Ep. 79 Body Image + Men, Masculinity, Body Trust with Aaron Flores

In this episode of The Body Grievers Club, Bri sits down with Registered Dietitian and Certified Body Trust® Specialist Aaron Flores, RDN. They dig into how grief shows up in men’s body image work, why “optimization culture” keeps so many dudes stuck, and what it really means to move from control to trust without the shame-fix-rush.

Bri and Aaron unpack the lifelong messages men receive about “fixing” their bodies, the pressure to perform masculinity, and the quiet grief of losing the hope of thinness, rippedness, or former abilities. They talk about straddling two ships, diet culture and body liberation, and why permission to be in the in-between is often the bridge to values-aligned change.

They also explore community as an antidote to isolation, how empathy (not fixing) rewires the story, and why acceptance = “the willingness to receive my body as it is.” From Big Mouth’s “shame wizard” to Yoda’s wisdom, this convo uses metaphor to make the work doable. If you’ve ever felt like you should just “hack” your way to a better body, this episode offers a different path: zoom out, name the grief, and build trust - slowly, gently, on purpose.

TIMESTAMPS:
02:10 Aaron’s story: from running a VA weight-loss program to Body Trust

06:05 Men, diagnosis, and why eating disorders are under-recognized

09:30 The two ships: straddling diet culture and body liberation

13:20 Masculinity, “optimization,” and the illusion of control

17:45 Grief themes: anger, fear, urgency, shame—and moving without a rush

22:15 Community + witnessing: why healing must be seen to be felt

25:40 Body Trust basics: zooming out, C-level work, and self-compassion
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9:20 Partners & attraction: unlearning beauty standards + holding your ground

33:10 Parenting & modeling: the relationship you want your kids to have with their bodies

36:00 Big Mouth’s “shame wizard,” parts work, and building new neural grooves

39:20 Star Wars metaphors: fear, the dark side, and choosing values over control

42:10 Final takeaways for dudes: your body isn’t a project; find your people

RESOURCES:
Mentioned in this episode:
* Center for Body Trust® (rupture → reckoning → reclamation)
* Big Mouth (Netflix): The “shame wizard” metaphor
* Star Wars quotes & metaphors (Yoda, fear → suffering)
* Book: Manhood: The Bare Reality by Laura Dodsworth (photo essays + narratives)
* Aaron’s 5-module body image course for dudes (via his website)

WANT MORE OF AARON FLORES, RDN?
* Instagram: @aaronfloresrdn
* Website: aaronfloresrdn.com
* Substack: The Unscripted Journey
* Podcast: Men Unscripted

WANT MORE OF BRI?
*Instagram: @bodyimagewithbri

*Website: https://bodyimagewithbri.com/
*Bri’s Free Resource: 7-Step Guide to Shift Body Grief to Radical Body Acceptance

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi and welcome back to another episode of the Body Grievers Club. I’m so excited for our guest today and I’m going to let him introduce himself. Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Aaron Flores. I’m a dietitian and Certified Body Trust Specialist. I have a private practice in LA, but I see folks virtually all over. Not everyone I work with has an eating disorder, but many do. I focus a lot on body image and changing people’s relationship with food. My practice is rooted in body trust principles. We can talk more about what that is, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to be on this podcast is that grieving is a theme that comes up all the time. As a dietitian, I never thought I would be sitting with grief every day, but it is such a huge part of this, so I’m excited to talk about it. I have a podcast called Man Unscripted and a Substack if you’re interested. You can find me on Instagram. By the end of the show there will be lots of ways to tag along for this ride.

I love that, and we’ll link all of that in the show notes. You also do supervision as well.

I do. It’s a fun part of the work to be trusted by clinicians who show some vulnerability and say, I don’t quite know how to handle this. I love that piece.

Something I’ve realized in my own work as a provider, especially when working with other providers, is that we want our clients to come to us and trust the process, but then as providers we want to control the session and make sure it doesn’t go awry or leave our area of expertise. The same thing we ask clients to do, we need to be willing to do.

A thousand percent. And it’s so hard. We can get into it. There are so many things you brought up that I want to talk about. We were reminiscing about when we first connected a long time ago, and I think that was when I learned being a dietitian was a career change for you, wasn’t it?

