Your Thursday Three Things for April 16, 2026

One in Five Men Feel Shame About Their Body. Almost None of Them Say It Out Loud.

We were in Hawaii a few years back. My wife was there, a buddy of mine had just competed in a physique show the night before. We went to the beach the next morning. He took his shirt off. And I… put mine back on.

I laughed about it at the time. But if I’m being straight with you, that moment peeled back something I hadn’t admitted was there. I had been carrying a quiet dissatisfaction about my body for a long time, and that morning it had a face. So I came home and signed up for a physique competition. I got obsessed with it. And then I had to sit with the honest question: was what I was doing discipline, or was it something else?

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, we brought in Kyle Ridley, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and TV producer of over 15,000 segments, to have the conversation most men never have. Kyle struggled with bulimia throughout his 20s. He spent almost a decade hiding it. He’s 41 now, over a decade into recovery, and one of the first men willing to talk about this publicly with any real honesty. What he said changed how I think about the whole subject.

The Numbers Nobody’s Talking About

Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation found a 416 percent increase in eating disorder related hospitalizations for young men over the past two decades. That number only counts the men who ended up in a hospital. The men who are managing it alone, quietly, while showing up to work and hitting the gym and keeping it hidden — they’re not in that figure.

Until recently, medical diagnostic criteria literally could not classify a man as having anorexia. A female-specific symptom was built into the definition. The men were not written out of the research by accident. The assumption was that this wasn’t a men’s issue. That assumption was wrong, and a lot of men paid for it.

25 percent of people with eating disorders are men. Almost half of men say body image concerns are actively affecting their mental health. And yet when Kyle spent over a decade producing TV segments on eating disorders, every spokesperson he was offered was female. Every expert who came on was female. He would ask: do you have a male representative? The answer was always no.

The Secrecy Spiral

Kyle made a distinction in our conversation that I want to highlight because I think it’s the most useful thing in the whole episode. There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is something you keep for yourself out of respect — it doesn’t need to be shared. Secrecy is shame-ridden. You’re not keeping it because it’s personal. You’re keeping it because you don’t want anyone to find out.

Eating disorders, he said, are a disease of secrecy. And secrecy is the thing that keeps the loop going. The lie you tell at dinner. The excuse you make to leave work early. The careful choreography of being alone at the right times. Every act of concealment reinforces the belief that the thing you’re hiding is too shameful to survive being seen. That belief is what keeps you stuck, not the behavior itself.

This maps onto what we’ve seen across every episode where men talk about the things they carry quietly — anger, grief, addiction, body shame. The pattern is identical. The thing goes underground. And underground, it grows.

When Does Dedication Become Disorder?

This is where the conversation gets complicated for men specifically, because the exact conditioning that drives disordered behavior around food and fitness — discipline, control, being hard on yourself — is the same conditioning that gets celebrated. The behavior looks like a virtue from the outside. That’s part of what makes it so hard to see clearly from the inside.

Kyle’s answer to where the line is: when it starts to isolate you. When the behavior begins to determine what you can and can’t do, who you can be around, whether you can go out to eat with friends. When a missed day — at the gym, on your plan, whatever your version is — derails not just your mood but your ability to function in your relationships. When you’re making excuses to leave, or lying to protect the routine. That’s when it has crossed from dedication into something that needs attention.

The comparison game is part of this too. Social media serves you an endless stream of the extreme end of what’s possible. If you click on one thing, the algorithm assumes that’s all you want to see. You stop noticing that most people don’t look like that. You start measuring yourself against a manufactured standard that almost nobody in real life actually meets. And the gap between where you are and where you think you should be becomes its own source of shame.

Where to Start

Tell one person. Kyle’s first recommendation was simple and specific: not someone who’s going to immediately offer to help or fix it, but one person in your life who can just receive it. Who can say “I hear you” and still be there next week. That’s the move. Not a full disclosure. Not going public. One person. Kyle said he kept his disorder secret for the first two years of his marriage to his husband, and it was a small intervention by his mom and his husband — not a hospital, not a program — that started the shift.

Know the difference between secrecy and privacy. Ask yourself honestly: am I keeping this private because it’s personal, or am I keeping it secret because I’m afraid of what would happen if someone found out? The answer to that question tells you a lot about what you’re actually dealing with.

Get professional support. Kyle was resistant to this for years — he kept telling himself he could handle it alone, and kept starting over on Mondays. The disorder doesn’t respond to willpower because it’s not a willpower problem. An eating disorder specialist or a therapist who has experience with men can make a difference that solo effort can’t. If you or someone you know needs to talk to someone now, the Alliance for Eating Disorders Helpline is available at 1-866-662-1235.

Build real community — not digital proximity. Kyle spent his 20s isolated. His 30s were a marriage and a dog. At 38, post-divorce, he made a deliberate decision to build connection. He kept a note on his phone of everyone he met. He had coffee with 200 people over two years. He now has a dozen men he can call. Jon admitted on the show that he’s in a bunch of group chats but doesn’t have regular in-person connection with men who hold him to a standard. If your main social life is a thread, that’s worth looking at.

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But before that…

This was a hard episode to sit with, for reasons I didn’t fully expect. If it landed that way for you too, that’s probably the episode working.

Speaking of awareness leading somewhere — we’re launching our new Awareness to Action (A2A) course in May. It’s built around exactly what the name says: taking what you notice about yourself and doing something with it. If that sounds like what you need right now, head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest and we’ll keep you in the loop.

This Week’s Episode

Audio: pod.fo/e/3fce78 — available now

Video: Valor Media Network on YouTube — available later today

A2A Course: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest

Thanks for your support,

Jon and Will,

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

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