We can all more or less guess what most men find attractive about a woman’s appearance – the other way around is often more nuanced and less predictable. Rather by accident, however, I think I may have cracked it.
Forget the ripped bod à la Olly Murs, whose new look has divided opinion so acutely among his online fandom. Instead, what women respond to most in a middle-aged man is… hair, and the thicker the better. Or at least my wife did in my admittedly unscientific experiment featuring one subject – me.
The fact is, I have undertaken two transformations recently in my capacity as a male journalist on the cusp of 50.
The first was to produce the chiselled body of Apollo in a relatively gluttonous dad of two. The second was to be fitted for an all-new ‘hair system’ as a man whose natural barnet began to disappear more than a decade ago.
And the one my wife (much) preferred – indeed, found ‘hot’ – did not involve a month-long diet of turkey mince and thrice-weekly sessions at the gym.
I have some sympathy for Olly Murs, who released a video of himself showing off his incredible new physique last month. The singer was meant to be promoting his tour, but considering every shot showed him shirtless either in the gym lifting weights or in the boxing ring with sweat glistening on his six-pack, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was pushing a fitness video or new male modelling venture.
He has rapidly discovered, however, that not everyone is impressed by rock-hard abs and bulging biceps.
In fact, his body transformation has prompted a debate on social media, with many fans, women in particular, saying they preferred his previous ‘dad bod’ to the sinewy look.
In the space of just four weeks, I lost nearly a stone (6kg) but, more importantly, I gained a rock-hard flat stomach with abdominal muscles
Three times a week, I had to attend hour-long sessions with a personal trainer, who taught me how to lift increasingly heavy weights, slowly and steadily
Olly was so ‘disappointed’ by the debate that he took to Instagram to say ‘this journey’ that he’d undertaken was ‘for many personal reasons and not one of them was to spark a debate and divide opinions’.
I read his thoughts with a shudder of recognition because last year, then aged 49, I too went on a ‘journey’ turning my chubby middle-aged spread into a six-pack.
In the space of just four weeks, I lost nearly a stone (6kg) but, more importantly, I gained a rock-hard, flat stomach with abdominal muscles an Athenian warrior would be proud of.
I had to follow a very strict regime put together by Roar Fitness, a gym favoured by City types. It was a mixture of dieting and weightlifting. The diet involved no alcohol and no caffeine (which I found far harder than the no booze), no sugar at all, including no fruit, no dairy, no carbohydrates, just lots of chicken breast, that turkey mince and steamed veg – which I had to cook following strict recipes to ensure I consumed the right ratio of protein (lots) and fat (a little, but only in the morning).
Three times a week, I had to attend hour-long sessions with a personal trainer, who taught me how to lift increasingly heavy weights, slowly and steadily.
Oddly, I was told not to go running – because this would burn off too much muscle mass – but instead to ensure I walked at least 12,000 steps a day.
It was an all-consuming project, but the results were remarkable. When I wrote about it for the Daily Mail, I was inundated with feedback. Most of it was genuinely warm, with men of my age in particular expressing admiration and keen to know more about the regime.
But there was one person who was less impressed: My wife, Vic. Yes, she thought the six-pack was quite a fun novelty. She even took to parading me around at a drinks party like a prize heifer, telling me to lift up my shirt so people could inspect the miracle muscles. But did she find them sexy? No.
There were two reasons for this. The first was because of the ludicrous diet that helped my rapid loss of body fat. Every meal had to be meticulously measured out. If we went to a friend’s house for dinner, I had to bring my own Tupperware of prepared mince.
‘The only way you got those muscles was by making yourself miserable and dragging me down with you,’ she says.
Not only was I in a continual calorie deficit, which made me pretty hungry and grumpy – ‘you were always losing your temper,’ my wife claims – but for a whole month I ate completely separate food from the rest of the family, a very antisocial arrangement.
‘It meant we could never go out properly,’ she adds. ‘Any party we went to, you stood in the corner nursing a fizzy water, avoiding the crisps and discussing bicep curls with other 50-year-old males. The man I married was fun, six-pack Harry was boring.’
