Broad strokes: it’s not just that they’re not drinking, but what.

These performers start with restricted-fat diet and an exercise routine that is targeted to build muscle volume on Aesthetic parts of the body and not build muscle volume in areas like the lower abdomen, where any volume is misread as “fat”. The diet keeps them at the minimum of fat tissue they need to survive to keep exercising.

Then for several days before a performance, they cut total fluids and drink a dense slurry of denatured starch. Typically made from potato starch, the starch has been scrubbed to be sure it contains no nutritional value.

‘No nutritional value’ is often used to describe fatty or sugary foods that are seen as ‘cheap’. But medically speaking, those are hugely ‘valuable’ foods: they have a huge amount of fat and sugar that your body could burn for energy. ‘Valueless’ food is something your body cannot get any energy from, like dryer lint, or potato starch.

It’s not supposed to be a food. Instead, the high concentration of starch in your bloodstream pulls water out of your cells. (This is the same thing that happens if you drink sea water, if you’ve ever heard about shipwrecked sailers getting sick doing that). The fat tissue under your skin is very fluffy, so pulling the water out makes it collapse. With the fat layer scrunched up, their skin is literally thinner. It starts to look like tissue paper, translucent, and it sticks and clings when you touch it instead of rebounding.

People who are severely dehydrated usually look like their skin is hanging loosely off their bodies, because they’ve literally shrunk inside it. To avoid that, right before the performance they do one more round of high-speed exercise, irritating their muscles into puffing up as big as possible to tightly fill their skin-sack.

This look is popularly described as ‘toned.’ In sports medicine, ‘muscle tone’ is the amount of tension in your muscles when you’re just standing around not doing anything: the tenser you are, the bigger they look. It’s not a plain good or bad thing; how different levels of resting tone affect actual athletic performance depends on what you’re doing. But super high tone is definitely not useful for athletic performance, because if the muscle is already tense, it can’t contract to actually do something with full strength. 

In general, people who have been through masculine pattern development (including trans*men on hormone therapy and exempting trans*women) have thinner fat tissue on their hands and forearms, so you can see their veins and musculature more easily there than on someone with fem pattern development. So if you can see hand veins, that doesn’t mean someone’s starching. (No one can accuse me of not liking hand veins). If you can see veins popping out of their chest, belly, or thighs, places that we carry more fat, you can know there’s a good chance they are.

You can also, like, ask them. Hugh Jackman is great example of a performer who starched until he was in critical condition, and talks openly about how much he hated it. (Jason Momoa, a treasure, vets his roles by asking “Do I have to have abs ‘n shit?”) And yet every profile talks about how they eat a bunch of lean chicken and brocoli and work out. Literally just the first step in the process.

The paper-skin look is a symptom of dehydration. It is impossible to look like that without being dehydrated. It is impossible to look like that with diet and exercise alone.

Most people won’t ever starch, but images of starched bodies can convince you that certain foods or workouts will be a silver bullet.

Understanding diet and exercise gives you tools that can make your body strong and capable and cool. But this is not what it will look like. The only way a product will make you look like this is it’s loaded with diuretics and laxatives.

I have no interest in telling anyone not to feel attracted to anyone with any particular body situation.

I don’t want to say that actually these performers aren’t Healthy and so it’s Bad to be attracted to them. Because that just reinforces the idea that only certain bodies deserve to be loved.

Just because someone is eating/exercising in a disordered way, or has any other illness, doesn’t mean their body is disgusting, that it should be sealed off from sexual desire. That’s important because the fear of becoming unlovable keeps people from asking for help, especially women: the fear is that as long as you’re “just skinny”, people praise your body, but when you become known as “that girl with ED”, people will distance themselves or double down on the message that your body is wrong and bad and a problem.

At the same time, sexualizing the signs of the struggle itself can really hurt people.

So there’s a balance to find, in how we talk about each other’s bodies: to not just see any one body part but also keep the whole person’s happiness in mind.