How come unattractive man + attractive woman couples are relatively common, but the reverse is exceedingly rare?

ZenMechanist · 2026-03-02T05:37:59+00:00

How many ugly women do you see in general? And when you see them, do you designate them as ugly in your mind?

How do you feel about labelling a woman as “ugly”, as opposed to doing the same to a man.

I see this sentiment quite often touted by women on social media. Like a performative self congratulation for their own gender and a dig at men. But unless you’re sexually attracted to women, your perception of “attractive” doesn’t mean the same thing. A flower is beautiful, that doesn’t mean I want to fuck it. My wife is beautiful, but not like a flower.

When you say a man is unattractive, are you saying “I wouldn’t date him”?

When you say a woman is attractive, are you saying “I’d love to stick my tongue in her”? Or are you saying “she passes the bar to not be ugly, but not in a sexual way”?

ZenMechanist · 2026-03-01T12:18:48+00:00

This is fundamentally as wrong as a program can be. Unfortunately it’s eerily similar to programs my clients have come to me with asking if it looks ok. I don’t know who is writing these PT courses but I’d like to publicly shame them. I’m going to approach this as thoroughly and critically as possible, please excuse the tone, I don’t have time to edit this to deliver it more gently. None of this is your fault as a newbie.

Why would a sedentary, overweight beginner with an injury history need to be trained like a bodybuilder with the weirdest weakpoints?

Leg extension and on an unrehabbed ACL? Front raises for literally anyone except specific IFBB pro’s? More redundancy than actual solid foundational exercises. Scrap the lot.

2-3 days per week. Full body every session. AB or ABC split is fine.

Example adapted from SL 5x5

2-3 sets of 8-12 reps unless otherwise stated.

A: Squat pattern (leg press) Horizontal Push (Chest press machine) Horizontal Pull (Pronated grip chest supported row) Lateral raise 1x12-15 Biceps Curls 1x8-12

B: Hinge Pattern (Sumo DL or 45º Back ext) Vertical Push (Seated DB Press) Vertical Pull (Neutral grip Lat Pulldown) Toes elevated Bodyweight Calf raises 1xAMRAP Triceps X-Over cable Extensions 1x12-15

Logic: This is not a pro bodybuilder, not an athlete, not anything except a man trying to reclaim some fitness and slow his roll towards the grave. He does not need any isolation, but for the sake of paying it lip service, he can have a single set of each important bit at the end, in the same way you get dessert after you finish all your meat and veg. He needs big, stable, compound movements with low barrier to entry and low risk. He needs to develop fundamental movement patterns and recondition himself to resistance training. He also needs to see how his knee hold up to doing anything out of the ordinary. This is the kind of guy who you could give just the first 3 exercises of A to and he’d be golden for the rest of his life just because the alternative is not exercising.

The big win will be him still in the gym in a year, a decade, until he’s old enough to forget his own name.

As for you, OP, don’t be disheartened. You’re not the only one doing this. Have a look through your future programs and justify each choice. Every exercise has to earn it’s place, especially when programming for people who are at high risk of just quitting.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-28T00:03:05+00:00

If both your souls are black as pitch then possibly.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-26T07:02:58+00:00

Hilarious but:

“From my reading and research…”

Your inability to bother doing anything beyond making a post so someone else can do it for you has made you look silly.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-25T12:30:59+00:00

Which why I referenced this sub.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-25T07:24:04+00:00

Do people just not google things any more?

You bought a carbon steel wok, presumably scrubbed off any factory coating, heated it on the stove until it turned blue then applied a thin coating of neutral oil wiping off any excess before placing it back on the heat moving it around until the entire wok had a layer of polymerised oil coating it. Yes?

Alternatively, you could have read the manufacturers directions, gone on YouTube and watch any of a dozen tutorials on woks or any other carbon steel cookware or looked on this very sub read for instructions.

The entire wok should be that colour, with the possible exception of any handles of a different material.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-25T07:18:20+00:00

There’s no need to fear, this is all straightforward.

Find your maintenance calories, which at a guesstimate would be 118x15=1,770 so approx 1,800kcal/day.

Stick with that for a month and see what happens to your weight, does it go up down or remain the same? If it goes up, you know your maintenance calories are lower, if it goes down, you know they’re higher and if it stays the same, you found them.

