Tim Shaw I have the Perfect Body 

When journalist Tim Shaw signed up for a health and fitness regime for Channel 4's new series Extreme Male Beauty, he saw it as an opportunity to lose a few pounds, firm up a bit and become the man he'd always wanted to be. Embarking on a lifestyle of carb-free cuisine and hardcore gym work, Tim threw himself body-and-soul into the experiment. The body turned out great – it was the soul that was the problem. He became a different, and far less pleasant, person – so much so that his wife took the kids and moved out.

Here, Tim discusses the extraordinary transformation he underwent, revealing the perils and pitfalls of male vanity, and explaining why he’s worried he’ll never be quite the same again.

You’ve got a new TV series coming up on Channel 4, Extreme Male Beauty. What's the show's concept?
The concept is to explore the world of extreme male vanity. It's addressing the fact that men feel more pressure than ever before to look a certain way, which is pretty scary.

Where does that pressure come from?
A lot of it comes from the media. It comes from many different places. There's been an acceptance over the last ten years of metrosexuality, of men using moisturiser and so on. The typical role of a man being a man, a hairy bearded thing, has been watered down slightly. I think that's come from the beauty industry and the media, and the images that are being rammed down our throats all the time of the perfect man – hairless, tanned, got pecks – the David Beckhams and Matthew McConaugheys on huge billboards. Men are being subjected to these images now. In the past, people would have laughed at these images. Now men use moisturisers, have grooming routines and have beauty products. They want to be like the men on the billboards, and we're all falling for that.

What's your role in the series?
I basically investigate the whole world of male vanity, and to try it out. It's my job to find out the sort of lengths men are prepared to go in the name of vanity, and to experience it. I have to investigate what they're doing, and then try it out myself, to see if it is actually beneficial to me. I'm a fairly average guy with a couple of kids and a beautiful wife, and I've always wanted to improve myself. I wanted to see if improving myself would help me generally in my life.

You say you're a fairly average guy. What was your lifestyle like before you decided to improve yourself?
I was living that typical blokey, have-a-good-laugh lifestyle. Five pints a night, kebabs, pizzas, crisps, Chinese, curries. Chips, convenience lifestyle, knocking around with a load of mates, just a care-free fun guy. I was more concerned with having a good time than the detriment that living like that might be having on my body.

In the first episode, you have to stand in front of a group of critical women in just your pants. That must have been terrifying.
It was like verbal rape. It was probably one of the hardest things I did. I once went to my mother and told her there were a few things about my body that I didn't like, and she said that nobody would ever notice them because they don't study your body in detail like that. I always believed her, until I stood in front of these women and got ripped up on twice as many things – things that it had never occurred to me were wrong with me. I found it utterly degrading and completely demoralising, and it made me realise how ready women are to return the insults that men have been giving them for years and years of objectification.

Did it make you feel more sympathetic towards women, then?
Oh absolutely. Would like to stand up in front of every woman in the UK and say sorry for all the pressures we've put on women for decades. It must have been absolute hell. This was a real insight for me into what it must be like to be a woman, and I feel so much more empathetic and sympathetic towards women as a result of doing this programme. It's meant that I would now never make any comments that are detrimental towards a woman and how she lives her life or her appearance. It's been a real education for me. I felt embarrassed to be a man for a lot of the time.

You decided to work on your physical appearance – how did you go about that?
It was an eight week regime. I went from 15 stone 3 to just under 13 stone. I lost two stone – but I probably lost three stone of fat and gained a stone in muscle, in eight weeks. It's a massive amount of weight to lose. The routine went from all that terrible food and alcohol and lack of exercise to a regime of exercising in a gym five days a week, seven days a week of cardio stuff, and the biggest shock of all, my diet. I gave up all carbs, which meant no potatoes, no crisps, no alcohol, no pasta, no fatty meat, anything like that. I was basically allowed chicken and vegetables. Even my fruit was limited. Zero carbs, to anyone who knows what that really entails, is a fucking nightmare. I had eight weeks of that.

