When Casey’s 14-year-old son, Ethan, stopped eating junk food and began obsessively counting calories, he knew something was wrong. Then the boy’s waist line began shrinking.
“He is really not eating a lot at meal time,” Casey, who asked to use pseudonyms for himself and his son, told The Post of Ethan, who is 5’8″ and 122 pounds.
The red flags were mild at first. Ethan, an eighth grader at a private school in Manhattan, started turning down ice cream, his favorite dessert despite always having had a sweet tooth.
One night at dinner, Casey noticed his son was taking photos of the food on his plate and uploading them to MyFitnessPal — a weight-loss app — to see how many calories of food he was consuming.
“He’s determined to lose weight, but he doesn’t have any to lose,” Casey said.
Parents and eating-disorder specialists told The Post how more teenage boys and young men have become hyper-alert about their physique lately — with the muscular and buff look becoming less desirable as waifish stars like Timothée Chalamet and trends like “mewing” and “looksmaxing” continue to dominate social media.
“Today’s youth are challenging the gender norm more than they have in the past,” said Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco
In other words, dieting is no longer just the domain of girls.
“It used to be boys wanted to bulk up,” Casey told The Post. “Now, actors like Timothée Chalamet are giving them a whole new look to achieve.”
Just ask 19-year-old Dempsey Bobbit, a Cranford, New Jersey, college freshman who recently won third place in a Chalamet look-alike contest.
“My friends at school that are girls say they want skinny men. It’s so the opposite of what you’d expect,” he said. As a result, “Every guy I know is really critical of what they eat. It’s kind of weird. They pay attention to it. They’re always trying to get leaner. Broccoli, rice, chicken — chicken is the only protein.”
Bobbit himself is 5′ 9″ and weighs between 120 and 125 pounds, and said he is “naturally thin” without trying: “I don’t eat a lot, period. I’m into candy, soda. That, and coffee is my diet.”
But, everywhere he goes, he sees other guys his age desperate to get skinny.
“Every time I go to the gym it’s like, ‘Do I look fat?’” he said of his peers. “These are normal guys who are self-conscious about how they look.”
One third of adolescent boys in the US are trying to lose weight, according to a 2023 study by the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco found.
Casey believes Ethan and his friends are chasing a romantic ideal.
“Girls the age of my son don’t feel threatened by a Timothée Chalamet body, so they kind of communicate this to the boys in their grade,” he said. “Then [the boys] try to emulate Chalamet’s particular brand of masculine acceptability.”
Spencer Delorenzo — a 22-year-old Long Islander who is 5′ 4″ and weighs 98 pounds — told The Post “women are straying away from the big, muscular guys so men are now interested in losing weight. I have friends who were like, ‘Oh I wish I was as skinny as you.’”
On TikTok and Reddit, there are plenty of communities and influencers dedicated to how to get Chalamet’s cinched waist — he can reportedly fit into size 29 women’s jeans — or comedian Matt Rife’s chiseled jawline.
An alarming number of teen boys in compression shirts, flexing flat biceps and flaunting tiny waistlines, appear in videos on the “Skinnerboys” TikTok discover page — which is devoted to “tips and tricks for skinny boys to look better in style and fitness.”
The hyper obsession with weight is also fueled by the “looksmaxxing,” in which teen and twenty-something men aim to reshape their jawlines and cheekbones to up their “sexual market value.”
That has spawned the “mewing trend” — flattening the tongue to the roof of the mouth to achieve a defined jawline a la Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman character in the movie “American Psycho.”
TikTok is also full of young men posting their calorie counts and meal plans on the #MyFitnessPal app, which is technically restricted for minors.
It’s estimated that 1 in 3 people with an eating disorder are men, and 10 million American boys and men will struggle with the disorder at some point in their lives, according to data from the American Psychological Association.
“I used to be upset if he ate junk food – now I’m buying the junk food. Ice cream, pastries, anything from the bakery,” Casey told The Post. “My concern is the physical damage it could do by [him] continuing to not eat well.”
At his son’s annual physical, Casey said, the doctor told Ethan he needed to gain weight. And Ethan is not the only one in his friend group doing this.
“I started to notice his friends were getting really skinny — seriously getting thin,” Casey told The Post, adding that other parents have told him their young sons are suddenly dieting.
Ironically, Chalamet, 29, has said that, when he was younger he lost roles in the “Maze Runner” and “Divergent” film series because “the feedback was always, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body.’
“I had an agent that called me and said, ‘You got to put on weight basically,’” the actor told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, adding that he gained 20 pounds for his award-winning role in “A Complete Unknown.”
But his super slim look is even changing things for young men in Hollywood.
Zander Dueve, 22, who works as an actor and model by day and security guard by night, told The Post casting directors are seeking lanky body types.
“It’s definitely a malnourished look,” he said, noting that he is 5′ 11′ and wears a men’s size 29 pants. “It’s become a phenomenon — everybody wants that look.
“It’s kind of f–ked up that people like it, but it is what it is.”
If you or someone you know struggles with an eating disorder, visit the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) website or call their hotline at (800)-931-2237 to get help.
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