Hear Me Out: You go to the gym to hate yourself

SINGAPORE – For 29 years, even as I watched my male peers swell into their singlets, I resisted going to the gym. The gym, I told myself, was that sad room padded with carnival mirrors where one went to perfect his self-hatred.

It was ruled by men who were fitness ideologues and fanatics about self-discipline, I told myself, the same men who were the beneficiaries of good genetics. I, on the other hand, lived in the long shadow of believing I was terrible with my body ever since I was exiled from the handball team in Primary 5 on Sports Day to a more “effete” sport – moving bean bags quickly from one hula hoop to another.

The way I carried that resentment beyond my adolescent years was to reject the valorisation of fitness and all who preach its cult – also associated with the cult of masculinity, which I did not feel I belonged to. I would not let the melancholy I feel towards my body swell into the voluptuous sadness of the fitness bros in my life, whose full range of motion in life seems atomised into reps and sets.

Other men, as I learn from fitness videos that flood my social algorithm, try to get over their early resentment by proving they can exceed their own bodily shame – the scrawny, bullied boy who bulks himself an armour. They speak of “transformation”, but I cannot shake off the feeling that they are leaving behind their inner child.

Yet, here I am in the same sad room as them now, since I made the decision one year ago to start using the gym. I started when I noticed the numbers on the weighing scale shoot up – when I felt that the ballooning body I wore was incongruous with the body I believed I had, to say nothing of the body I wanted – or was taught to want.

You go to the gym to hate yourself, I have always thought. Have I now become resigned to hating myself?

The truth is, one year on, I have found more things to love about my current body as I have to hate about it. There seem to be new dissatisfactions to acquire each time I lift my head from a set on the chest press to meet my reflection in the mirror – the funhouse I am trying to make a home out of.

I am trying to resist becoming the person I hate, which is to say, the kind of person who constantly points out his or her physical imperfections and believes that overcoming it is a matter of discipline, rigour and willpower.

On the other hand, I acknowledge that I am embarrassed to want the things I want. When I do see some progress, I brush it off, not believing that I worked for or deserved any of this.

I hate it especially when people congratulate me on my weight loss. Were they about to offer their sympathies when I was 10kg heavier? I hate it, too, when people now ask if I had gained some weight, regressed or got busy at work again. Everyone seems too interested in talking about other people’s weight, as if it were the weather.

I scrunch up all this hate into a cheap drawstring bag and take it to the gym. The voice inside my head telling me to work harder is promising that I will hate myself less, once I have something to prove for it. It is all part of the vicious circle I cannot break out of.

So much of the fitness industry is couched in the language of positivity – the first gym I went to had a bright neon sign which read Hustle For The Muscle. But we do ourselves a disservice when we disguise shame and self-hatred in self-improvement talk and fitspo.

Feminism, I think, has found the language to talk about the self-destructive shame inflicted onto women’s bodies by the male gaze. Look at feminist horror thriller The Substance (2024), in which American actress Demi Moore’s character uses a black-market drug to clone a younger version of herself – to disastrous outcomes – when she realises she is no longer beautiful and perfect to her male managers.

Men – so used to doing the gazing – do not yet have that vocabulary to look at and understand their self-destructive tendencies. But the fitness and beauty industry will continue to sell men the same self-hatred that it has sold women for far longer. And the self-destruction can be worse if one does not have the words to talk about that self-hatred.

The work that I have to do, I think, is not so much rooting out the self-hatred. I am of the opinion that self-hatred will always be there and is a part of who I am. It is grasping the shape of my self-loathing, and being honest about this with myself and others, that matters.

The mirror, I learn, does not simply return my reflection. The reflection that comes to me is already distorted – by the fitness industry, peer pressure and internalised shame. The sooner I grasp that, the more I will be okay with hating myself.