Yeah. I went back to school at 30. I dropped out of college the first attempt. I really shouldn’t have gone right out of high school, but I didn’t know that was an option. I floundered through the 90s doing gaming work and drifting. Ever since I can remember I had challenges around eating and my body. In the midst of that I found dieting and restrictive eating as a savior to my self-confidence and navigating the world. Believe it or not, that’s the lens that led me into dietetics. I thought I’d teach everyone how to lose weight. I wanted to be Richard Simmons. I had the hubris of if I can do it, so can you. That’s how I got into the field. Over a long period of unlearning, I did a complete 180 in my philosophy. But yes, this was a career change. I went back to school at 30 to do this.

Wow. I don’t know many providers who go in because they already know intuitive eating. I was just reading an old journal and it wasn’t even that long ago. I was on a restrictive diet, tracking everything, thinking I was broken. I wrote, I stuck my finger in a cream cheese container and ate six bites of mac and cheese. Now I’m like, oh, you were hungry.

Listen, I used to have a blog when I first started. I’m so embarrassed by what I wrote. I cringe. But my first career out of training was at the VA in Los Angeles. I stayed seven years and ran their weight loss program. I don’t just cringe at the posts I wrote. I feel immense sorrow and shame for how I talked to people about their food, their diet, and their bodies. I feel like I need an apology tour to meet every person and say I’m so sorry. I didn’t know any different. I wish I knew then what I know now. I don’t say I’m sorry for having changed. I say I’m sorry for the harm.

I’ll go on the apology tour with you. I didn’t even use my personal Instagram because there’s so much I can’t cosign now. I actually don’t know the answer to this: have you always existed in a larger body, or were there periods where you lost weight?

If I look back at high school, I don’t know why anyone was worried. That’s when I first saw a dietitian at 15. Was I bigger than some folks? Yes. But I live in Southern California by the beach. It’s an odd place to live for body diversity because there is none. I was definitely bigger, but not fat then. I became fat during and after college. When I started dieting I gained size privilege back and then regained most if not more. I’m fat now, and I know what it’s like to have thin privilege and to have people treat me differently based on size, and to lose that.

For providers who haven’t had the lived experience, coming into this work can feel overwhelming. You don’t want to say the wrong thing. I had more privilege than some, and I was larger than my peers. I went to school with lots of thin white Dutch people, so I looked huge in comparison. I can see photos from junior to senior year and see where the PCOS started. You can see inflammation, and I took it on as a personal responsibility without a diagnosis, still being the largest in my friend group. That takes a toll. I read somewhere, maybe a TikTok, that if you don’t cringe at old work, you haven’t grown. So we can take cringe as evidence of growth. I saw Weight Watchers doing another pivot and thought, my message has stayed the same since at least 2020, maybe with a few caveats. It’s stayed the same, whereas before every six months something changed because I learned something different.

I agree. For me this is more aligned with my values. Even though my original methodology wasn’t well guided, I went into this because I like working with people. I wanted to have a meaningful part in someone’s life and help them feel better. That through line is still here.

And you’re doing that. It’s just not what either of us thought it would look like. I have a question. As a man who is a dietitian and understands eating disorders in men, do you know any statistics on how many men are diagnosed?

You’re asking me to pull back numbers from a talk I made a while ago. I don’t remember exact numbers, but diagnosis is low for men, partly because we do a bad job screening and diagnosing. We aren’t asking the right questions. There are a lot of men struggling. Stereotypes are not accurate. For binge eating disorder, numbers are close to 50-50 across genders, and it’s the most common eating disorder even if it isn’t the first people think of. So there are many men struggling and it’s underreported.

I take issue with binge eating disorder because for people in larger bodies, only a small percentage of folks with anorexia look stereotypically thin, yet people like you and me may not be diagnosed with it. It’s frustrating and real. Tell me about the men you work with and your framework.

I didn’t set out to work specifically with men. It just happened. When people ask me how to work with men, I say, how do you work with people? My philosophy doesn’t change with the client’s gender. The men I work with, mostly adults in their 30s to 50s, have been struggling their whole lives. It started with a pediatrician scolding parents, a coach making a comment, a parent monitoring food. That’s not gender specific, but it sticks. There’s an idea of I’m the only one struggling. They’ve done great at work and with family, but can’t figure out the problem that is their body. For men to realize their idea of masculinity and fixing things needs to shift is big. Maybe it’s okay to say I can’t figure this out. Maybe it’s okay to say I have a lot of feelings that I need to reckon with. Maybe it’s masculine to grieve the loss of the hope of thinness, muscularity, being ripped, or grieve that my body can’t do what it used to. And there’s a need for community, to hear someone else say, I’m in this with you. That’s eye-opening.

