To all the possible afflictions, add the specter of contracting Barbell Blues.
Yes, it could be relevant now that the holidays are over and you’ve pledged, once again, to shape up. Admit it: You have been mulling a membership at the nearby health club, right?
If so, you might be warned that there could be trouble afoot, or at least in your abs, biceps and psyche, according to the Jan.-Feb. Sciences, a high-brow publication from the New York Academy of Sciences.
“In a study sure to cause an outbreak of schadenfreude among the meek, psychiatrists have confirmed my suspicion: bodybuilding can be a disease.”
This insight might be traced to a recent academic exercise (no pun intended) by psychiatrist Harrison Pope Jr. of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and a Pope graduate student. They sought to study subjects in gyms, posting signs whose questions included, “Do you lift weights regularly but still think you are small?”
Pope concluded that for most lifters, the endeavor is quite healthy, if not necessarily satisfying to the soul, while for some others it was a “dangerous obsession.”
“They would work out five, six hours a day,” he says. “They would lose jobs and loved ones, abuse steroids and still feel like they weren’t big enough.”
Some men complained of still feeling small, while others apparently actually were convinced they were physically smaller than they actually were.
At the same time, two psychiatrists at the Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, R.I., were doing similar work. The Brown duo discerned that women were given to obsessive behavior, with “84 percent morbidly preoccupied with being lean and muscular, and nearly half had taken jobs in gyms to accommodate their regimen.”
The two groups decided to combine their research, publish together and coin a name for what they claim is a new psychiatric disorder: “muscle dysmorphia.”
Pope speculates that the origin of this purported malady is similar to that found in genetic predispositions toward, for example, repetitive washing of one’s hands. It is not clear how many bodybuilders have this disorder.
Pope doesn’t think very many do, but Alan Klein, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, disagrees after spending seven years studying bodybuilders.
“As long as you don’t accept the bodybuilders’ rationalizations, you’ll find (muscle dysmorphia) in all the big gyms, where most of the people are steroid abusers, and in every gym rat. It’s pretty widespread.”
No surprise, the social scientists find a lot of muscle-building to be a defense against low self-esteem, albeit not a very strong one.
“We are talking about a subculture that deals in spectacle and illusion,” Klein says. “All you have to do is tell a bodybuilder, `Gee, I thought you were bigger last week,’ and he may go into a tailspin.”
I’m glad I stick to jogging and swimming pools. Burkhard Bilger, the magazine’s deputy editor and author of this short piece, probably agrees.
A self-described wimp, he always thought bodybuilding was weird and, “between the days of Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, I reassured myself, something went terribly wrong: machismo grew into a kind of mania.”
Now, if the pointy heads of academe are to be believed, it may even be a disease.
Quickly: January Texas Monthly has interesting musings on the limited national audience for unabashed Texas liberal and syndicated talk radio host Jim Hightower, citing the dominance of conservative-minded listeners, the popularity of emerging, quickie advice formats (Laura Schlessinger, among others) and how “his professional Texan act may finally be wearing thin.” . . . In Jan. 18 New Republic, University of California historian Alan Taylor uses a re-publication of George Washington’s writings by the Library of America to consider why it is we don’t seem to think of him much. While there are lots of considerations of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, Washington has become “alien to the twentieth-century sensibility precisely because he was so iconic to our predecessors, who believed in heroes on the grand scale.”
