This week I’m giving a guest lecture on spotting the lies, cheats and fakes in the fitness industry and, as you can probably guess, I am not short on material.
So, at a somewhat frenzied pace, I’ve been putting together what I’ve started calling the ‘Bullshit Bible’ of fitness. Lest someone accuse me of being an edgy teenager using swearing for shock value, I am drawing from the philosophy of bullshit.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit distinguished between the liar and the bullshitter. The liar knows the truth and works to hide or obscure it. A bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t really care if what they say is true, only that it works. A liar knows what is true, a bullshitter doesn’t need to have any actual knowledge to BS someone. And fitness has quite a lot of them. It also has a lot of messages and marketing techniques that are recycled with varying degrees of truth, lies and bullshit, which we’ll soon dig into.
I’ll leave it to you to decide who’s lying and who’s bullshitting. Some of them make it very easy.
In Defence of Exercise
Exercising works. We know this. Going from no physical activity to some physical activity is one of the greatest things a human being can do for their health, strength and overall longevity.
This is still an important thing to stress. Physical activity is transformative. It does turn people’s bodies into marvelous spectacles and can induce incredible weight loss or muscle gain. The problem is that physical activity comes in two forms – the habits we have, and the industry that sells it to us.
That distinction is something we don’t spend enough time considering. Exercising in the gym is very different from a salesperson trying to convince you to buy a new supplement. We often times conflate the two but the truth is the ‘fitness industry’ goes far beyond impactful practices like coaching and gym memberships. It is an industry based on sales.
Here is where the gap for bullshit lives and thrives. You see oftentimes the person selling the product holds far more knowledge than the person buying it. And I’ll give some examples from my own life as proof.
When I first began exercising Joe Weider’s magazines convinced me that I needed an entire shelf full of supplements to build muscle. Instead of focusing on a sensible workout plan, I instead pestered my parents about protein powders, creatine, BCAAs etc. convinced that this was the secret.
When I ‘knew’ better, I decided it was time to get lean. Instead of dieting down slowly and sensibly, I followed a 12 weeks to six pack abs program by someone who seemed to be respectable. It amounted to four circuit workouts a week and a vague diet plan that didn’t work.
A decade later, I developed sciatica after a very minor hamstring tear while deadlifting. The pain was immmense and I struggled, genuinely, with placing my newborn down to sleep at night without turning it into a good morning movement. A functional movement specialist convinced me I had ‘weak glutes’ before an osteopath correctly identified that one hip was higher than the other (don’t slam your deadlifts down kids).
In each of those cases I went to someone who seemed to know what they were talking about. They had the knowledge and I had the need or the problem. That is where the lies and the bullshit can thrive.
And don’t get me wrong, good people and good products exist. My supplement addiction changed when I got a good one-to-one coach who instilled the fundamentals in me. I dieted down for a natural bodybuilding show with the same person and the osteopath cured a debilitating injury.
But I was taken in with the slickness of people’s marketing and their convincing messages. Here I’ve taken ten techniques that have sold exercise, diets and supplements since the nineteenth century and gives each one a historical case and a modern version.
I expected the modern half to be the fun part but that turned out to be the most depressing, because things hadn’t changed.
The Miraculous Before and After Photograph
Let’s start with one of my favorite old-timey salesman, Professor D. L. Dowd, who sold physical culture and a home exerciser to Americans in the 1880s. In 1886 Dowd published Physical Culture for Home and School and included in it a before and after transformation of himself. Plate I showed Dowd, aged twenty-three in 1878, before he began his own system of ‘scientific training’. Plate II showed him in 1882. He assured readers that both illustrations used the same pose and the same focus. His chest, he said, had gone from flat and sunken to full and round.
There was just one ‘wee’ problem. Both images reproduced in the book were engravings made from photographs, which gave the engraver some potential for ‘creative licence’. Dowd reported going from 138 to 162 lbs., ‘a gain of twenty-five pounds of muscular tissue’. My maths is terrible, but I think that’s twenty-four. Elsewhere in the same book, however, he claimed to have finished at 163 pounds. His height was similarly troublesome, with the book giving two different sets of measurements for his supposed one-inch growth.
Dowd’s Transformation Shot
A few years ago an Instagrammer called Jessica Pack posted a bikini transformation made from two photographs taken thirty seconds apart. She changed her posture and nothing else. Before that, Chris Bell did one of my favorite vignettes in Bigger Stronger Faster when he made his own supplement and did a before/after shoot in the same day. At least we’ve moved on from engravers right?