If you’re familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, one quote I love is that grief must be witnessed to be healed.

A thousand percent. That’s a core reason communities like yours matter. I thought I was the only one thinking these things. I didn’t know there was another way. I didn’t know you could not be on a diet. As Deb Burgard says, what’s diagnosed in them is prescribed to me. The social justice piece in body positivity and ED recovery bridged that gap for me.

The language I use is zooming out, which is a body trust idea. Zoom out to see how you learned this. If you’re zooming into a micronutrient, what if we zoom out and see how the laser focus is the problem. We get lost zooming in so tightly that we lose the big picture.

When people feel out of control in their body, they want to control something; a macro, the number of gym classes. There’s empowerment in it, but it only lasts as long as the moment. Then you’re back to square one.

The current male narrative is optimization. How do I make this efficient. My body doesn’t know how to be efficient, so I’ll hack it and force optimization. That language is pervasive and fuels disordered behavior. People don’t think it’s dieting or restriction, but that’s the language being used to promote it. In the age of Ozempic, when rapid results are at your fingertips, going against the stream feels difficult.

Tell me about how grief shows up with men.

They don’t know it’s grief. Most people don’t. It shows up as anger, sadness, frustration. This is what I thought would help, what I was told would fix everything, and it’s not. Grief is understanding how little control we have and how scary this is. Mortality is scary. Health is scary. Healing means a lot of uncomfortable feelings. I think about witnessing grief and also helping folks realize we don’t grieve well as a culture. We don’t hold space for grieving at all, so why would we do it well here. I validate why they don’t want to go down this road and why they want to veer off. There’s no rush. No urgency. If a choice is made out of urgency or shame, what does that tell us. When I weave that into grief, it becomes a philosophical shift that touches food, body, friends, partners, work, community. It’s a big shift.

People who come to me are often between two ships. Ashley Bennett uses an analogy: the body liberation ship and the dieting ship. You have one foot on each, and they’re about to leave port. There’s pressure to jump. Most people coming to me are between ships and feel like a bad person because they want to be on the body lib ship, but they still desire weight loss and fear what surrender will cost. That cost is real.

When I started private practice it was hard for folks to know where I stood. As I’ve done this work, I’m transparent about what I do and don’t do. My site is clear, so I don’t get as many what about questions, but I still get them. Many are straddling both ships and afraid of falling into the water. I tell them the ships aren’t actually moving. You’re fine here. You don’t need to hop immediately. I had a foot on both ships for a long time. It took time to move. Messaging matters, especially for men. There aren’t enough messages saying what this looks like for dudes. I just finished an online course for men with five short modules covering the basics, how masculinity impacts it, and how to rewrite the story.

It’s uncomfortable to be in the water and on either ship. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking it. My definition of body acceptance is the willingness to receive my body as it is. I don’t have to like it. I can dislike that it’s uncomfortable to be in the water, but this is where we are. Do you remember when the shift happened for you, when you fully chose the body liberation ship?

I don’t have a single epiphany date. It was gentle and gradual. In undergrad I was told about intuitive eating, started to read it, and didn’t finish. I thought it couldn’t be true. Years later I heard one of the coauthors speak in LA, dove back in, and looked again. I had mentors who allowed the process to happen slowly. No one said, figure it out by next week or you’re out. It was, you’re going to straddle paradigms and when you’re ready, you’ll move.

That’s where trust comes from, permission to straddle. It becomes autonomous when you realize it aligns with your values. I had two moments. One was my goddaughter being born. She knows nothing. She’ll learn body hatred from somewhere, and I don’t want it to be me. Two, intuitive eating with a dietitian. The first time I gave myself permission to eat a bagel, I had a panic attack. I had to sit in that discomfort. Now I can eat a bagel without it taking brain space, but that’s not where we started.

I was highly restrictive in my 20s and early 30s. I brought the same lunch for years because I knew the calories and it was controlled. I convinced myself I liked it. I haven’t had that lunch in 15 years and never will because it wasn’t good. I cringe at that too. Tell us about Body Trust and your certification.

