On Bodybuilding and Finding Happiness in a World of Superhero Physiques and Fitfluencers
Perhaps the best thing a guy can do to get better mental health and become more insecure.
Bodybuilding is Not Awesome
I don’t know why I decided this was a good topic, nor am I particularly inspired to write about this, but in my list of 50+ topics I plan to cover, this was on the list. My goal is to keep this under 5 minutes, and retroactively editing this, I totally failed.
Much like everyone who is into bodybuilding, I started bodybuilding to (try to) get girls. I came up during the Aesthetics era. Aesthetics means you’re both impressively muscular and shredded. I’m not talking abs, abs are easy, I’m talking peeled. Veins on abs. Veins on everything. For anyone who is into fitness at all, you know that being both impressively muscular and impressively lean is basically impossible unless you’re on the good stuff. You either look good in clothes or out of clothes, but not both. That is the bodybuilding platitude to internalize.
Anyway, yeah, if girls needed to be skinny, guys needed to be skinny AND muscular (which I just said is impossible). I remember we had this one guy in high school who hit puberty on time (on time to me is freshmen-sophomore year), and at a rally he took his shirt off to reveal (relatively big for a 16 year old) muscles AND abs. It’s still seared into my brain. Despite years of my brother calling me chubby through adolescence (I kinda was) (thanks Runescape/Guild Wars/Halo), that shirtless pep rally was the moment I developed a lot of real insecurity about what I looked like.
How I Got Body Dysmorphia
So that all sounds like a proper helping of terrible, and it was.
That hot piece of ass on the left with the sick guitar (thanks mom and dad) is me at the end of my freshman year of high school. I was in a Jonas Brothers/Panic at the Disco/Fall Out Boy cover band, and obviously that way really good for me socially. None of those bands were popular, especially among popular people.
I pretty much looked like this until halfway through my sophomore year, when I was maybe 6ft tall and got a set of pretty broad shoulders. That’s me on the far right. I was still chubby, and my voice was Jekyll-Hydeish.
This was also when I started getting very serious about mountain biking and weightlifting. I started a mountain biking team with a few guys in this photo, and we raced a bit, but this isn’t about mountain biking, and much like mountain biking, it distracted me from what mattered in life—bodybuilding.
Bodybuilding is Awesome
I towed a weird line in high school. I was smart enough to keep up with all the future Ivy League/Stanford/Not-Ivy-League-but-just-as-good-of-a-school kids, but I also had had an ample helping of bad OCD, gnarly truancy-causing Migraines, and a ton of insecurity around what I looked like. Everyone goes through stuff, so I’m not convinced I had it harder than anyone, but my life sucked, at least relative to many other points in my life, and I knew it.
That’s when I started working out.
Working out is the fastest way to develop a goal. And to me, goals that “feel possible but require work” ~= mental health for men.
Feeling lost? Get a goal that you give a shit about and go work toward it. Problem solved.
Bodybuilding was perfect because you don’t just get to look better, you get to feel that sweet drip of progress.
Within a year of that last photo, I had grown 4 or so inches, and had hopped on my first of many dirty bulks. I still wanted abs, needed abs even, and I definitely spent too much time trying to bulk and cut at the same time (impossible), but you can see some hints of muscle.
I still worshipped the aesthetics gods shown above (those guys literally went by Legends of Aesthetics, and would go on to be the literal first reps for Gymshark), but as a guy who really struggled to fit in or like anything about himself, I finally felt in control. You add weight to the bar, you see the popular guys at the gym and they recognize you, you get to taste testosterone. Is this nirvana?
My freshmen year of high school I had to share a locker with a guy who had somehow already hit puberty. I was looking at his muscles in aww and he called me gay; I still think about how I felt that day (it has been 15 years!). 2 years later, he was still bigger than me, but I wasn’t some scrawny kid with chubby cheeks, I was one of his kind with chubby cheeks (thanks dirty bulk). This definitely was nirvana.
