Body Number 2: The Imaginary Body
Body Number 2 is a concept introduced by Dr Philippe Jacquet in his University of Essex doctoral research on male eating disorders (The Devouring Kronos, 2026). It names the imaginary body, usually the body of a young god, muscular, very lean, without an ounce of fat, in which a man believes his whole life will finally be won. Body Number 1 is the body he actually lives in. Body Number 2 is the one that is always one diet, one programme, one transformation away. The chase never ends, because the problem was never really the body.
How it narrows a life
A life is meant to be broad: you go after what you desire, you build a vocation, a love, your kingdom. In a male eating disorder all of that contracts around a single sentence: I just need to be leaner, more muscular. The imaginary body becomes the place where a whole life is meant to be won, and never can be.
The function: turning down the volume of life
Body Number 2 is not only a fantasy; it has a function, and the function is the reason it holds so fast. Life is loud. Work, love, family, uncertainty, other people’s needs, one’s own unlived possibilities: all of it makes noise, and all of it makes demands. The pursuit of the imaginary body turns that volume down. When the main goal of a life becomes achieving this body, through diet, through training, through any kind of insane regime, everything else recedes into background. It is almost a mission, and a mission simplifies: one concern, one measure, one task for today.
That is the secret bargain of the disorder. It does not only promise a future body; it quiets a present life. And this is why the behaviour cannot simply be taken away. Remove the pursuit without offering the man another way to bear the volume of his life, and you have removed his noise reduction while the noise remains. Treatment has to respect the function before it dismantles the mechanism.
Undoing the fantasy: taking back the charge
A fantasy is a thought emotionally charged. That is the whole definition, and it contains the whole treatment. What gives Body Number 2 its grip is not the idea of a lean body, which is banal, but the emotion invested in it: the longing, the promise, the mission. So the fantasy cannot be argued away, because argument addresses the thought and leaves the charge untouched. The only way to diminish the longing is to re-engage with the emotion underneath it, to deal with the feeling directly, and so take away the emotional payoff of the quest. When the feeling has somewhere real to go, the imaginary body loses its reason to exist.
The puer aeternus and the provisional life
Body Number 2 also keeps a man forever on the threshold: my life will really start when I have this body. This is the territory of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth of Jungian psychology, whose life is always about to begin. It is a costly position, because a life treated as a preparation is a life not lived. The years spent getting ready for the body that will finally permit living are the living itself, spent.
A psychic retreat
There is a name for the place where this happens: what John Steiner called a psychic retreat, an inner shelter where reality cannot intrude. The man pursuing Body Number 2 lives, ultimately, in his head and not in his body. The real body, Body Number 1, is merely the building site; life is conducted in the imagined one. Part of recovery is the slow return from the retreat: back into the body one actually has, and the life that is actually here.
The envelope and the letter
The body is the envelope; the personality is the letter. What matters is a body that lets you act and live, rather than a body that becomes the whole of the life. Recovery, for a man, is finally this: however I feel, it no longer decides what I eat.
The full essay: Body Number 2, male eating disorders. When the pursuit settles on muscle, it becomes bigorexia. The father-son dynamic behind the disorder is the Kronos energy. Sourced figures: male eating disorders, UK statistics.
Men Who Heal is Dr Jacquet’s practice dedicated to men’s eating disorders: menwhoheal.com. For treatment, see male eating disorder therapy or arrange a confidential consultation.
For treatment, see eating disorder treatment in London.