The Lean Imperative

Fat and soft is the highway to low status

I don’t write very much about fitness here because the link between SSH status and fitness is so obvious. But every now and then, one happens to observe something that underlines the concept and might help drive it home for those who simply lack the motivation to maximize their fitness.

Consider the actor Jason Patric, who was legitimately regarded as a heart-throb by late 80s and early 90s girls. He was probably best known for LOST BOYS; here is a picture from when he was a little older and had grown out of his younger Byronic style.

Good-looking guy. Having Sandra Bullock on your arm is not exactly a low-status move. Now, obviously time is inexorable, youthful beauty fades with the years, and the slowing of one’s metabolism, expansion of one’s waistline, and receding of one’s hairline is always going to reduce a man’s physical attractions in the eyes of women.

As compensation, we also tend to gain wealth, influence, situational and social dominance, and power, which happen to be female attractors of a different kind. But the objective should be to maximize those new age-related attractors while minimizing the loss of the youthful ones. The importance of doing so can be seen in this recent picture of the same man at 59, who, to be fair, doesn’t look terrible or anything. While I’ll leave it to the women to pronounce the conclusive judgment, he probably looks better than the average 59-year-old man. But in terms of physical attractiveness, he is a very pale shadow of his former self.

The one thing that is most striking and obvious is that he’s probably carrying 20-25 pounds more than he was 28 years ago when the first picture was taken. If he were to cut weight and get to within 5-10 pounds of his younger weight, he’d almost certainly have retained much more of his former attractiveness.

Robert Downey Jr. is an actor of the same time period as Jason Patric. He was more of a character actor than a leading man, he didn’t date the likes of Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington, and certainly young women didn’t swoon over him the way they did over Patric. But despite being a year older than Patric, RDJ is arguably more attractive than him now.

Again, we’ll leave it to the women to declare their opinions, but this reversal is chiefly down to one thing: Robert Downey Jr. keeps himself lean in order to play the action roles required of him while Jason Patric doesn’t.

And while I’m not quite as lean as I’d like to be - I probably need to get my daily range down to 172-175 from 177-1780 to get back to a 30-inch waistline- I have noticed that simply being more lean than the average man in his late 50s tends to not only make a man more attractive, but also causes him to be perceived as younger than he actually is.

In any event, it is definitely worth putting some effort into improving your fitness. Becoming lean and fit is not going to transform you from Delta to Alpha or anything like that, but adding muscle mass and reducing your bodyfat is definitely going to elevate your SSH at any age, even if only to a small degree.