Ed Gamble is very adamant that he is ‘not on TikTok’. Whenever he’s been exposed to it, the app seems nothing but manic and stressful. “It sounds like a panic attack. It’ll be an intense music track, then someone waffling on about something, then a cat farting. But people aren’t even watching the whole video, they're just flicking through.” He cringes. “That can't be good for the brain, can it?”
Not good for the brain, or the body, we now know. It’s not just a TikTok-specific issue, though – even on the social media platforms he still uses, the comedian, presenter and podcaster has noticed a shifting toxicity in his feed.
“Sometimes my algorithm is just, like, loads of ripped lads, and it didn’t used to be like that,” the comedian tells me on the Well Enough podcast. “I mean, they look lovely. Well done. But I’ve been through that type of body transformation, where you go to a personal trainer four times a week and stick to a very specific diet.
“Sure, I looked toned and in shape. But having gone through it, I see pictures of men who look like that and just think: ‘Your life is horrible.’ It’s being hungry and cold all the time. You can’t look like that and be a food lover, in my mind.”
Gamble is nothing if not a food lover. The Off Menu podcast, which he hosts with fellow comedian James Acaster, sees celebrities from all flavours of fame pitching their ‘dream menu’. The show has produced surprisingly emotional and intimate conversations from some of the world’s biggest stars. After all, food is an inherently emotional topic. “Sometimes they pick a dreadful menu. We’ve had it many times. But if there's an emotional or funny story behind it, I'm always on board.”
Gamble is well-positioned to sit at the table during conversations around food and body image. Over his lifetime, he’s seen himself go from a self-professed ‘lovely fat little boy’, to getting diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 13, to achieving a dramatic seven-stone weight loss in his early twenties.
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His fluctuating weight means he’s lived in many versions of his own body. His diabetes diagnosis means it remains a relationship made of constant, unending maintenance. “It’s a lot of mental effort,” Gamble sighs. “It's like having another job. A 24-hour job.
“Your pancreas is still producing insulin, whereas my pancreas is an absolutely useless bit of kit. It's completely dead. It's just floating around in there.”
Diabetes is when the pancreas fails to produce enough or any insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels by turning glucose from food into energy. People with diabetes have to constantly monitor their blood sugar levels, which can go up or down depending on diet, exercise, sleep, and even emotional state, and inject insulin daily.
Gamble characterises his glucose levels like a puppy: excited, unpredictable, and troublesome. Sometimes the puppy’s having a nap – that’s a great, easy day. But other times, particularly when other factors get involved (like, say, lack of sleep from being on a comedy tour, or the adrenaline of walking out onstage), “it decides to kick off, and I have to ultra-manage my type 1.”
When he first started doing stand-up, Gamble didn’t plan on speaking about his health. But the more he let the outer world into his inner world, the more positive the response. It can be a really lonely disease, he says. People always like to hear that they’re not alone.
He’s wary, however, of the trend of oversharing about health issues online. “It used to be that people only posted their victories, but then they realised they could post their flaws, too, which somehow got co-opted into something very squeaky clean, like: ‘We all need to talk about mental health, guys.’ I’m like: ‘No, I don't wanna talk about it with you. You seem really annoying.’”
Listen to the full episode of Well Enough, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to hear more from Ed Gamble about touring with a chronic illness, male body image, and how technology has transformed diabetes care.
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