Secrets of the Men at the Olympic Gym

The Adonis Complex
by Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D., Katherine A. Phillips, M.D., Roberto Olivardia, Ph.D.

A HEALTH CRISIS THAT STRIKES MEN OF ALL AGES.

Trying everything from compulsive weight lifting to steroids, more and more boys and men are taking the quest for physical perfection beyond the bounds of normal behavior. The Adonis Complex — the groundbreaking book that first gave a name to this phenomenon and sparked nationwide interest in the subject — identifies for the first time the symptoms and warning signs of this dangerous problem, including:

• An obsession with exercise, sometimes to the exclusion of all other activities

• Binge eating, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia

• The abuse of steroids, muscle-building supplements, and diet aids

But perhaps more important, it offers readers an explanation of the underlying causes of the Adonis complex, together with hands-on advice for those who have experienced body obsessions themselves, or who see these problems in a boy or man they love.

Chapter 1

It is 6 P.M. on a warm spring evening in a small city ten miles west of Boston. In an industrial park near the highway, the two-storied, white-brick Olympic Gym is surrounded by nearly half an acre of parking, but the lot is overflowing with cars. Some are old Fords and Chevys belonging to students at the nearby college; others are the pickups and delivery trucks of tradesmen and service men who've stopped to lift weights after work. There are also pristine Corvettes and Porsches, a Mercedes or two, and half a dozen BMWs. Every social class in America has come here to work out.

Inside, the frenetic beat of "Get Ready for This" is punctuated by the occasional clanging of a weight stack on a machine, or a 45-pound plate being loaded onto a bar. Although the gym has half an acre of floor space, it still seems crowded. Groups of weightlifters cluster around the cables and the squat racks; others wait to use the lat pull-down machine or the Roman chair. A blond-haired twenty-six-year-old trainer instructs a prominent Boston attorney on the fine points of abdominal exercises. The gym's owner is out on the floor, giving a tour of the facilities to two young high school students who want to sign up. Wide-eyed and slightly frail-looking, they glance furtively at two big bodybuilders doing shoulder presses at the dumbbell rack nearby. Dozens of treadmills, StairMasters, stationary bicycles, and ergometers hum and whir on the balcony overhead. At the front counter, a handsome, highly muscular staff member, still in his teens, smiles brightly and mixes protein shakes in a blender as groups of clients joke together, read magazines, and search for their car keys among the hundreds of key rings hanging on the big pegboard on the wall. And this is only the evening crowd. At five-thirty tomorrow morning, twenty or thirty people will line up at the door, waiting eagerly for the gym to open. A hundred more will show up over the next couple of hours to lift weights before work. They will be followed by dozens of lunchtime regulars, with many stragglers in between.

The Olympic Gym has 2,400 members, and it is only one of several gyms in this small city of 60,000. All over the United States, in small towns, suburbs, and cities, big gyms like this one have their own large and faithful followings. In greater Boston alone, the major gyms collectively count well over 100,000 members — and some metropolitan areas have far more. As recently as twenty or thirty years ago, you would hardly ever see a crowd like this at any gym, with the possible exception of a few hard-core bodybuilding establishments in Southern California. But over the last two decades, gym memberships have exploded across America.

More than two-thirds of the people working out at the Olympic Gym tonight are men. Some wear old T-shirts and dirty cutoff shorts; others are carefully dressed in striped workout pants and Olympic Gym sweatshirts; a few wear deep-cut tank tops and tight spandex shorts, carefully chosen to show off their musculature. But the "muscleheads" are only a small minority of the gym community. Most of the members are ordinary-looking guys: they're a slice of America, ranging from squeaky-voiced boys of twelve or thirteen to gray-haired elders in their seventies.

You would think that the men at the Olympic Gym, or any gym, would be happy with their bodies. After all, they're here getting in shape rather than vegetating on the couch watching TV after work. But surprisingly, many aren't content at all. Many, in fact, harbor nagging anxieties about how they look. They don't talk about it publicly — and they may not even admit it to themselves — but they suffer silently from chronic shame and low self-esteem about their bodies and themselves. And many are obsessed with trying to change how they look. Beneath the seemingly benign exterior of this scene at Olympic, and among millions of other men around the country, a crisis is brewing.