The Former Weakling
Tied to the before and after photograph is the story of the former weakling. Nearly every guru in the fitness industry seems to have started out as a wreck. George Barker Windship arrived at Harvard University in 1850 aged sixteen, five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet.
A keen but undernourished student, Windship was teased endlessly. When a bigger student threw his book down the stairs and continued tormenting him, Windship decided to go to the gym and build some ‘hurting bombs’, as Rocky fans would say.
When Windship told his story to the Atlantic Monthly in January 1862, the context was now very different. Windship was now strong and powerful, a qualified doctor and a touring strongman lecturing under the slogan ‘Strength is Health’. In October 1861 he lifted a platform holding twelve men at the town hall in Brighton, Massachusetts to showcase his strength. Over ten years later, in 1876, he died of a stroke at forty-two, which largely put an end to the ‘health lift’ machine he was selling. Still though, his story that once he was weak, but now he was cured, continued to resonate.
The ‘liver king’ Brian Johnson, has a similar story as told in his Netflix documentary about his rise to fame. He was once a weakling, and bullied, but through his own training system and principles he cast off his weakness to become a fully fledged man… who eats bull’s testicles. Sigh.
Modernity is Making Us Sick
In December 1902, a new British physical culture magazine called Vim opened with a warning. ‘The exigencies of modern life’, editor J. E. McLachlan wrote, placed ‘an increasing strain on the physical and nervous systems of the people’. Exhaustion and ‘degeneration’ were spreading, and Britain needed to improve its physique before things got worse. The answer, conveniently enough for a physical culture magazine, was physical culture. Modern life was making people weak, and exercise could put them right. Jolly good.
In April 2012, American standing-desk manufacturer OiC Innovations announced that ‘Sitting is the New Smoking’ while advertising its Desktop Elevator. As someone who lost family members to smoking, I appreciate the sentiment but not the delivery.
The company claimed its adjustable desk was the best way to improve health and extend life. In 2018, researchers by Jeff Vallance did the lord’s work and actually examined the comparison. Smokers had about 2.8 times the risk of death of people who had never smoked. For those who sat the most, compared with those who sat the least, the figure was about 1.2. So sitting isn’t great but it’s not as bad as shotgunning chemicals down your throat at high temperatures.
We All Need to Detox
In 1887 the French physician Charles Bouchard argued that the body poisons itself. Food, bile and above all the bowel, produced toxins that could account for illnesses doctors couldn’t otherwise explain. He called it autointoxication, and it gave health entrepreneurs an enemy that nobody could see.
Nobody took this idea further than John Harvey Kellogg, physician at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan for sixty-two years from 1876. Kellogg held that the majority of illnesses began in the stomach and bowel. I’m a historian and not a physician but that seems…. high no?
Kellog’s cure was cleaning. His Sanitarium used machinery to flush the bowel with enormous quantities of water. Each treatment could be followed by a pint of yoghurt, half by mouth and half by the ‘other route’… ‘thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed’. Kellogg started his own mornings the same way, which tells you a great deal about his commitment and rather too much about his mornings.
Kellogg’s Autointoxication (1919)
Ninety years later, Kinoki Foot Pads were sold on American television as an ‘ancient Japanese secret to perfect health’. You stuck them to your soles at night and woke to find them dark with ‘toxins and heavy metals.’ They also promised help with depression and diabetes which, unsurprisingly, eventually brought some legal intervention against Kinoki.
The Miracle Supplement
Before whey protein there was Plasmon, a dried milk protein sold in Britain around 1900 as a powder and a cooking aid. Its most famous endorser was Eugen Sandow, the world’s first modern bodybuilder. In 1901 Sandow called it ‘the essential food I have so long wished for’. In 1902 he told an interviewer that a teaspoonful carried the strength of two eggs. By 1906 Sandow was telling followers that it was the only supplement he used, and that a physical culturist could live and thrive on it alone. So no foods fellas, just Plasmon.
Sandow then did what successful endorsers tend to do and launched his own supplement a few years later when it became clear there was money to be made. Sandow’s Health and Strength Cocoa arrived in 1911 with a full-page advert in the Daily Telegraph announcing that food was the most serious problem facing the world and that his supplement was modern, scientific, pure and nutritious. By 1916, Sandow Ltd was in compulsory liquidation, with liabilities exceeding £20,000.