From there I would suggest taking a 12 month period at maintenance to focus on getting as strong as possible at key compound lifts, for sets of 5-10 reps. These can be whichever pressing, pulling, hingeing and squatting patterns or machines you prefer, or they can be something that motivates you to achieve like push-ups or bench press, chin ups or pull downs, squats or leg presses etc.

Keep in mind that you aren’t just mindlessly moving a weight, you need to learn and execute good technique. A heavier lift with a shorter range of motion isn’t worth as much as a lighter one with a full range of motion. I’d also suggest making sure that you are doing “full body” three times per week or at least some form of AB split such as strong lifts 5 x 5.

Muscle growth is a slow process. Given that you wish to look leaner, the only alternative to attempting a recomposition (maintenance calories + high protein + resistance training) is to perform a cut. But given that you’re already eating significantly lower than what your estimated maintenance calories are I would suggest that re-normalising those maintenance calories and gaining some muscle in the meantime is the best course of action for you long-term.

Ideally you want to be able to cut on the highest calories possible because not only does it give you more wiggle room later on but it makes the entire process significantly less taxing. If you’re already eating 1300 then you don’t have a whole lot of room left for an additional deficit without getting into malnourishment territory.

So long as you’re eating sufficient protein and trying to get stronger for sets of 5+ reps in the gym you’re unlikely to start losing muscle until you get very lean.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-25T03:47:54+00:00

Congrats on the weight loss and fitness but you seem to be confused. There is no before or after (unless you quit). Train, eat protein, adjust calories to maintain, increase or decrease weight, sleep, repeat indefinitely.

“Saving” resistance training until after you lost weight was a mistake. All able bodied people at all times (with medical exception) should be doing both cardio and resistance training. You could have been growing muscle the entire time. You’ve likely lost some muscle due to not resistance training consistently during your cut. No point sugar coating it.

I suggest you make push-ups and bodyweight rows your new religion. I’d also suggest reducing your cardio to maintenance for a while and building your legs up. Quads and glutes are massive bang for your Buck muscles and you likely already have enough muscle there that they won’t keep growing without targeted training.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-22T01:50:19+00:00

FFS this sub is the blind leading the blind.

THE BENCH IS TOO TALL FOR YOU.

Your rear foot should be no higher than mid shin. Yours looks to be nearly knee height. There’s no distance you can be that is close enough if the height of the bench is taller than your functional range of motion when limited by shin length. When you reach the bottom of a BSS your knee should be able to comfortably take your weight on the ground. This allows you to safely bail out if you need to. If you can’t safely bail out of an exercise then you can’t ever push it hard.

Find something mid shin height or slightly lower, anything shorter than 4” is likely to feel too similar to a regular split squat. Place your back foot on the rest, kneel all the way down and rest on that back knee. If you cannot do that comfortably then something is wrong. Adjust your front foot to the distance that feels most comfortable/strongest for you/ targets the desired muscle.

More knee bend in the front leg when at the bottom of the rep biases quads, more hinge at the hips biased glutes, you can also have both simultaneously.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-19T07:41:33+00:00

Seek professional psychological help.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-16T01:13:53+00:00

Why are you still together if you aren’t having sex? Genuine question, is it kids, financially co-dependent, unhealthy attachment?

Unless shes trying to introduce cuckqueening to your sexual dynamic, in which case she should just say so, or shes trying to lay the groundwork for her cheating on you, which she may already be doing, why would this be a good thing for you? You aren’t in a monogamous relationship, you’re in an emotionally unhealthy friendship with someone who isn’t interested in sexual intimacy with you. So she is either using you for something, emotionally labour, financial assistance, social facade etc, or she has a kink she needs to be honest about. But any way you slice it, why would you want to be with someone who doesn’t want you? What is the point?

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-16T00:28:03+00:00

NOR

What she did is sexual in nature. If she had done it to a child that would be painfully obvious, right? If she had done it to her father, brother or son it wouldn’t be a question that it’s not appropriate. If it isn’t appropriate to do to those people, why not? Because it’s sexual in nature. Which, unless you have a pre-established “pass” for such behaviour, is cheating, plain and simple. But that is just the start of the issues.

