What Noah Kahan's "Out of Body" Gets Right About Body Dysmorphia

Written By Zoe Ogulnick

I watched Out of Body expecting a tour documentary — soft lighting on a bus, sold-out crowds, the usual arc. Some of that is there. But a chunk of the film is Noah Kahan, very plainly, describing what it's like to look at a photo of himself and not recognize what he sees.

"Sometimes I see a photo, and people are like, 'You look great here,' and I'm like, 'What do you mean? I look like 3 or 400 pounds,'" he says. "I don't know what I look like. No clue. I guess that's what body dysmorphia is supposed to be, like, not having a correct image of who you are."

It's not a dramatic scene. It's delivered almost as an aside. That's part of what makes it land — it sounds like a thought he's clearly had a thousand times before the cameras got there.

What he actually says

The doc goes further than I thought it would. Kahan talks about binge eating when he's stressed, then refusing food for days — "I binge eat a lot of food when I'm feeling stressed and then I get so hateful about my body that I don't eat for a while, starve myself." He describes feeling "physically ugly and facially ugly, mentally ugly." And at one point: "I worry that I've just wasted so much time hating who I am."

That last line is the one I keep thinking about. It's the sound of someone who has been rehearsing that sentence privately for a long time.

The part of the conversation we keep skipping

The body image conversation has gotten more sophisticated over the last decade, but most of that sophistication has been built for women. Body neutrality, intuitive eating, "all bodies are good bodies" — those frameworks matter, and they've also, quietly, reinforced the assumption that the person suffering is female.

The numbers don't really back that up. Body Dysmorphic Disorder affects an estimated 1.7% to 2.9% of the general population, and as many as 40% of people with BDD are men. Muscle dysmorphia — the presentation where someone fixates on not being lean or muscular enough — is rising quickly in young men, with some studies finding around 1 in 10 men at the gym meets criteria. Men are also less likely to seek treatment or to have a name for what's happening, which means the real prevalence is almost certainly higher than what shows up in the research.

So when Kahan says, on camera, "I don't know what I look like" — he's describing something a lot of men are quietly living inside without language for it.

Other men, with caveats

It's worth saying: men with platforms talking about this is rarer than it should be, and the examples aren't always clean.

Jonah Hill has been public about not taking his shirt off at a pool until his mid-thirties, and about asking people to stop commenting on his body at all. Those were genuinely useful moments in the conversation. They're also complicated by the fact that texts his ex released later painted a pretty ugly picture of controlling, emotionally abusive behavior — which I don't want to gloss over. A person can name real suffering and also cause real harm. Both things have to sit in the same sentence.

Sam Smith has been more straightforwardly helpful on this — talking about years of body dysmorphia, about slowly reclaiming a relationship with their body in public.

The reason these disclosures move the conversation isn't that the men making them are heroes. It's that men aren't given much of a script for hating how they look, and every time someone with a microphone describes the experience in plain language, it shrinks the distance for the guy watching who thought he was the only one.

What Kahan does that most celebrity disclosures don't

Most celebrity mental health reveals follow the recovery-memoir shape: I struggled, I got help, I'm better now. Clean arc, marketable.

Kahan doesn't do that. He doesn't tell us he's on the other side. He says he's aware of this thing "that feels like it's grinding me down sometimes," and that knowing it could be better doesn't mean it is right now. That tracks with how body dysmorphia actually works. It isn't something you defeat in a third act; it's something you learn to recognize, interrupt, and keep recognizing. Telling the story without the bow at the end is more honest, and more useful for anyone still inside it.

What I'm taking from it

I don't think one documentary changes much on its own, and I don't think Kahan was trying to. But the fact that the guy who wrote an album a lot of people played on loop while processing their own stuff is now saying, on Netflix, that he's spent years unable to look at a photo of himself without flinching — that's not nothing. The people who needed to hear it will hear it.

The body image conversation has left a lot of people standing just outside it, especially men, and especially men whose relationship with their body doesn't fit the shapes we've built stories around. Watching Out of Body, what stuck with me wasn't a single quote. It was the tone. Tired, specific, and finally said out loud.

Body dysmorphia and disordered eating are treatable. If any of this resonated more than abstractly, it's worth talking to someone — a therapist, a doctor, a person you trust. You don't need to have the right language for it first.

References

Zoe Ogulnick
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