If we begin to look carefully around the gym, we see hints of this crisis everywhere. John and Mark, both twenty-four-year-old graduate students at a nearby university, are at the counter debating what kinds of protein supplements to buy from the bewildering display of boxes that crowd the wall. Many of the boxes boast "supermale" images: photographs of smiling bodybuilders with massive shoulders, rock-hard pectorals, and impossibly sculptured and chiseled abdominal muscles. All of the supermales exude health, power, and sexuality. Not even the biggest bodybuilder at the Olympic Gym resembles these images, and John and Mark don't come close — even though they've been lifting weights for years and have spent thousands of dollars on nutritional supplements they hoped would thin their waists, stomachs, and buttocks, while swelling their chests, arms, and thighs. Privately, John and Mark are slightly embarrassed that they don't even begin to look like the guys in the pictures. But they've never admitted these concerns to anyone.

Supermale images appear not only on the boxes of protein powder, but throughout the gym. They're on magazine covers in the waiting area, on posters on the walls, and on a clothes advertisement posted on the bulletin board. John examines a magazine showing amazing "before" and "after" pictures of a middle-aged man who appears to have transformed in three months from a couch potato into a muscle-bound hunk, allegedly with the help of the food supplement advertised. John has tried a lot of food supplements himself, and he wonders why he still hasn't achieved the same Herculean image. All of these displays convey the same message to men: If you're a real man, you should look bigger and better than you do.

While John may feel as though he's the only guy at the gym who's so worried about his appearance and size, in reality he's surrounded by many others with similar secret feelings. But lost in his own thoughts of insecurity, John doesn't seem to notice all the other men who are covertly checking out their reflections in the big mirrors that line the walls. When they're sure that nobody is looking, some flex their arms, puff out their chests, or suck in their stomachs, almost as a reflex gesture. They don't say anything, of course. But many, like John, can't stop thinking about the discrepancy between the image in the mirror and the one they desperately want.

Alan, a math teacher from nearby Cambridge, notices, for the tenth or the twentieth time that day, the stubborn ring of fat that has accumulated around his abdomen in the years since college. Bob, a truckdriver, wears a baseball cap with the visor turned back, even though he's thirty-eight years old and the baseball-cap look is usually reserved for teenagers. But he'd rather wear the cap than expose his "prematurely" receding hairline. Meanwhile, John himself wears three layers of shirts — a T-shirt, then a regular shirt on top, and then a sweatshirt on top of that. He's sweating inside all of those layers, but they make him look bigger, and he's ashamed of how small he'd look without them. Bertrand, an attorney in his fifties who arrived a few minutes earlier in an immaculate, six-foot-high sport utility vehicle, despondently eyes his unappealing reflection in the mirror next to the drinking fountain. Above the drinking fountain, a poster of a famous bodybuilder twice his size, majestically posing on a rocky summit in the desert, stares back at him.

These are men who have achieved success in their careers; some are leaders in their community. They come from different classes, races, and sociological backgrounds. But they are all victims of a relentless message: You don't look good enough. Most of the time, men are unable to talk to each other about this message and the inferiority it makes them feel. So the message gets louder, the problem becomes bigger, and the isolation grows deeper.

Three college students arrive and head into the locker room. They're laughing and joking with each other, exchanging gossip about a party last weekend, while they get ready to go out onto the gym floor. But once they're in the locker room, none of them actually takes off his clothes in front of the others. Although they haven't shared their feelings with one another, one of the young men is terribly ashamed of the acne scars on his back. Another is convinced he's too fat, and he's especially upset at the "female" fat that he thinks has accumulated under his nipples. The third privately worries that his penis is too small. Even though they've been good friends for years, none of these young men has felt comfortable enough to reveal these secret concerns to any other person.