College, Steroids, and The Dark Side of Bodybuilding
When I entered college, I was 6’4”, probably 185 lbs. I had put on maybe 15 lbs total of muscle (would have been much more, but I felt the need to spend 80% of my time cutting in high school).
Here’s me at a rush event for the greatest pyramid scheme on earth, Pi Kappa Alpha (I will absolutely be writing about that experience in another post). I look good here. Lean, kinda looks like I lift, happy.
I’ll tell you how I felt: fat, skinny, insecure about having my shirt off.
That spring I rushed Pike, and even though I was in the top house, with a popular brother in the house, an affable nature and accordingly tons of friends, I got no girls, and I thought it was my body and personality that was the problem.
You know who did get girls? This guy I pledged with named Matt. He was probably 5’8”, and while we probably had a similar amount of muscle, at 5’8”, he looked way bigger, and people always commented on how big he was. He also had a secret.
PEDs, Steroids, Pro-hormones, The Good Stuff
As my freshmen year wound down, I felt confused. I was one of the most popular freshmen on campus. Every sorority girl knew who I was, I was slightly infamous among the fraternities, and I was hanging out with Matt.
I mentioned working out, and within minutes, he shared that secret I alluded to 20 seconds ago: Anavar. Anavar is a prohormone. Prohormones are anabolic steroids that metabolize in the liver, meaning no injections. They used to be sold over the counter from sketchy websites. They are TERRIBLE for you—your piss turns orange from liver toxicity. Very bad news.
I didn’t take Anavar, but I did go home and google Pro-hormones. I ended up convincing my parents (who are pharmacists) that this was totally a good idea. While I now realize they had no choice but to capitulate given my age and blind-conviction (young people don’t know anything and can convince themselves of anything), I felt like I really sold it to them, and more importantly, to myself.
I ended up on Epistane, an “entry level” steroid (lol). Remember that OCD and insecurity. Well multiply it by like 4 and that’s what you get when you mess with your hormones.
You will be as strong as a bull, walk around with a pump, recover from workouts in hours, look huge, and feel like the worst version of yourself all the time.
It’s great except for all the bad parts.
I absolutely know there are dozens of people who met me this summer of classes and mayhem that still think poorly of me, and to add fuel to the reputational fire, pretty much all my gains went away as soon as I stopped.
(I don’t have any photos from this era thanks to a bad apple update that deleted almost everything from college, so just imagine a bigger, more out-of-breath version of the running guy).
Here’s something I never told anyone. I also almost bought DNP. DNP is a compound that metabolizes your fat. The dosages are tiny, making it very easy to literally cook yourself to death on. There are all sorts of stories, or at least that’s how I remember this. I didn’t do this because the website was hard to add a payment method. I still think about this and how bad it is to mix youthful ignorance and recklessness with useful poison.
Finding a Healthy Balance
I’d be lying if I said I have totally cracked the code on this, but I feel like I am mostly in a good place. I’ll take you through a short journey of what I’ve looked like through the years since.
That’s me senior year at 22. 200lbs-ish. I have good size, I could bench 225 for a relatively easy 10, deadlift 405 for 5 (sumo, I know, doesn’t count), and squat…erm…I wasn’t squatting. I remember wanting to bulk so that I could be an enforcer in rec sports hockey. I somewhat succeeded.
Here’s me at 23 during my masters:
Super cringy, I know. It’s funny, because I remember at this time I was convinced I was still fat. That is objectively insane to me. In the above, I’m what I would classify, as almost shredded. Shredded would be maybe 4 lbs lighter, but those would be a horrible 4 lbs.
I didn’t know how to make friends outside of alcoholism, so I had none and basically just went to class, ate chicken and vegetables, went to the gym, did homework, played guitar, repeat. It was a sad time in my life, and I didn’t even want friends because I worried I’d have to give up being shredded. If I wasn’t shredded, I couldn’t get a girl. Little did I know, having no testosterone from cutting all the time and being calorie-afraid to have fun was exactly how not to get a girl. Don’t be like me.