The certification is through the Center for Body Trust with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturdivant in Portland. I was in the second cohort in 2018. It brings together intuitive eating, weight stigma, and Health at Every Size and puts them together in a way that resonated for me. Body Trust phrases I say all the time include zooming out and doing C-level work. You aren’t getting an A with me. Get a C. Coast. My clients hate that. The type A folks want a gold star for intuitive eating. Deeper philosophically, it’s about reclaiming trust in our body. We lost it at some point and reclaiming is a process. Unlearning and healing. Even if I don’t like my body, it still shows up for me. One word I love is body respect. Can you treat your body respectfully. You don’t have to like it, but you can choose something kind. There’s a lot of self-compassion and community in Body Trust. It’s kind and gentle instead of blame and shame.

In the beginning I rejected that. I didn’t want to be kind and respectful. Thinking of my goddaughter helped. Why is it different for her than me. The Body Trust framework I love is the rupture, the reckoning, and the reclamation. We want reclamation, but you don’t get there without the reckoning, and you don’t get through the reckoning without grief.

We spend a lot of time in the reckoning. The rupture is the honeymoon. Forget dieting, I’m done. Then all the stuff comes up, which is good stuff to work through. That’s where reckoning and grieving live. When you have a provider or friend who can hold that space, it’s transformative. I remember coming home from the Body Trust retreat and realizing I’d never been in a space of empathy like that. Now that I’ve felt it, I want more of it. It’s still hard to find folks who give empathy, not sympathy, not fix-it energy. That shift made me want much more empathy in my life.

For me, real-life bereavement taught me everything I know about grief. Losing someone puts you in a club you didn’t ask to be in with a high price, but you just get it. That’s what I find in body grief communities and recovery. I’m in a room, even virtually, with people who get it.

I recently wrote about an interview between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert. Cooper’s mom had died and he asks about a quote where Colbert says he’s grateful for the grief he’s had. He really believes gratitude means being grateful for all of it, even the hard things he wishes hadn’t happened. The benefit is it brings him closer to people with similar experiences. I love it. We need that. We are looking for spaces to be seen and understood, to hold difficult feelings with someone who gets it.

If someone hears that and thinks, I’m not grateful for grief, then you’re in the water, and that’s okay. If I could unlearn everything and get my loved one back, I would. I can’t. So I accept. You don’t have to love it. But because I grieved that loss, I could grieve my body. I’ve got a couple of rapid fire questions. A theme I keep seeing: my husband tells me he’s no longer attracted to me since I’ve gained weight. What do you say to those men?

Do better. If a man said that to me, I’d say, I get that you feel this way, and I’m curious about how beauty standards are learned. You’ve learned attractiveness your whole life through messaging. It makes sense this is what you think is attractive. You can change what you find beautiful. It takes work, but that’s the zoom-out moment. I’d also ask, what makes your partner attractive beyond looks. Those things likely haven’t changed. If it’s only the physicality, maybe there’s something deeper to explore. Relationships are built on more than appearance.

To the person experiencing that, it sucks. You don’t owe anyone attraction and your partner’s attraction isn’t your responsibility. It’s harder if the relationship was formed in diet culture. That’s tough water. I’ve worked with couples where one hates that he thinks this about his partner and doesn’t want to divorce but isn’t attracted. I’d approach both sides differently.

If the person whose body changed was with me and their partner said they weren’t attracted anymore, I’d say, this isn’t a reflection that your body is the problem. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s scary to potentially lose a relationship as a result of your healing. I can’t fix it. I can witness how hard it is and help you see a broader perspective rather than going back to old behaviors. Instead of keeping it in the dark, we bring it to the surface. It’s uncomfortable, and we ask, are we moving toward healing, or is this evidence the relationship is growing apart. We have evidence that we can change beliefs. Neuroplasticity is real. Personally, I am choosing partners where this won’t be an issue for me.

As a dad, something I hear is, I just want to be healthy so I can keep up with my kids. Often there’s optimization. I’ve got to do whatever to keep up. You won’t keep up with a two-year-old. They have more energy. Joking aside, this is where masculinity shows up. My role is to be a provider and do things for my family, so now my health becomes my job. My body is my job. Let’s be curious about how those choices show up in your life. Suddenly you have to go to the gym constantly. What if the goal is to get your annual physical and have a good relationship with your provider. Go to therapy. Do the work on yourself. You can’t guarantee good health, but you can be an active participant and do your best. And what better lesson to teach your kids than to show your humanity. Apologize when you get it wrong. Wrestle with your changing body without making it mean you’re broken or a bad dad. If there’s a lesson for fathers, it’s to make your full humanity visible to the people closest to you, including your kids.