MALE BODY IMAGE OBSESSION:
A TROUBLING DOUBLE BIND

In our research at Harvard and Brown Medical Schools, and in studies collaborating with scientists across the country and overseas, the three of us have met countless otherwise "normal" boys and men who share these same feelings of inadequacy, unattractiveness, and even failure. By interviewing hundreds of men working out at gyms, and compiling our collective clinical experience with the hundreds more who have seen us at our offices, we've learned that men like John, Alan, Bob, Bertrand, and the three college students represent a broad and growing group who feel insecure and anxious — even paralyzed — by how they look. Society is telling them now, more than ever before, that their bodies define who they are as men. Because they find it impossible to meet this supermale standard, they are turning their anxiety and humiliation inward.

On the surface, most of the boys and men we've talked with, and the millions of other men like them across the country and around the globe, lead what appear to be regular, well-adjusted lives. In fact, the vast majority would never dream of going to see a mental health professional. But behind the smiling, behind the cheerful athletic bravado, many of these men worry about their looks and their masculinity. Some are even clinically depressed, and many are intensely self-critical. Because these men carry a secret that they're uncomfortable sharing even with their closest loved ones, their self-doubts can become almost toxic, insidiously eating away at their self-esteem and self-confidence as men.

Indeed, many of these men, we believe, are caught in a double bind they can neither understand nor escape. On the one hand, they're increasingly surrounded with media images of masculine perfection — not just here in the gym, but in advertisements, on television, in the movies. And if this alone weren't enough to make them feel inadequate about their bodies, they're also bombarded with messages from burgeoning multibillion-dollar industries that capitalize upon their body insecurities. These "male body image industries" — purveyors of food supplements, diet aids, fitness programs, hair-growth remedies, and countless other products — now prey increasingly on men's worries, just as analogous industries have preyed for decades on the appearance-related insecurities of women.

But the problem gets compounded further. Women, over the years, have gradually learned — at least to some extent — how to confront society's and the media's impossible ideals of beauty. Many women can now recognize and voice their appearance concerns, speaking openly about their reactions to these ideals, rather than letting them fester inside. But men still labor under a societal taboo against expressing such feelings. Real men aren't supposed to whine about their looks; they're not even supposed to worry about such things. And so this "feeling and talking taboo" adds insult to injury: to a degree unprecedented in history, men are being made to feel more and more inadequate about how they look — while simultaneously being prohibited from talking about it or even admitting it to themselves.

And so, trapped between impossible ideals on the one side and taboos against feeling and talking on the other, millions of boys and men are suffering. For some, body image concerns have grown into outright psychiatric disorders, ruining their own lives and often the lives of those who care about and love them. And for every boy or man with a full-scale body image disorder, there are many more with milder cases of the same body obsessions — not disabling in any way, but still enough to hurt.

THE ADONIS COMPLEX:
MEN UNHAPPY WITH THEIR BODIES

We call this syndrome the "Adonis Complex." In Greek mythology, Adonis was half man and half god — the ultimate in masculine beauty. So beautiful was his body that he won the love of Aphrodite, queen of the gods. But Persephone, who had raised Adonis, refused to give him up to Aphrodite. So Zeus, the king of the gods, brokered a deal: Adonis would spend four months out of every year in the underworld with Persephone, four months with Aphrodite, and four months on his own. It is said that he chose to spend his own personal four months with Aphrodite as well.

Throughout the centuries, many a great artist has attempted to depict the physical perfection of Adonis. Most famously, the Renaissance painter Titian shows him about to go hunting with his dogs, with Aphrodite clutching his body in her arms. The body of Adonis presumably represents the ultimate male physique imaginable to a sixteenth-century artist — but Titian's Adonis looks fat and out of shape in comparison to the men pictured on the boxes of protein powder at the Olympic Gym.

We should note that "Adonis Complex" isn't an official medical term, and it doesn't describe any one body image problem of men. We use it in this book to refer to an array of usually secret, but surprisingly common, body image concerns of boys and men. These concerns range from minor annoyances to devastating and sometimes even life-threatening obsessions — from manageable dissatisfaction to full-blown psychiatric body image disorders. In one form or another, the Adonis Complex touches millions of boys and men — and inevitably, the women in their lives.

