But the problem, I eventually realized, was my relationship to food — always stressed, I chased down my salads with any carbohydrate not nailed down. Eating raw or straight-up fasting were ways to regain a modicum of control over my appetites, at least at first — and to do so in ways that felt like fun, slightly absurd challenges: There’s a machismo to this sort of explicit bodily abuse that simple healthy living doesn’t offer.

But if this started out about weight, at some point, for me, these obsessions stopped being about my body; the strain of a new fitness regimen, a new mania, be it lifting or raw food, became its own draw.

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It’s clear I’m not the only one — and not the only guy — who sees something appealing here. If fasting started as a life hack for the billionaire class, which in turn saw would-be billionaires follow suit — as if food was the thing that was holding their start-ups back — today, run-of-the-mill bros everywhere are studying how to eat only during six-hour windows in the pages of Men’s Health and Men’s Journal.

We live in a time of wellness not as health but as transcendence. It’s not a coincidence that all of the supposed cures of wellness-adjacent diet hacking hinge on extreme behavior — fasting, or that daily coffee you put special butter in. The appeal of this brand of wellness has very little to do with being healthy. After all, most of what maintaining good health requires feels pretty good: eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, practice everything in moderation (even moderation), etc. With “biohacking,” the effects are ephemeral and the health claims are dubious. But what these crude approaches do offer is a sense of control in the moment — a way to tell yourself that you’re willing some change into being.

It would perhaps be going too far to call this kind of behavior “eating disorders”; those are conditions that send people to the hospital and sometimes kill them, not a series of passing, momentary manias. But nor do I have a healthy relationship with food or exercise, a fact about my life that up until recently has been more or less obscured by my gender. After all, if I asked you to picture someone grappling with disordered eating, would you imagine a skinny teenage girl or me — a 33-year-old man who weighs 200 pounds and is flirting with exercise bulimia? I bet you a cookie you picked the former.

So if there’s an upside to the male-driven starvation-as-biohacking era, it might be that it reveals what disordered eating and exercising, stripped of their typical gender norms, are actually about.