues suggest in an entertaining essay on overpathologisation that by the loose standards of some mental health scholars, we could diagnose them with “Research Addiction”. The market for shouty headlines about crises and epidemics ensures that this kind of sensationalism finds a home.

At its worst, this can provide a smokescreen for miserable, fixable material conditions. As students have been confined to their grief holes in British universities, for example, doing seminars online and thinking of the money they will have to spend for the privilege of having been there, we have heard a lot of talk about protecting their “mental health”. But this threatens to conflate a symptom with a disease. One trainee psychiatrist wrote, “I’m struggling to find the mental illness here. There’s no DSM code for being locked in a cupboard. CBT worksheets aren’t going to let students hug their parents again.”

Another problem is how simplistic the messaging can be. There is no doubt that British institutions need a renewed focus on eating disorders as experts warn of a “tsunami” of urgent referrals, and there is no doubt that the loved ones of people who might succumb to anorexia, bulimia et cetera should be aware of warning signs. But the valuable goal of communicating this demands some awareness of their complexities. “Awareness” is not an instant revelatory experience. It takes time and thought.

Some years ago I suffered from bulimia, which developed into anorexia — growing serious enough that I was dangerously underweight and experiencing awful cold, even in June, and obsessive, monomaniacal thought and behaviour. I stubbornly told myself and everybody else that I did not have a problem — accepting that I was sick and had to seek recovery only after working out that I was more emaciated than Christian Bale had been in The Machinist.

I do not believe there was any single cause of this. It would be marvellous, as a writer, to latch onto some unkind remark or anxiety-inducing image that set all of these events in motion — but it would be a lie. I had struggled with my weight for years, but I had struggled with everything: school, university, relationships and, above all, myself. The food I ate, or did not eat, was one thing I could control.

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When I read about eating disorders in the media, though, everything comes back to body image. That one factor is zeroed in on out of a whole spider’s web of causes. A recent well-intentioned BuzzFeed article addressing EDs among men talked about “body insecurity”, “unrealistic body standards”, “ideal paradigms” and “the pressure to have Captain America’s washboard abs and bodies devoid of an ounce of body fat”. Endless think pieces  debate the effects of social media, and fashion models, and the nebulous concept of “diet culture” on people’s sense of self.

As Hadley Freeman wrote in a perceptive article, “Eating disorders are the only mental illness that people still assume is caused by something identifiable and external.” Of course, that does not mean these things are insignificant. Body image plays a role in eating disorders and it is influenced by the people we look up to. Did it help me that one of my favourite albums was the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible and its song “4st 7lbs”? Probably not. But did Richey Edwards take a cheerful and confident young man and make him ill? Absolutely not. The problem is what these articles do not mention. Body image is one factor but it is not alone.

Genetics could be another. According to a 2020 article in Science, “reports showed that 50% to 60% of the risk of developing anorexia was due to genes.” Different reports have claimed that anorexic people often have a specific kind of metabolism that makes them more vulnerable to mental illness. Professor Cynthia M. Bulk, a veteran researcher into eating disorders, suggests, “the processes in the body that normally regulate metabolism, including weight regulation, may be malfunctioning in anorexia nervosa patients.”

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This is all interesting, though not much help to people who have the conditions. But there are other psychological factors at play. Are we witnessing a dangerous rise in young people seeking treatment for eating disorders more because of Captain America and Instagram or because their lives have been upturned by a pandemic which has thrown their education, their social lives and their future into chaos? I suspect that it has more to do with the latter. Food restriction, in such a bewildering and depressing time, is one thing that is in their hands.

I do not want to poeticise illness here. At some point an eating disorder becomes far less of an exercise in self-control than an exercise in addiction. In anorexia, for example, one’s mind and one’s metabolism create a vicious circle in which the more underweight one becomes, the less one is capable of appreciating the need for sustenance. It is as if one is a car in which the emptier one’s petrol tank becomes, the more petrol one sees on the fuel gauge. That is why treatment of the most severe cases focuses on getting people’s weight up. Physiological changes tend to be a precondition for psychological changes. It is a terrible illness.

Still, even if one rejects the idea that someone with an eating disorder controls their illness more than the illness controls the person with an eating disorder, that does not mean one should be so reductionist as to shrink a complex phenomenon down to a single element. That is unhelpful, and more than a little patronising.

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It would be unfair to expect attempts to raise awareness of mental health problems, or any health problems, to reflect their every nuance. After all, these campaigns are not aimed at turning average people into experts, but making them more mindful and empathetic. Yet just as I have the nagging sense that a lot of the discourse around depression is aimed less towards people suffering from its clinical varieties and more towards people suffering from gloom, listlessness and self-doubt, I have the nagging sense that a lot of the discourse around eating disorders serves less to illuminate the lacerating self-abuse of mental illness and more to illuminate sad, common dissatisfaction with oneself. That dissatisfaction is not trivial. But it is not the same.

If you know someone who might be slipping into an eating disorder it is good to be aware of what they eat and what they say about themselves, and their relationship with food. It is also good to be aware of everything else in their life and how it might be contributing to their state of mind. Otherwise, one might miss the forest for the cold, bare winter trees.

If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s health, contact Beat on 0808-801 0677 or beateatingdisorders.org.uk