Did the exercise hurt?
The first two weeks was absolute hell. Absolute hell. I hated every second of it. I absolutely loathed it, loathed the fact that I had taken part in this, despised people in gyms, despised my trainer, the producers, the show, everything. Everybody was saying I'd never manage it, this would break me, and that was driving me on. Plus the women who had ripped me to pieces – I kept on hearing back some of the comments they had made, and that kept me running on the treadmill, or made me go on with the bench presses or pull ups. I wanted to prove that I could see this through, no matter what happened, even if it killed me.

You employed various gadgets and gizmos to help with your appearance. Which were the best and worst?
I used a facial toner that is meant to do the hard work for you, and they're absolute rubbish, complete junk. The concept is that it sends electrical pulses to your muscles and makes them contract. It does absolutely nothing for you. I used one for my abdominal muscles as well, which worked on the same principle. I used them religiously, they just made my voice sound like it was in the process of breaking again. It also made me feel like I had literally shat myself when I was buying stamps in a post office. You're just being electrocuted regularly every eight seconds. It's horrible, and a complete waste of time. Because they can't really be disproven, there are always going to be suckers out there who will buy them.

So which was the best gadget?
The chest expander. If you put hard work in, you will get results – it's as simple as that. There's no denying it, my body has changed massively. By the end of the show, Channel 4 wanted all sorts of proof that I hadn't cheated, that I'd done it all genuinely, because I'd changed so much. But it's completely possible, it's just very, very hard.

You also addressed various issues of vanity 'downstairs'. Was it difficult getting your penis out on camera?
What drives me is the fact that nobody else will do it. Penises are something blokes don't often talk about. Women think we do, and they think that men have massive insecurity issues about it, and I just wanted to get mine out and say 'Let's find out if they do or they don't.' I want to be the first to say 'Look, I don't care'. I want to do this for the benefit of men. I wanted to be that normal bloke on the telly that all other blokes watching go 'Fuck me, I look like that'. Rather than always having to be a body beautiful guy. I wanted to represent the bloke with a hairy back and an average-sized cock.

Am I right in thinking you tried out a piece of equipment to make it bigger?
I tried out all the equipment. I tried stretching devices, suction pumps and all sorts. The method that I stuck with, because it was the only one that I thought I could actually manage, was something called jelqing. It's basically where you get yourself semi-aroused and then practically swing off it. You literally pull on it 20 to 40 times. You do that up to 200 times a day. Yes, you do spend the majority of your time with your cock in your hand, which is a bit embarrassing when you've got your kids downstairs. People would ask my wife where I was – he's basically upstairs wanking! The show is outrageous, it's very funny. I'm pleased I tried it all.

What did your wife make of the new you?
Hayley hated it. She didn't want me to change my anatomy or the shape of my knob at all. She was worried that it would actually damage me. And she certainly didn't like who I became.

Why? Did you become a different person through all of this?
Yeah, absolutely. I've learned a lot about male vanity. I started to get to know some of the guys in the gym, and I can say that men who work out and look beautiful are psychologically damaged. That is my genuine conclusion. They're so self-obsessed, and I became that way. I became one of them.

How did you change?
When I first started going to the gym, I couldn't hang out with them, I didn't know what to say to them. I felt like the odd one out. But I was actually the normal bloke, they were the weirdoes who only ever wanted to talk about carbs and diets and pecs and abs and stuff like that. One time, in the gym, a big guy came up to me and asked me to move over to the left a bit, because he couldn't see himself in the mirror. And 95 per cent of the men I spoke to, who had perfect bodies, all thought they were fat, didn't like to show their muscles off and wouldn't take their t-shirts off. Yet they were perfect. They were embarrassed, shy and self-conscious, much more so than normal blokes.