Don’t get me started on supplements (because I have recently ranted about them). In the 2010s several protein manufacturers were sued over ‘amino spiking’, that is adding cheap free amino acids into their mixtures so that the protein figure on the label went up without the added protein. Their powders, like Sandow, promised way more than they gave.
The Scientific Hack
Sandow was a salesman to his very core. In the late 1890s Sandow introduced a spring-grip dumb-bell which was an ordinary dumbbell split lengthways, with steel springs holding the halves apart. All you had to do was squeeze it shut before you exercised. In Strength and How to Obtain It (1901 edition), Sandow argued that they let the pupil regulate their will-power because even a distracted pupil, he wrote, ‘has a definite point upon which to concentrate his mind’. People didn’t need to lift heavy weights!
No, Sandow had done that and now he was back with a ‘scientific’ and quicker way to produce results.
The Shake Weight also put its weights on springs, but then asked you to shake it. Its makers credited something called ‘dynamic inertia’ and claimed more than 300% more muscle activity than ordinary weights. In 2012, researchers at the University of Arkansas wired twenty-five adults with electrodes and tested it against a plain dumbbell of the same weight. If there was a winner in anything involving a shake weight, it was the plain dumbbell. Sadly ‘dynamic inertia’ was more science theatre.
Become a New Man
Physical culturist Earle Liederman knew how to sell a new man. In January 1921 he advertised his mail-order exercise course in Strength magazine under the heading ‘I Will Give You Wealth, Health and Happiness’. He promised to broaden shoulders, build muscular arms and to turn weaklings into confident, successful men. ‘I will make a new man of you,’ he announced. His readers would become more attractive, more successful in business and even leaders of men. In 1924 he promised an entirely new body in just ninety days. All you had to do was follow his system, and preferably send away for his free book, which cost about ten cents in postage. All in, not a bad deal.
Andy Frisella launched 75 Hard in 2019. For seventy-five days you follow a diet with no alcohol, do two forty-five-minute workouts, drink a gallon of water, read ten pages of non-fiction and take a progress photo. Miss anything and you go back to day one. Frisella sells it as a programme for mental toughness, promising greater confidence, discipline and control over your life. A century earlier Liederman was promising much the same transformation, although he gave you an extra fifteen days to achieve it which brings me back to my favorite movie skit about why eight minute abs and not seven minute abs?
Become the Perfect Woman
Aussie Annette Kellerman wore steel braces on her legs as a child in Sydney and learned to swim at six to strengthen them. By her twenties she was an international star in the water. In 1908 Dudley Allen Sargent, director of Harvard’s gymnasium, declared Kellerman the Perfect Woman after comparing her physique with those of some ten thousand women. She was, he decided, the closest living approximation to the Venus de Milo. Kellerman used the title for the rest of her career. Movie executives billed her films with it, and in 1918 she published Physical Beauty and How to Keep It.
Kellerman was a real athlete and the title was the borrowed admittedly but the idea that exericse, and Kellerman’s system of exercise could perfect your womanhood thrived.
A century later, celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson was making similar promises. In 2009 Anderson, whose clients included Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, told The Guardian, ‘I want to make every woman look like a Victoria’s Secret model.’ Her method involved dance-based exercise, high repetitions and very light weights, designed to produce a lean, feminine physique without bulky muscles. Anderson trained Madonna for two hours a day, six days a week. Kellerman had promised the perfect woman in fifteen minutes a day. Apparently things had become considerably harder.
Achieve ‘Steroid-Like’ Results
Joe Weider grew up in Montreal and built an empire of magazines, equipment, supplements and bodybuilding competitions. I would sincerely argue that when people say Arnold changed fitness they overlook the structures that Joe, and his brother Ben, put into place in moving bodybuilding from an afterthough of weightlifting into its own sport.
In an fantastic article on the history of the supplement industry, Daniel Hall and John Fair showed how Weider, Bob Hoffman and Peary Rader turned protein into a commercial product in the 1950s…the very same decade Ciba released Dianabol in the United States. Many entrepreneurs began selling supplements, using incredible before and after transformation images, with steroid using athletes. They attritbuted the gains to new protein powders and not dianabol.
By the 1980s steroids were an open secret in bodybuilding, and Weider was selling a supplement called the Anabolic Mega-Pak which contained amino acids, minerals, vitamins and herbs. In 1984 the Federal Trade Commission charged that its adverts were misleading, and in 1985 Weider agreed to stop claiming it could build muscle or stand in for anabolic steroids. Still anyone reading Weider’s magazines knew what many of the champions on the cover were taking, and also that Weider was claiming to have found a ‘safe’ workaround.
