Three months after one of the worst days of my divorce, I did something I hadn't done in years. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and really looked at the man staring back. Forget the quick glance while brushing my teeth or straightening a tie. I mean a long, honest look.

He wasn't pretty, brother. Stress had carved new lines around his eyes. Money worries had parked themselves on his forehead. His shoulders slumped in a way that announced to the whole world, "This guy has lost."

Divorce shows up on your body. Researchers can measure it in your face, your waistline and the hours you sleep. Most men over 40 notice the change and then quietly look away, because caring about your appearance feels like vanity when your life is on fire. I'm making the case for looking anyway. The man in that mirror has to walk into a courtroom, a job interview, a first date and your kid's next basketball game. He deserves some care.

Every August, thousands of twins pour into a small town called Twinsburg, Ohio, for the Twins Days Festival. (It's real. Look it up.) A team of plastic surgeons led by Dr. Bahman Guyuron of University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland set up shop there. They photographed 186 pairs of identical twins and had each twin fill out a detailed questionnaire about their lives. Then an independent panel studied the photos and estimated how old each person looked.

Identical twins start out with the same genetic blueprint for aging. So when one looks older than the other, life is doing the work. The study, published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2009, found that twins who had been divorced looked nearly two years older than siblings who were married, single or even widowed. Guyuron pointed to stress as a likely common denominator.

Same genes. Same parents. Same birthday. The divorce still found its way onto the face.

Quick question. What did you eat for dinner last night? Did you cook it? Or did it come in a box, a bag, or through a drive-thru window while you sat in the parking lot scrolling your phone?

I grew up eating at my grandmother's table. Grandma Elise was from Georgia, and nobody walked into her house without hearing, "Are you hungry?" Greens, baked ham, macaroni and cheese, rice and beans, and if you were lucky, a slice of her lemon meringue pie. That table taught me what a meal is supposed to feel like.

Plenty of divorced men go from a shared table to eating standing over the kitchen sink. The research shows exactly where that leads. Cambridge researchers tracked 11,577 adults between about 40 and 78 in England's EPIC-Norfolk study. Their paper, "Marital Transitions and Associated Changes in Fruit and Vegetable Intake," was published in Social Science & Medicine. Media coverage of the study reported that men whose marriages ended cut their daily fruits and vegetables by roughly 25 percent compared with men who stayed married. The women's diets barely moved.

Then comes the scale. Ohio State sociologists Dmitry Tumin and Zhenchao Qian followed more than 10,000 Americans from 1986 to 2008. They found that men who divorced were 63 percent more likely to put on a large amount of weight than men who stayed married. The risk was strongest for men who divorced after 30, and it grew with age. For a man who stands 5'10", WBUR reported, "large" meant about 21 pounds.

Twenty-one pounds. That's a Thanksgiving turkey strapped to your midsection, and you never even got the leftovers.

Divorce steals sleep. Lawyers, money, the empty side of the bed, the 2 a.m. replay of every argument. Your face keeps track of every hour you lose.

In a 2017 study published in Royal Society Open Science, Tina Sundelin and her colleagues at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet photographed volunteers twice. Once was after two normal nights of sleep. The other was after two nights of about four hours each. Strangers rated the sleep-deprived faces as less attractive and less healthy. Then came the kicker: they were also less interested in spending time with the tired-looking people.

Sundelin told The Guardian, "If someone looks less healthy, you are more likely to withdraw from them."

Let that one land. You may think people are pulling away because you're "the divorced guy." Some of them might be reacting to a face that hasn't had a decent night's sleep since mediation.

Every divorced man knows this outfit. Gray sweatpants. The hoodie with the mystery stain on the sleeve. Sneakers that have quietly given up. Add a haircut that's three weeks overdue and a beard that's less "style choice" and more "I stopped caring."

What you put on your body talks to your brain. In 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management published a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They called the effect "enclothed cognition." Participants wore a white coat. People told it was a doctor's coat paid closer attention on their tasks than people wearing the exact same coat described as a painter's coat. Same coat, different story, different performance.

So what has your wardrobe been telling your brain lately? If the answer is "the game's over," it's time to change the conversation.

Here's the thing. No player walks onto the court for a big game wearing flip-flops. How you take care of yourself is how you tell yourself you're still in the game.

When you look benched, you act benched. You skip the cookout. You leave your buddy's text unanswered. You decide dating can wait another year, and then another. You show up to your kid's school event looking like you slept in the car, and your kid notices, because kids always notice.

When you clean up, the door gets lighter. You say yes to the invitation. You reach out to the old colleague. You stand a little taller when you pick up your children. Your appearance is where confidence starts showing up in public, and confidence is what pulls you back into the world.

That day in front of my bathroom mirror, I didn't like everything I saw. But under the worry lines and the slump, I caught a glimpse of someone I'd almost forgotten. I saw the kid from the South Bronx who lost his father in Vietnam and still earned his way to Phillips Academy. I saw the man who had made it through every hard chapter before this one. Battered, bruised, and still standing.

That man is in your mirror too. He's been waiting for you to look up, wash your face, get some sleep and put on a clean shirt. Give him the care he's earned. He's the one who'll carry you back into the world.

Your move, brother. When's the last time you really looked?