I had a conversation with a man at a coffee shop yesterday that’s been sitting with me.

We talked about nutrition, training, work, and health. He had run an Ironman a few years back and was slowly rebuilding after a serious injury. He’d built a successful career through discipline and long hours. He struck me as thoughtful, sharp, and deeply invested in doing things “the right way.”

At some point, the conversation landed on food.

I mentioned that the food at this shop wasn’t really my favorite. That when I look at the pastry case, the quiche makes me a little sad. I told him I’d been to another coffee shop nearby recently and that their quiche was incredible.

He said he’d tried it. Smiling, he told me he didn’t really like it. Not because it tasted bad, but because he doesn’t let himself enjoy food unless he knows exactly what’s in it. He’s the kind of person who asks what’s in the quiche and gets irritated if the barista can’t list every ingredient. I asked if that means he’s a good cook, to which he replied no; that he just sticks to minimal ingredient dishes like beef, avocado, and eggs.

Later, he told me that when he was training for his Ironman, he struggled a lot with eating enough. That every Friday at midnight, even though he felt “bad” about it, he’d go to In-N-Out late at night and eat several burgers just to get enough calories in. He called it “shocking the body.”

While we were talking, I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich. At one point, he told me he doesn’t eat carbs. That rice and pasta are bad. That they’re responsible for bloating and are some of the worst parts of the American diet.

Nothing about this exchange felt extreme.

That’s what stayed with me.

The posture toward food

What stood out wasn’t the specific foods. It was the posture toward food. The tightness. The vigilance. The sense that enjoyment was something risky. The idea that the body couldn’t really be trusted unless it was being monitored closely.

I see this often, especially in people who are highly disciplined and outcome-oriented. Food becomes something to control rather than experience. Enjoyment feels secondary, or even suspicious. Rules become a stand-in for trust.

Underneath that, there’s often a quiet belief that the body is something that needs managing, correcting, or outsmarting.

The physiological cost

From a physiological standpoint, this has consequences.

Digestion doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s deeply shaped by the nervous system. When we eat while rushed, guarded, or anxious, the body reallocates resources. Blood flow shifts away from the gut. Saliva production drops. Mechanical digestion becomes less efficient. The entire process is subtly deprioritized in favor of vigilance. 

Most people have felt this before. Trying to eat while stressed, multitasking, or on the move. Food sits heavier. There’s more discomfort. Less satisfaction.

Compare that to eating in a calm environment. When there’s time. When you feel relaxed. When your shoulders drop a little. The same food lands differently.

Not because the ingredients changed, but because the body did.

I’m not interested in diagnosing strangers or speculating about anyone’s psychology. But I can’t ignore how often I hear similar themes, particularly among men. Fear of food. Distrust of public health. A tendency toward all-or-nothing thinking. A belief that discipline must come at the expense of enjoyment.

At the same time, we’re surrounded by messaging that rewards optimization, productivity, and self-denial, especially for men. Grind culture doesn’t just shape how people work. It shapes how they eat, rest, and relate to their bodies.

The systems men are responding to

For men especially, this messaging often lands alongside something else. The expectation to produce. To endure. To push through. To be rational, self-reliant, and unaffected.

Optimization culture speaks to men fluently. It borrows the language of strength, discipline, and mastery. It frames the body as a machine to tune, a system to outwork, a variable to control. Rest becomes something to earn. Pleasure becomes suspicious. Listening to the body is recast as weakness or indulgence.

Health, in this framework, isn’t about relationship. It’s about performance.

Food becomes fuel in the most transactional sense. Eat to work. Eat to train. Eat to recover just enough to go again. Enjoyment is optional. Sensation is irrelevant. Signals that don’t fit the plan are ignored or overridden.

There’s a particular loneliness in this approach. Many men are never taught to check in with their bodies beyond function. Curiosity gets replaced with control. Discomfort gets normalized. The body becomes something to manage rather than something to live inside.

Men’s mental health often gets overlooked here, especially when it doesn’t look like crisis. Strain is reframed as toughness. Anxiety becomes drive. Rigidity becomes discipline.

Disordered eating frequently goes undetected for the same reason. The research, the language, and the diagnostic frameworks have historically centered women, shaped in part by BMI thresholds and symptom profiles that don’t capture how these patterns often show up in men. So behaviors like skipping meals, rigid food rules, fear of entire food groups, or cycles of restriction and overeating are rarely flagged as concern. They’re praised instead. Clean eating. Cutting. Bulking. “Dialing it in.”

Even when the relationship with food is tense, joyless, or driven by fear, it often goes unquestioned as long as the body looks strong or performs well enough.

Steroid culture follows a similar logic. The risks are well documented, but they’re frequently wrapped in humor or bravado. Side effects become jokes. Long-term consequences get deferred. Sacrifice your body now, deal with it later.

All of this points back to the same underlying story. Control as virtue. Endurance as identity. Care as something unnecessary, or even suspect.

Many men are left carrying this quietly. Doing what they’ve been told should work. Playing by the rules. Hitting the metrics. While feeling increasingly tense around food, disconnected from pleasure, and unable to rest without guilt.

None of this makes men weak. It makes them human, responding logically to the systems they’re embedded in.

The harm doesn’t come from discipline itself. It comes from discipline without reflection. From strength without softness. From health framed solely as output, appearance, or optimization, rather than something meant to support a life.

What stays with me

I keep thinking about that damn quiche. Not because of what it was made of, but because of what it represented. A moment where enjoyment was available and quietly declined. Not out of indifference, but out of vigilance.

I wonder how many men are living like that. Doing everything they’ve been told should work. Following the rules. Staying disciplined. And still feeling disconnected from their bodies, their appetites, and their capacity to rest.

Over the years, I’ve been grateful that many men have trusted me with these tensions. Not just as someone with a background in nutrition, but as someone willing to listen. Through conversations, client work, personal study, and paying close attention, I’ve seen how often strength and strain coexist quietly. How much effort goes into holding it together. How rarely there’s space to question the cost.

That trust has shown me something larger than individual behavior. When entire groups of people are taught to override their bodies in service of productivity, discipline, or performance, the consequences don’t stay personal. They accumulate. They shape how people relate to rest, pleasure, vulnerability, and care, and they ripple outward into relationships, workplaces, healthcare systems, and culture itself.

I don’t take that lightly. And I don’t think the answer is to pathologize men or ask them to abandon strength. I think the work is to make room for a more honest relationship with the body, one where care and discipline can coexist. Not as something to fix, but as something to understand. With more honesty. And more compassion.

Because what we learn to ignore in ourselves eventually shows up everywhere else.