I usually picked jobs where offices were near a gym. I had my meals prepared and I would eat them all by myself. "I would always choose to work out over hanging out with friends. When he was 18, the California native weighed 140 pounds, but in the seven years that followed, Hafertepen doubled his size by following intense workouts, drinking six protein shakes a day and spending half of his paycheck on supplements. "I used to look at and really beat myself up, because it's like this is so out of reach, and why am I not there?" Hafertepen said.
" to the point where it'd be very difficult for anybody to kind of achieve this," Feusner said.įor 29-year-old web designer Dylan Hafertepen, the quest for maximum muscle has been a lifelong struggle. Jamie Feusner, an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, says the portrayal of the ideal male body size and musculature in movies, television and magazines seems to have become “more and more inflated” over the years. You could call what he does "bigspiration," following the trend of other young men like Laid, who post videos of themselves flexing and working out and gaining millions of views.īut for some, the desire to bulk up can just as easily be an obsession, leading some young men down a destructive path of compulsively dieting and working out, but never feeling quite big enough.ĭr.