BLACK MIRROR

What starts as an idea to ‘add a little muscle’ can turn into a twisted fixation on getting huge. Here’s how to stop your pursuit of a brawnier body from running – and ruining – your life.

- Daniel Williams

It was while making breakfast one Sunday that Mitch realised he had a problem. The family cat had leapt onto the kitchen bench and stuck its nose into Mitch’s plate of food, the usual Everest of eggs and sweet potato that comprised his post-workout gorge. “I lost it,” Mitch recalls. “I got right in his face and I could feel my eyes spinning.” In a cold whisper he hissed, ‘F*** off, c***! You tryin’ to stop me from getting big?’”

During the previous year Mitch had transformed from a lean, lightly muscled 22-year-old into a Goliath who’d have looked at home in the Springbok front row. Though he was enrolled in a university course and showed up to lectures sometimes, mostly he thought about the proportions of his physique and how to expand them. At home he moved as little as possible so his body could use its reserves of energy to build muscle rather than to fuel counterproductive activities like taking out the rubbish.

“I’d eat six meals a day. And by ‘meal’ I don’t mean a piece of toast. I mean a big serving of meat, rice and vegetables,” says Mitch. After rinsing his plate he would lie on his bed and watch bodybuilding videos on YouTube until it was time to eat again. His transformation was Hulk-like, his heft topping out at 113 kilograms, up from the 81 kilograms he weighed during what he calls “his last year of being normal”.