BYMATT GAGNE, MILES RAYMERANDDAN SIMMONS
PHOTOGRAPHY BYROBERT MAXWELLS TAT E
OF MINDMIRROR
,
MIRROR
,
ON THE
GYM WALL
Cultural expectations about manhood are
fuelling a silent epidemic of eating disorders
and body image disturbance in men across
the country. Can you recognise the warning
signs? Do you see any of them in yourself?
C
hris Marvin had a secret
morning ritual that he practised
at uni. Sunlight creeping
through drawn shades, he’d roll
out of bed around 7am with a pounding head.
After making sure his door was locked, he’d
rummage through drawers and the depths of
his mini fridge. Then, on a white marble desk
that would have been pristine if not for the
Thrasher and Mayhem stickers, he’d line up
everything he needed to get through the day.
First he’d pop a cafeine pill to feel
alive; then he’d chase it with a couple of
painkillers – a preemptive strike against the
grind of training two hours a day, seven days
a week. (“There is no rest muscle,” he’d tell
himself.) A hit from his bong would help
calm his racing heart. Instead of water, he’d
pour a glass of whiskey to wash down his
preworkout supplements. Then he’d inject
himself in either his glutes or deltoids with
black market anabolic steroids. After putting
his supplies back in their hiding places, he’d
ride his bike 800m from his of-campus share
house to uni, where he studied – wait for it –
exercise science.
“A kinesiology major doing all that shit? Iwas a walking oxymoron,” says Marvin,
now 32. Nothing could keep him out of the
gym, not even injuries that would eventually
require surgery. “I’d have my training partner
hold my shoulder in its socket so I could
do heavy preacher curls. In my mind I
was indestructible.”
By the time he was 25 and working odd
jobs, Marvin weighed 95kg, and his back
rippled like the Hulk’s. When he eventually
cycled of the steroids and ramped up his
use of synthetic marijuana, ecstasy, sleeping
pills and Valium – on top of the booze and
painkillers – he dropped down to 64kg and
fell into a deep depression. After one wild
bender, he spent more than a week locked
down in a psych ward.
“I had done so many drugs that I didn’t
sleep for eight days coming down of them,”
he says. “From there, I went to a cognitive
behavioural therapy program, and that’s
where they pointed out that I had muscle
dysmorphia. I’d never heard of it before. I
was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’”
If you look closely, you might see a bit of
yourself in Marvin. From a young age, men
are taught to be bigger, stronger and faster,and to ight through pain. Anger? Self-
loathing? Anxiety? Who needs a therapist
when you have the gym? And who among us
hasn’t tried to ix our inward insecurities by
addressing our outward appearance?
Unlike Marvin, you probably don’t have a
mental disorder, much less a substance abuse
problem that you developed to cope with it.
Muscle dysmorphia, or MD, is a little-known
psychological condition irst described in
scientiic literature in the late 1990s. Because
formal diagnostic criteria deine MD as a
subset of a broader group, body dysmorphic
disorder, it’s impossible to know how many
people are afected.
But the current diagnostic parameters can
apply to millions of people who just aren’t
satisied with their physique. Those who
sufer from so-called “bigorexia” obsess over
their appearance, perceiving themselves to
be insuiciently muscular even though they
are indeed muscular, if not ripped. “People
would give me compliments,” Marvin says,
“but in my head I was like, ‘This part sucks’.
I was super insecure even though I looked
better than most people. I would almost give
myself dry heaves thinking about my body.”