<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did it get to this?\u201d I was sitting on a rooftop restaurant on the Amalfi coast<\/a> \u2014 surrounded by friends, my ambitions of having a career in journalism achieved, my physique goals largely reached \u2014 looking at a giant pizza as if it were some behemoth I had to fend off. How many hours of incline walking would I need to burn it off? Would it derail the years I\u2019d spent toiling to reach my current leanness? Would I lose control again, slide down a slippery slope back to my formerly \u201cskinnyfat\u201d existence?<\/p>\n It\u2019s absurd, tragic almost, that an idyllic scene \u2014 in the birthplace of pizza, no less \u2014 would be the source of tortuous mental arithmetic. It finally dawned on me that my fitness journey<\/a> had imprisoned me into a state of body dysmorphia<\/a>. I needed an escape.<\/p>\n A few years earlier, things looked starkly different. I had moved from finishing my Master\u2019s at Cambridge to Italy to be a freelance writer, found an apartment in central Rome, and finally embraced my life as a gay man. My dating<\/a> experiences before were less Call Me By Your Name<\/em> than they were He\u2019s Just Not That Into You<\/em>; a string of romantic failures and lacklustre \u201csituationships\u201d. I felt like the guys wanted someone who fit their bodily ideal more closely, which they either expressed directly, or was clear from their dating profiles. I turned to fitness culture to turn a ripped heart into ripped abs.<\/p>\nShorts<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n