Below is 25ish. I’d probably gained some size by virtue of also gaining some fat, so hard to say if better or worse. I only really had access to 50 lbs dumbbells, but I was super consistent and really focused on stretch and tempo. I’d also just developed a severe case of Alopecia Areata from working 2 jobs and never stepping out of my hustle:
Me at 26, right after tearing my pec, and then after surgery and 6 weeks in a sling:
It took me maybe a year total to get my gains back, and since then it’s been a weird ride. I hung out at 195 for a while. Any time I’d creep up to 200, I’d do a cut, as I was always chiefly concerned with not losing my abs, which subsequently kept me from gaining any muscle.
I had a girlfriend for a bit and started a software company for a longer bit, but I never fell off the wagon (although I definitely had to shift priorities depending on where my life was at).
Now I’m 29 in late 2023. I’ve never not lifted at least 3x/week, but 2022 was tough with being a founder, tired workouts, inconsistent nutrition, continued auto-immune issues, and low(er) testosterone (taking Ls every day will do that to a man). I came into 29 smaller and fatter than I’d been in a long time, so I did what anyone would do when we shut down the company and got jobs—I bulked.
The first proper bulk in literally like 8 years was a strange experience. I went from 205 and somewhat muscular/lean to a huge 223 and with minimal abs in 4 months. I did 2 aggressive mini-cuts, one 4-week cut from 223 to 213, and one 2 week cut from 213 to 210. Now I’m 213ish post carb load, I’m nowhere near as strong as I’ve ever been, I’m achy from years under the iron, I’m probably the biggest I’ve been, I’m somewhat lean, BUT I FEEL GREAT.
A New Framework
This is not about body acceptance—if you are overweight, lose weight—but it is hopefully a good lesson to anyone who is anywhere along the bodybuilding journey I just described.
You probably look better than you think. You probably are less attractive to potential partners because of the self-esteem hit you are taking from obsessing about what you look like. You are probably missing out on being happy by always chasing a physique goal.
Life wasn’t designed to always be charging, or maybe it was, but you gotta pick your battles. I have a nasty habit of trying to perform 4 miracles at once, which makes me feel terribly overworked and dissatisfied all the time. Sure, you get small wins more often, but you rarely get the big wins that come with focus, and you get at least 4x as many Ls. The Ls are what hurt.
There’s an old adage for guys to get girls. Get in shape. Okay, it’s maybe not an adage, but you hear that a lot. I agree with it, but I think you should really narrow your focus so you don’t end up boiling the ocean. An ex-girlfriend of mine said something profound that stuck with me. She was a TikTok girl who worked at FAANG, so she rarely said anything profound (unwarranted burn, for she was young), making this one thing especially memorable. Biceps > Abs. And I agree.
Yeah, that’s the stupidest shit ever to build up to, but shoot, it’s true. As a guy, we were not made to be shredded. Look at photos from any point in history—even the bodybuilders were not that lean. And your friend who perpetually has abs—I guarantee he struggles to put on muscle. Obviously there are exceptions, but if you like bodybuilding, your primary focus should be on getting bigger and stronger, and only 10% of the time should you be thinking about getting smaller and weaker.
There are things I’d write if my mom wasn’t reading this, but I’ll just say: being muscular has done better for me than leanness ever did. Big biceps > shredded abs.
So Is Bodybuilding Awesome or Not?
Well, it depends. I love being at the gym. I love making progress. I love being muscular. I love seeing the work pay off. I love the attention I get (realistically it’s mostly dudes, but being respected among dudes is chill with me).
I don’t love how much time I spent chasing something what’s basically impossible.
I see a ton of young people caught in that trap. Some are getting some “help” like I did in college, many are trying to do it naturally only to be disappointed with either not reaching their goal, or getting there and realizing it is neither sustainable, nor worth it.
As a grown man who has come close to cracking the code, I promise you that people will still like you if you look 10% worse, shoot, they’ll like you more because you’ll feel 80% better.
Would you rather be the guy who looks immaculate and spins on that, or the guy who looks good and isn’t thinking about it. As a guy who has been both, pick the second one.