Olly Murs’ wife, Amelia, is a former body builder and has very much supported his transformation, but even she – in a comment below his video – hints at the disruption it caused. ‘Does this mean we get to eat the same dinners again now?’ she wrote.
Forget the ripped bod a la Olly Murs, whose new look has divided opinion. Instead, women respond to hair, and the thicker the better
The other reason my wife thought my body was a turn-off was the fact it was, by definition, an exercise in vanity.
‘It’s not that I hate muscles, not at all,’ she explains. ‘But it’s so much more attractive if it’s effortless. I knew you were – literally – sweating for them every day.’
There’s a reason why the latest season of The White Lotus decided to make its most obnoxious character, Saxon Ratliff (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger) a protein-shake-obsessed, gym-going narcissist who judged every person on their body fat percentage.
The Hollywood heartthrobs of old, such as James Dean or Steve McQueen, were undoubtedly in good shape, but their bodies showed they were more likely to be stumbling home to bed at 5am after a good night out than getting up to eat eggs and salmon before doing early morning squats.
Vic is by no means alone in being unimpressed by the super-lean look that can only be achieved through dedicated shredding and obsessive dieting.
In 2000, a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School asked male college students to choose the bodies they aspired towards.
The male students who took part in the study chose images of men with 30lb (13.6kg) more muscle than they had as an ideal body. But, when asked which body types were most desirable to them, female college students chose men with 15 to 30lb less muscle than most males considered ideal.
I notice that Olly reached his 40th birthday this time last year. I wonder if this has sparked his muscle mission.
I’m prepared to admit that my body transformation was, in part, fuelled by the fact I was about to hit 50 – a last chance to regain some youth, rather than embrace cardigans and golf.
Was it a similar impulse that made me agree to the request from another newspaper, a couple of years ago, to try out a £1,000 ‘hair system’ for a week? Very probably.
Olly Murs’s body transformation has prompted a debate on social media with many fans, women in particular, saying they preferred his previous ‘dad bod’
This was a sophisticated, modern toupée, which gave me a genuinely realistic full head of hair and transformed my appearance just as totally as the beefcake mission.
I’d started losing my hair in my mid-30s. It bothered me a little, like most men who start to go thin on top – if they are being honest.
At the time, I was appearing on television most weeks on a show called SuperScrimpers and, out of the blue, a hair surgeon contacted me saying that he had spotted I was losing my hair. He asked if I’d consider a free hair transplant in return for writing about the procedure. I was genuinely tempted but, after quite a bit of research, I discovered it was a major operation with no guarantee of success.
Some men have to return for a second or third operation, because their hair continues to fall out on top and it needs to be replaced – a Forth Bridge project with ever smaller cans of paint.
However, though I have learnt to accept my bald head, I have since then followed the trends in hair loss treatments and written about them for newspapers – including the Daily Mail, for which I went undercover in Turkey to expose the rogue end of the hair transplant industry.
So, when I discovered more and more men were wearing ‘hair systems’, I was intrigued enough to try it for a week.
Unlike a hair transplant, which takes a full six months to improve your barnet, this is an immediate transformation. And because they are lightweight, bespoke to each man and stuck on with remarkably strong glue, you can shower, even go swimming, and they don’t fall off – though you do have to get them refitted every six weeks.
They are so convincing that quite a few colleagues and friends whom I had not seen for a year genuinely had no idea I was wearing fake hair – they just thought I looked ‘in great shape’.
My experiment ended after a week. I was relieved, because the hair system was itchy and quite high-maintenance, requiring careful combing after a shower.
My wife, however, thought the wig was amazing and I should consider keeping it. ‘You look hotter, sorry, but you do,’ was her verdict. But why did she prefer the fake hair to the real muscles? ‘Well, the hair made you look at least five years younger, maybe ten. It allowed me to time travel to the younger you.
‘The ripped body made you look like the 50-year-old you are, just a slightly desperate 50-year-old.’
Olly, enjoy your new body. But, as you have probably already discovered, keeping it up is very hard work. Even harder work is impressing women, who just want you to be you, not a hungry, vain version of you.
I note that you have plenty of hair, however, and suggest very strongly that you do whatever you can to hang on to it.