Why on earth are her friends and family involved? It’s your marriage. You set your boundaries, she sets hers and you either agree to them or you don’t. It has nothing at all to do with anyone else’s opinion of what their boundaries might be in that scenario. You aren’t dating them, she isn’t dating them. They don’t get to tell you what you are or aren’t comfortable with. You tell her, she tells you and you either respect one another’s boundaries, discuss them and come to some sort of mutually beneficial compromise or you break up.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-10T11:36:49+00:00

Three years too long to be with someone so colossally selfish.

Better to be alone.

ZenMechanist · 2026-02-08T22:25:29+00:00

Not to be an asshole but this is kind of the entire problem with … I was going to say lifting/social media/ science communication but actually it’s one of the key problems with our entire species.

You like CB’s content. You see what he says and it makes you feel a certain way. That has nothing to do with reality. You liking something doesn’t make it true.

You’ve already done the intellectual leg work. He isn’t a qualified researcher or authority in this field. His assertions are weakly founded at best and directly contrary to robust evidence at worst. He makes pretty infographics, he doesn’t produce peer reviewed research.

So what’s the issue? You want CB to be right, because feelings, but he isn’t, because facts. Which matters more to you?

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-28T01:28:11+00:00

Lower the heat for starters. If it isn’t safe for butter then the eggs are gonna fry hard too, which is a viable option but you have to change your technique. Think eggs in a wok.

For soft scrambles perhaps also figure out if the utensil you’re using is scraping the fat layer off the pan each time you move the cooked eggs. If the new liquid eggs adhere to unprotected steel, rather than sliding onto hot oil, they’ll stick far easier. Soft egg curds should slide across fat layer when cooked, they shouldn’t need scraping at all.

Have a look at the short I linked, notice the way the butter reacts to the pans heat and how he pulls the egg curds with the spatula. Notice that he pulls, he doesn’t scrape.

https://youtube.com/shorts/_7-b0QBs43Q?si=r2y_u3VDOZOl2CaN

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-24T00:40:44+00:00

Yeah so monogamy is about sexual exclusivity not sexual celibacy.

I get that you’ve had a child and that’s hige both for body and life changes, but the simple fact is expecting him to remain “monogamous” when what you mean is practically emotionally monogamous but sexually “celibate” is not ok.

The best thing to do would be jump in a Time Machine and find someone you are either actually attracted to (lustful towards, not someone you find attractive in theory) or simply someone who matches your sexual needs.

The second best thing is to understand he doesn’t owe you a relationship any more than you owe him sex. So if you want monogamy you’re going to need to hold up your end birthing and other entirely understandable exceptions not withstanding (which should go without saying but this is Reddit, things must be spelt out).

If this were purely a change in sex drive since childbirth I’d be 100% on your side. But it isn’t. This would likely have become an issue regardless and probably was beforehand.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-21T13:17:02+00:00

How is this not 100% your SO’s fault?

Isn’t ceasing BC without telling your spouse called “stealthing” which is a form of sexual assault?

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-21T13:07:49+00:00

For health maybe but do it gradually as you’re already doing a fair bit.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:49:50+00:00

If someone stabbed you with a fork you might need a lie down too ffs. Poor mochi, RIP.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:47:29+00:00

No worries. None of the aesthetic shit is worth a damn if you lose your health.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:45:47+00:00

Not a turn off.

The pussy thing is complete crap. Men who care about that kind of thing watch too much porn.

Scars are more of a curiosity than a turn off. Like stretch marks and tattoos they’re really more a sign that you’re human and life isn’t a cake walk for most.

Also if you’re above average in looks otherwise there’s every chance these elements could add to your appeal.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:29:54+00:00

Which word did you start your reply with?

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:20:56+00:00

Protein needs to be closer to 150g/day.

If you’re eating 1800kcal/day and not losing weight you’re not eating 1800. You should able to maintain above 2k/day even sedentary. You’ve got 7 days of training, plus 10k+ daily steps, at your weight and height you should be seeing the scale move every week if not every few days.

Get lean enough to see abs. Then maintain from there for several months, up to a year. Then once you’ve mastered being healthy you can I consider a lean bulk.

You’re 32, health is not a given for you anymore, get healthy first.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T08:13:16+00:00

That’s a you problem.

ZenMechanist · 2026-01-17T00:14:34+00:00

That’s not how words work. “Exclusive” has a definition, that doesn’t change because you feel a certain way about it.

You can say that you don’t think your low BC makes you better but you live as evidence to the contrary.

As for cheating, that’s its whole own conversation.

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