The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

The Bully in the Mirror
In this weight room, in a gym in a northern New Jersey suburb, the gym rats
have a nickname for Alexander: Mirror Boy. That's a vast improvement over the
nicknames he endured at school not long ago. "I know it sounds kind of odd to
have favorite insults," he told me with a wry smile, munching on a protein bar
before moving on to his next set of lifts, "but Chunk Style always was kind of
funny." And kind of appropriate. Until recently, Alexander carried nearly 210
pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame, and when I asked if he was teased about his weight,
he practically dropped a dumbbell on my feet. "Oh! Oh, man, was I teased? Are
you kidding?" he said in his rapid, agreeable patter. "When I was fat, people
must have gone home and thought of nothing else except coming in with new
material the next day. They must have had study groups just to make fun of
people who were overweight." He even got an earful at home. "My parents --
God bless them, but they would make comments all the time. My father would
say, 'If you eat all that, you'll be as big as a house.' And I'm, like: 'Dad, it's a little
late for that. What am I now? A mobile home?"'
The day of reckoning came in April 1998, during a spring-break vacation in
Boca Raton, Fla. As his family was about to leave its hotel room to go to the
beach, Alexander, then 15, stood in front of a mirror and just stared at the
spectacle of his shirtless torso. "I remember the exact, like, moment in my mind,"
he said. "Everything about that room is burned into my head, every little thing. I
can tell you where every lamp was, where my father was standing, my mother
was sitting. We were about to go out, and I'm looking in this mirror -- me, with
my gut hanging over my bathing suit -- and it was, like: Who would want to look
at this? It's part of me, and I'm disgusted! That moment, I realized that nobody
was giving me a chance to find out who I was because of the way I looked."
And so Alexander decided to do something about it, something drastic.
here is a kind of timeless, archetypal trajectory to a teen-ager's battle with
body image, but in most accounts the teen-ager is female and the issue is
anorexia or bulimia. As any psychologist knows, however, and as any
sufficiently evolved adult male could tell you, boys have body-image problems,
too. Traditionally, they have felt pressure to look not thin, but rather strong and
virile, which increasingly seems to mean looking bulked up and muscular, and
that is why I was interested in talking to Alexander.
Although more than 30 years in age separates us, hearing him give voice to his
insecurities, to imagined physical flaws, reminded me all over again of my own
tortured passage through adolescence, my own dissatisfaction with a body that
seemed punitively untouched by any growth spurt and my own reluctant
accommodation with certain inalienable facts of nature. Like me, Alexander had
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