Nowadays, it seems, increasing numbers of boys and men, including some of those lifting weights tonight at the Olympic Gym, have become fixated on achieving a perfect, Adonis-like body. Take Scott, for example. He's a twenty-six-year-old personal trainer at the gym. Right now, he isn't training anybody because it's his own time to lift. He's just started his leg routine — three sets of squats, two sets of leg presses, two or three sets of leg extensions on a Nautilus machine, three sets of leg curls on another machine, and then on to some hack squats, leg abductions, and side leg raises. The whole routine will take him an hour and a half, and then he still has to do his calves for another half hour after that. He's working out alone, because he doesn't like any distractions to come between him and the weights.

To a casual observer, Scott seems like a perfect picture of fitness and health. Five feet nine inches tall, with shortly cropped dark brown hair and handsome facial features, Scott weighs 180 pounds and has only 7 percent body fat, making him leaner than at least 98 percent of American men his age. Beneath his worn gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, he has the proportions of a Greek statue. He has a 31-inch waist, a "six-pack" of sculptured abdominal muscles, a 46-inch chest, and shoulders as big as grapefruits. But surprisingly, and unknown to even many of his closest friends, Scott constantly fears that he isn't big enough.

As a result, Scott has surprisingly low self-esteem. He puts all his hopes and dreams into his workouts and not into his daily life. This makes him withdraw from others and hold himself back from social situations he would otherwise enjoy. Although women are enormously attracted to Scott, he secretly thinks he isn't really big enough or masculine enough to appeal to them. In fact, he doesn't have a girlfriend right now, partly because his self-image is so poor and his confidence about dating so crippled.

Scott came to see us at our research laboratory in response to a notice we put on the bulletin board at the Olympic Gym, looking for bodybuilders who weren't satisfied with their physiques. In this study, we were comparing male bodybuilders who were insecure about their appearance with those who felt comfortable with how they looked. The study involved an office visit in which we measured each man's height, weight, and body fat, had him fill out some questionnaires, and then interviewed him about his body image and other psychological issues.

When Scott arrived for his interview, he was ill at ease, almost embarrassed to be coming to see us for such a study. "You've really had a lot of guys who've called about your ad?" he asked. He was surprised when we told him that we'd already seen many men like himself.

Scott took a chair, seeming a little relieved. He wore loose cotton pants with a drawstring at the waist, and an oversized blue sweatshirt with a bodybuilding logo on the back. The words TAKE NO PRISONERS were emblazoned under a figure of a muscled bodybuilder wearing combat fatigues.

Scott soon grew relaxed and told us his story in a warm, soft-spoken, almost self-effacing manner. An honors graduate of a prestigious New England college and holder of a business degree, Scott was highly educated. But his heart, it turned out, had never been in business.

"I started going to the gym fairly regularly when I was in college," he said. "But I don't think it was until I started business school that it became an obsession. I remember, one day when I was in business school, looking at myself in the mirror and hating how I looked. I started wondering how I'd ever tolerated what I looked like when I was back in college. Gradually, I got more and more fixated on getting my time in the gym each day, and I got more and more impatient with all of the demands at school. The other guys were all talking about companies that they wanted to work for, and how much money they were going to make, but I could never seem to get into it."

By the time Scott graduated from business school, his body obsession dominated his life. "I had several good job offers," he continued, "but I just couldn't picture myself working in an office. I was afraid that if I was forced to sit behind a desk all day, I'd turn into a fat slob. In fact, even at school, I couldn't sit in front of a computer screen for more than about fifteen minutes before I started worrying that I wasn't getting any exercise."

During his graduate studies, Scott worked as a personal trainer at a local health club. After business school, it became his full-time job. "This probably sounds strange," he said, "but it was the only job I could think of that gave me enough time to do my own training."

He paused and studied our faces for several seconds, seeming to fear we would have a negative reaction to what he had said. Instead, we asked questions to hear more about and understand his concerns.

"Did people criticize you for not going on to a business career?" we asked.

