The dots which Frank Turner connects up are clearly suggested by his Index notation at page 725, "Anorexia, 434-435. See also Asceticism; Fasting; Homosexuality."

For male anorexia we are invited to read, inter alia, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, FROM FASTING SAINTS TO ANOREXIC GIRLS: THE HISTORY OF SELF-STARVATION (Longon: Athlone, 1994, pp. 181-217). This is a translation of a 1994 German translation and abridgement of an original Dutch text whose date is not given. Pp. 181-217 comprise Chapter 10, "The Victorian Roots of Anorexia Nervosa."

This book says that medieval fasting by saints was done for utterly different motives from those of 19th Century fashion setters like Lord Byron or Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary. The authors caution against retroactive applications of contemporary theories of self-starvation ("reliable retrospective diagostics" p.221), There are worlds of differences between saints and anorexics (p. 222). "There is no trace of saints 'dieting' from a fear of becoming fat" (p. 221). Worth trying to apply retroactively to Newman's age are two books by American whose contents are sketched between pp. 222 and 226:

--Rudolf M. Bell. HOLY ANOREXIA. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1988.

--Caroline Walker Bynum. HOLY FEAST AND HOLY FAST: THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOD TO MEDIEVAL WOMEN. Berkeley. University of California Press. 1987.

As for asceticism those influenced by Richard Hurrell Froude saw England in need of "some stricter religion." Any Christian country according to Newman requires either dissent or monachism; "so make your choice." (Turner, NEWMAN, p. 158)

Frank Turner inconclusively explores "Monasticism, Homosexuality and Celibacy" (pp. 425-436). Two of Turner's sources throw light on the age's debating over manliness. Newman maintained an earlier English devotion to the heroic, self-denying virtus of Aeneas.  See James Eli Adams, DANDIES AND DESERT SAINTS: STYLES OF VICTORIAN MASCULINITY, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995). Attention goes to Lord Tennyson, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Walter Pater, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde and others. 

The extensive treatment of Charles Kingsley and 'muscular Christianity' is justified in a second important source, Susan Chitty, THE BEAST AND THE MONK: A LIFE OF CHARLES KINGSLEY, New York, Mason/Charter, 1975.  Frances Eliza Grenfell's attraction toward an Anglican sisterhood had almost cost Kingsley his future wife. If the life-affirming, 1960-ish, rollicking, sensuous married sex life which the Kingleys enjoyed be validly Christian, then true Christianity, to Kingsley at least, has no room for the flesh-hating monasticism, fasting, celibacy and self-protective reserve in truth-telling embodied by John Henry Newman and many of his younger Tractarian disciples.

Oliver S. Buckton (SECRET SELVES: CONFESSION AND SAME-SEX DESIRE IN VICTORIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Chapel Hill, U. of NC Press, p. 222, n.8) thinks that Newman clearly (1) preferred the face-to-face company of males, (2) had strong emotional attachments to one particular male friend more than another but was never into (3) physical sexual contact with any of them. Thus, JHN exemplified the first and second of "three levels" of homsexuality" in the typology of W. S. F. Pickering,  ANGLO-CATHOLICISM: A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS AMBIGUITY, Londaon, Routledge, 1989. But Buckton also prefers the terminology of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, BETWEEN MEN: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MALE HOMOSOCIAL DESIRE, New York, Columbia U.P., 1985.  Homosociality, per Buckton, is a more adequate term for the male camaraderie of Pickering's "first level" of homosexuality. (July 3, 2003)

Newman generally seems to "like" this world mainly because it points to a better and higher world beyond. But there are fleshly elements which he seems distinctly to dislike. Thus he called for a study of "Jensenist saints." And in an unsent 1835 letter to Henry Wilberforce (who was afraid to tell Newman of his coming marriage, Newman said:
 

"the time is fixed for your changing your state and commencing to be a citizen of this world that now is." And March 25, 1840 he wrote: "I could not take that interest in this world which marriage requires. I am too disgusted with this world."