Dave Maggard, 35, works at the YMCA as a maintenance supervisor, but you won’t catch him working out in the gym there–or anywhere else.
“I’m afraid to,” Maggard said.
Though healthy at 6 foot 1 and 195 pounds, Maggard is afraid of slipping back into an obsession with bodybuilding that began in 1989. He weighed just 165 pounds then.
But after four months of taking steroids and adhering to an intense exercise ritual, Maggard beefed up to 210 pounds, working out for two hours in the morning, two hours on his lunch break and four hours at night.
By 1991, he weighed 276 pounds and had a 50-inch chest. When he walked down the street in Lexington, Ky., people would stop and stare. Maggard loved the attention.
“If I wasn’t sore enough, I’d get up in the middle of the night and lift again,” Maggard said.
He eventually landed in therapy and got his obsession under control. When he started working at the YMCA, people would ask him to work out.
Maggard would say no, explaining that he had an addiction. It didn’t have a name then, so Maggard said, “I told them I had the opposite of anorexia. I never thought I was big enough.”
Maggard compared working at the YMCA to an alcoholic working in a bar, but he won’t leave because he enjoys his job. “I just know my boundaries now; I know I can’t work out,” he said.
Maggard’s story–with the exception that he sought treatment–is the classic tale of a person with muscle dysmorphia, also known as “reverse anorexia” or “bigorexia.”
People with body dysmorphia, a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, can be fixated on a variety of body parts, such as noses, feet or breasts.
Muscle dysmorphia, in which sufferers are fixated on their muscle size, was branded earlier this decade by Dr. Harrison Pope, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and his fellow researchers at Brown University and Keele University in England.
Pope, who specializes in working with anorexia patients, blames the media and fitness trends for the new expression of the old compulsive pathology. Sufferers are mostly men.
“The ideal male body image,” Pope said, “has grown more muscular over the years, evidenced by movie stars and men in magazines.”
According to Robert Olivardia, one of the researchers on Pope’s muscle dysmorphia study, the warning signs of muscle dysmorphia are:
– Working out for more than two hours a day.
– Anxiety over missing a workout.
– Meticulous control of food and beverage intake, often avoiding restaurants.
– Elaborate rituals in which a man examines, measures or weighs his body.
– Sacrifice of professional and social life to spend more time at the gym.
“And no matter how small they are,” Olivardia said, “they are preoccupied with a sense that they are very small.”
Olivardia gathered subjects for a muscle dysmorphia study by posting notices in 20 Boston gyms that asked: “Do you lift weights regularly and think you’re too small?”
One respondent–who was 5 foot 2 and 250 pounds–told Olivardia, “I’m not even big enough to think I’m small.”
Dwayne Carr, owner of Powerhouse Gym on Richmond Road in Lexington, said he sees men with symptoms of muscle dysmorphia “all the time.”
While not every bodybuilder has an obsession with his physique, Carr knows that leading a balanced life can be a challenge. The 5-foot-9 gym owner weighs 196 pounds today, but at his bulky peak, he weighed 225.
“I was really obsessed with it,” Carr said. “I lifted and lifted. I spent four or five hours in the gym.”
So today, Carr restricts his workouts to 90 minutes a day. And he works hard to keep his interests balanced, such as spending time with his family.
“It’s a self-esteem issue,” Carr said. “When you see these younger kids starting to do it, you realize there’s a cost. It takes a lot of mental strain to be able to lift and lift and lift and inflict that kind of pain on yourself.”
Although Carr knows his gym feeds the intimidating bodybuilder male image, he agrees with Pope that the beefier male prototype is partly to blame for muscle dysmorphia.
And men, Carr said, are as susceptible to obsessing about their physical attractiveness as women. “We have the same types of insecurities,” he said.
