The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys - Softcover

Pope Jr., Harrison G.

 
9780684869117: The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys
Softcover
ISBN 10: 068486911X ISBN 13: 9780684869117
Verlag: Free Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: Secrets of the Men at the Olympic Gym

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...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
068486911X
ISBN 13 
9780684869117
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
306
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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ISBN 10:  0684869101 ISBN 13:  9780684869100
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Hardcover