My question is, is the relationship you have with your body the one you want your kids to have with theirs. If not, we have to hold that dissonance and want better for them. Final rapid fire: if a partner or friend wants to support a man with body image struggles, what can we do?

It’s powerful to say something empathetic like, I notice you might be struggling with this. I can see something going on for you. I’m here if you want to talk. I’m here to listen. What can I do to support you right now. Sometimes the answer is, leave me alone. Then we have to leave them alone, even if it’s uncomfortable for us. You can’t fix it. If we want to tackle shame, especially with men, they don’t want to be seen struggling. If you confront them in a way that perpetuates shame, it gets worse. If you engage in a way that acknowledges and challenges shame with empathy, it might not work the first time. You just spoke another language. Maybe it lands the fifth or sixth time. Don’t give up. Ask, is there anything I can do right now. In my house, sometimes someone asks what they can do and I say, I need to be alone with my feelings right now. I’ll come back. I know myself. I need time to stew, and I know how to get out of the stew. Give me time. I’m highly emotional and sensitive. I overanalyze. I need that time, and then I can come back.

I used to avoid processing because I didn’t want to upset anyone, and I’d shut down. Now I know I need to move through it first. In my framework, I no longer say bad body image or gremlins. I see them as parts. Even shame gets curiosity instead of criticism. What story is it telling me. We listen with curiosity.

I highly recommend folks watch Big Mouth on Netflix. It’s raunchy, so buckle up. It’s an animated show about puberty. There’s a shame wizard who shows up like a British old figure. Its whole purpose is to breed shame because it believes it’s protecting you. Acceptance and curiosity say, oh, this is here to keep me safe. It’s not doing a good job. What’s the other voice that can speak after the shame wizard, which will be the default. That’s where trust comes in. What story is being told. Does it align with your values. Can you trust yourself more than the fear. Over time that becomes a new groove.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Star Wars. Yoda says, fear is the path to the dark side. The dark side is dieting, hating your body, all of that. Fear leads to hate, hate to anger, anger to suffering. I use metaphors a lot. Here’s how fear is motivating. How can we challenge fear.

Is Yoda body positive.

In a galaxy far away, Yoda was the pioneer. He says, judge me by my size, do you. And well you should not. My ally is the Force. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. I’m a nerd watching and thinking there’s real life wisdom here. Star Wars makes these concepts relatable. If someone says the language isn’t speaking to them, I say, Yoda is. Here’s how Darth Vader is manipulating you into diet culture. Exploring metaphor helps make these concepts land with different people.

I think in metaphor all the time. I don’t call body image a journey because it implies an arrival point. It’s a relationship. It would be like you and your wife going to couples therapy once and never having conflict again. It evolves over a lifetime. Aging throws everything for a loop. If you think you’ve got it figured out, wait until 50. That’s why grief work is paramount. If you can grieve not having a six pack and the energy to sprint upstairs, you can grieve anti-fatness at the doctor’s office and your mortality. You don’t have to unpack it all at once. I could talk to you all day. We’ll have you back after we get listener questions. Where can people find you, and any resources you recommend, especially on masculinity.

You can find me on Instagram at @aaronfloresrdn. My Substack is The Unscripted Journey. It’s free and I post weekly. My body image course is on my website, aaronfloresrdn.com. The podcast Man Unscripted is on my Substack and website. If you want to work with me, I work with folks all over. As for recommendations, one I always come back to, and I know this is a reach for some, is Manhood: The Bare Reality. It’s a photo essay with 100 pictures of men naked from belly button to thigh. I call it the penis book. There are 100 different penises and each person wrote an essay. It’s surprisingly diverse. It challenged my own homophobia and what people would think, and it helps men understand how porn, sexual expectations, and insecurities shape body image. It’s not often talked about. There are many different body types and stories. It’s a good way to sit in discomfort that’s helpful for finding a way through.

You also have a Substack on this. We’ll link it. Any final statement to men specifically.

Your body is not a project that needs to be fixed. It’s really hard. There are other men struggling. You’re not alone. Find them. Find those other men. And find me.

Aaron, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.

I’m grateful to be on the show and for the work you do. I send so many folks your way. Bringing grief into this is so valuable. It’s one of the keys in this process. Thank you for what you do.