"Everybody," he said with resignation. "Especially my mother, and also my girlfriend at that time. They just couldn't understand why I'd throw away my years of education to work at a gym. I guess it does seem a little weird. But I couldn't imagine going back to a business job now. I guess I've just become too wrapped up with working out."

As the interview progressed, Scott began to reveal the full extent of his preoccupations. "If you could see what I was thinking about during the day, ninety percent of the time it would have something to do with either my weightlifting, my diet, or the way I look. I can't go past a mirror without posing just for a minute to check out my body — as long as I'm sure nobody's watching. I even check myself out when I see my reflection in a store window or car window." He laughed nervously. "Sometimes when I'm in a restaurant, I even study my reflection in the back of a spoon."

Most of the time, Scott explained, he sees his reflection as small and puny, even though he's actually massively built. "I know it sounds silly," he said, "but there are times that even on hot summer days, after getting a bad shot of myself in the mirror, I'll put on heavy sweatshirts to cover up my body because I think I don't look big enough." For the same reason, he explained that he almost always wears heavy sweats when working out at the gym. He sometimes even turns down invitations to go to a swimming pool or the beach, for fear that when he takes his shirt off, people will notice him and think he's too small.

"How would you feel if you were forced to miss working out for a day?" we asked.

He looked shocked. "I'd probably go bananas and start breaking things. In fact, one day last winter there was a blizzard and I couldn't get out of my house to go to the gym. I felt trapped. I got so frustrated from not being able to work out that I put on my weight belt and started bench-pressing the furniture in my living room. My girlfriend thought I was crazy."

"Has your relationship with your girlfriend been affected by your weightlifting preoccupations?"

Scott fell silent, and for a brief moment, tears seemed to form in his eyes. "Actually, my girlfriend broke up with me because of my weightlifting. It got to be too much for her. Sarah could never really understand why I needed to go to the gym or why it mattered so much to me what I looked like. I'd ask several times a day whether she thought I looked big enough or muscular enough. I guess she got pretty tired of my asking her. She also complained a lot because she said I was too inflexible. She'd want to go out and do something, and I'd say that I couldn't because I needed to go to the gym and train. But I'd warned her that I was that way. I told her that when we first started living together: the gym comes first, my diet second, and she was third. I guess she couldn't take being in third place anymore. And I don't really blame her.

"It's weird," he continued. "I think the truth is that I actually thought Sarah would break up with me if I didn't work out enough. I actually thought she'd leave me for some bigger guy. But the real reason she left me was because I was so caught up in working out that I didn't do anything or go anyplace with her. She told me that I was screwed up and that our relationship was getting 'lost.' When I think about it, I guess maybe she was right."

"Why do you think you have such intense feelings about your body and about working out?" we asked.

"I don't know. I guess I've really never stopped to think about just how much this muscle thing has affected my life. At first, it was a healthy thing, wanting to pursue a healthy lifestyle and be in shape. But now, it's gotten out of control. It's a trap. I can't get out of it."

"Have you ever considered some type of therapy to look at your feelings about your body?"

"Yeah, I've thought about it sometimes, but it would never work. Someone who doesn't lift weights himself would never understand." As he spoke, Scott flexed his arm unconsciously.

Over the last several years, we've interviewed many men with Scott's condition. We call it "muscle dysmorphia" — an excessive preoccupation with body size and muscularity. Many of these men, like Scott, revealed that this preoccupation had spiraled out of control and profoundly affected their lives — causing them to change their careers, or destroying relationships with people they loved. But practically none of them had sought treatment for their condition — usually because they doubted that any type of professional would actually understand or be able to help them.

Copyright © 2000 by Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D., Katharine A. Phillips, M.D., and Roberto Olivardia, Ph.D.

About the Author

Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

Katherine A. Phillips, M.D., is an associate professor of psychiatry at Brown University School of Medicine, director of Butler Hospital's Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Body Image Program, and the author of The Broken Mirror: Understanding and Treating Body Dysmorphic Disorder. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Roberto Olivardia, Ph.D., is a clinical research fellow at Harvard Medical School. He lives in Malden, Massachusetts.