Now we have peptides, TRT (which I often, tongue in cheek, refer to as steroids for the middle-class) and selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMS). SARMS are experimental drugs that act on the same receptors as testosterone, and were sold online during the 2010s as bodybuilding supplements that had ‘steroid like’ effects. In 2017 the US Food and Drug Administration warned three sellers that their products were unapproved drugs, with risks that included liver damage, heart attack and stroke.
I Know the Secret… Or the ‘Persecuted’ Prophet
In 1899, Bernarr Macfadden founded Physical Culture magazine and spent the next half century fighting doctors and censors. In 1905 Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had MacFadden arrested over photographs promoting his physical culture show at Madison Square Garden. A couple of years later, Physical Culture ran a serial on the dangers of syphilis, and Macfadden was convicted of sending obscene material through the post and fined $2,000. He later got a pardon from President Taft.
Some of this was genuinely unjust. Writing frankly about venereal disease shouldn’t have been a crime but Macfadden learned that persecution was good for business. In 1908 he published a book about his own prosecution and used it to argue that he alone knew the answers, that he held the secrets and that the ‘establishment’ (in his case the American Medical Association) was trying to tear him down. Every criticism became more proof that ‘they’ were against him.
Kevin Trudeau put the idea in his titles. Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About became a bestseller in 2004, and The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About followed in 2007. In 2014 a federal judge sentenced him to ten years for contempt after he misrepresented the weight-loss book in his infomercials. ‘They’, it turned out, were federal courts.
Let Me Now Argue Against My Own List
The really annoying thing about this list is that most of it is true. Fitness can transform your physique. Plenty of us, me included, were unhappy with our bodies, started training, and over weeks, months and eventually years went from weak to strong, heavy to lighter, or sore to fine. Many of us have the before photos.
Modern life can make us sick. Processed food, towns built to stop us walking, noise, light and pollution all do damage. Institutions do sometimes close ranks against a health idea, and being persecuted doesn’t make you wrong.
So every one of these tropes gets used by people telling the truth, people telling lies and people who couldn’t care less either way. They’ve lasted nearly two hundred years because they work. Spotting the trick is easy once you’ve seen it ten times. Working out who’s using it, and why, is the hard part. The bullshit lives in the gap between what a product can do and what the seller says it can do, and that gap is where most of the money in fitness is made.
Further reading
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, 2005). D. L. Dowd, Physical Culture for Home and School, Scientific and Practical (New York, 1886). George Barker Windship, ‘Autobiographical Sketches of a Strength-Seeker’, Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 51 (January 1862). Charles Bouchard, Lectures on Auto-Intoxication in Disease, or Self-Poisoning of the Individual, trans. Thomas Oliver (Philadelphia and London, 1894). J. H. Kellogg, Autointoxication, or Intestinal Toxemia (Battle Creek, 1919). Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It (London, 1897). Annette Kellermann, Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (1918). Earle Liederman’s advertisements in Strength, January 1921. Vim, December 1902.
On the history, see Daniel T. Hall and John D. Fair, ‘Pioneers of Protein’, Iron Game History (May/June 2004), Ben Yagoda, ‘The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden’, American Heritage 33, no. 1 (December 1981), G. P. Walsh on Kellermann in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9 (1983), and Joe Schwarcz on Kellogg for McGill’s Office for Science and Society. Lauren Alex O’Hagan, ‘Flesh-formers or fads? Historicising the contemporary protein-enhanced food trend’, Food, Culture & Society 25, no. 5 (2022), covers Plasmon.
On the modern cases, see the FTC’s 1985 settlement with Weider over the Anabolic Mega-Pak, the FTC’s stipulated order against the marketers of Kinoki Foot Pads (2010), Viv Groskop’s 2009 interview with Tracy Anderson in The Guardian, Jordan M. Glenn et al., ‘Comparison of the Shake Weight Modality Exercises When Compared to Traditional Dumbbells’, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 11 (2012), Jeff K. Vallance et al., ‘Evaluating the Evidence on Sitting, Smoking, and Health: Is Sitting Really the New Smoking?’, American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 11 (2018), the FDA’s warning letters on SARMs (October 2017), the ABA Journal on Kevin Trudeau’s sentence (2014) and Stephanie McNeal on ‘30-second transformations’ for BuzzFeed News.
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