And they can't lead a normal life?
Not at all. A lot of these guys are in the gym punishing themselves for what they've had to eat the night before, because they cannot lead this perfect life. The thing is, to maintain that body, you have to live an extreme lifestyle – you cannot live in the normal world. You can't socialise normally. If you said to me "Tim, can you meet me for a beer," and I was on my routine, I'd have to say "Well, yeah mate, but I'll have to have a fizzy water." "Okay, let's go out for a meal." "Well, actually, I'm sorry mate, but there's nowhere I can go, because I don't know of a restaurant that would just do me plain chicken and vegetables." So you live in this secluded, lonely place, where you can only mix with other body beautiful people. And people become so deranged and deluded, it becomes the most important thing to them, they spend all their time focusing on themselves. You become so obsessed with yourself that you have no time for anyone else. And that's what happened to me.

How did that manifest itself?
I became so into me, so into the way I looked, that my wife had none of me, and the only bits she did have were the moody bits. That's why we separated for two weeks halfway through the regime. She said "I can't live with you anymore." I was becoming so moody and such a wanker that she just said "I don't want to be around you any more."

So she moved out?
Yeah, she went up to Sheffield, to her mum and dad's, with our daughters. We had a big argument – I was sitting at the table in a foul mood, because I wasn't happy about something to do with my body, and I had just been to the gym and was knackered, and my two daughters were sitting at the table, and I was just scowling at them, thinking 'Go on, drop a pea and I'll have a go at you.' Two little girls, a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, and I snapped. I started having a go, and Hayley just said "Right, I can't live with you anymore. It isn't fair on me or your daughters. I understand you have to do this for the show, but I just cannot be around you." And I didn't care, because I was so into myself. It gave me more time to focus on myself. And it's not like I'm the only one who's like this. Blokes who go on these low-carb, high-intensity gym routines, a lot of them are like this. A lot of people had said to Hayley "God, I bet he's a moody nightmare," which I think helped Hayley. They were able to assure her that I'd return to the way I was.

And have you returned to the way you were?
Yes and no. The worst thing for me is I want to unlearn this stuff. Ignorance is bliss. I can't go out for a pint without feeling guilty the next day. I don't want to know how many calories there are or how much saturated fat, or what carbs there are in everything I eat. I'd like to be able to eat a burger now and not know about it. But I can't enjoy it now because I know what I'm eating and how much damage I'm doing to my body. I don't want to know that stuff anymore.

So you're sort of trapped. You don't want to pursue the body beautiful regime, but you can't just forget about what you learned. Where does that leave you?
Well, I've tried to go back to the old me, and have a few beers and so on, but I can't. Hayley's trying to counsel me just to not care any more about the burger. She'll get me to eat it and then use a distraction technique, like watching a film afterwards to forget about it. But the next day I always analyse what I ate and think "I shouldn't have eaten that." It's left me in a state, and I'm trying to get back to how I was. I don't want to become one of those people, and we're all susceptible. To any man who's reading this, I would say "Don't think you're tough enough to not be swallowed up by this." I thought I was pretty robust when it came to stuff like this, but there's this massive world of male vanity that's just evil. You start off using creams, then you start getting your back waxed, and before you know it, a few years down the line, you're having invasive surgery.

The programme does feature people having surgery. You very clearly did not go down that route. Is it something you would ever consider?
It's something I never would have considered doing. During the series I meet a guy who's having liposuction, and I talked to the doctor. I'd never been exposed to a doctor who stands there and says "Look, I can do a bit of testing, you hop up on the table, and in six hours, you can have a six-pack." Before it wasn't an option. Now it's an option for men, and that's dangerous. I hope I never go for surgery, but there might be a day that I do. At this moment in time, I'm so anti it it's incredible. I hope I make it through the rest of my life without this sort of thing becoming that important to me.

It sounds like there are elements of all this that you're still struggling with. Do you regret having made the series?
No, I don't regret it at all. I found it fascinating, I've learned a lot. I spent 34 years wanting to look the way I look now. And I'm so pleased for myself and for anyone else out there who might benefit from this that I've done it and tried it and learned that there is nothing beneficial about it at all, apart from the fact that it might leave you a little healthier and on this planet for longer. But I'd rather be on the planet for a slightly shorter amount of time and had a damn good time than be a good-looking twat and die five years later and have had no fun.