Looks Can Kill: A Doctor’s Journey through Steroids, Addiction and Online Fitness Culture

Looks Can Kill: A Doctor’s Journey through Steroids, Addiction and Online Fitness Culture by Riam Shammaa with Patricia Pearson addressed the dangerous steps men and women are willing to take in order to pursue their ideal fitness goals. Whether in pursuit of a heavily muscled physique for a bodybuilding show or a sinewy and taut body for a bikini competition, men and women are taking drastic measures to achieve the perfect look.

I was glad to read what the bodybuilding and fitness literature has always denied. Shammaa, a doctor with expertise in musculoskeletal and sports medicine, calls out all the competitors who enter these physique competitions as users and abusers of appearance-enhancing drugs (AED). We are not talking merely about performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids, but the entire medicine chest of substances that physique competitors ingest or inject in order to strive for their impression of the perfect look, such as insulin, diuretics, human growth hormone and estrogen blockers.

Shammaa states it plainly: there is no way that anyone can achieve these kinds of physiques naturally. End of. Physique competitors in their quest for bodily perfection must take more and more drugs to offset the deleterious side effects of whatever pills or substances they’re taking. Without medical or pharmacological degrees, physique competitors are learning about these drugs on-line via “bro science” and are dosing themselves. Since they are likely obtaining their drugs illegally, they are taking even more chances with their health regarding what they are injecting or ingesting.

As one who follows the competitive bodybuilding scene I am aware of the winners of the major shows yet I am also aware of the overwhelming number of injuries and deaths that have occurred. If any other professional athletic association recorded so many deaths among its elite competitors, not only of retired champions but also among active members, there would be a tribunal to find out why. The elephant in the room is the pharmacological playground known as appearance-enhancing drugs. Yet nothing is done about it because without the AED, every physique association would be out of business and there would be no fitness industry.

One of the book’s contributors was not afraid to state the brutal truth: the only reason elite bodybuilders and physique competitors have managed to get on stage is solely on account of not having died yet. Those who win the top titles are the luckiest ones who have cheated death (so far). Imagine if anyone had said that about players in the World Series or the Super Bowl.

Shammaa addresses muscle dysmorphia, which refers to the distorted impression of oneself as less muscular than one actually is. He uses other street terms for this disorder, including megarexia, which I had never heard of before, yet did not include bigorexia, which is the most common term, at least in terms of Google hits. The rise of social media and photo sharing has led to the epidemic of perfect lives and perfect bodies, no doubt leading to the quest to be more muscular or leaner than others. Shammaa wrote:

“Bodybuilding and fitness competitions become a kind of breeding ground for muscle dysmorphia, because they hold you to–and indeed expect you to achieve–extremely unrealistic standards of what healthy musculature should look like.”

and:

“Instagram is a powerful platform for reinforcing shame, as are Pornhub and other visual media sites.”

I sped through this book, not only because I was interested in the subject matter but also because of the way it was written. Shammaa discussed some anatomical and metabolic processes in language that made it easy for the layperson to understand. In fact, one remark I made early in my notes is that Shammaa tended to oversimplify things. I wondered who he was writing this book for.

Eating disorder specialist psychiatrist Dr. Leora Pinhas summed it up the best:

“If our aim was health, none of us would look like that.”

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Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries

 

I read Go Ask Alice forty years ago and as a diarist myself I enjoyed peeking into the private world of another teen. My own strong sense of living clean steered me clear of drugs so the diary did not influence me as a moralistic horror story to just say no. Only after I read Alice’s diary did I start doing my own research and discovered that the entire diary was a hoax. I have been interested in the real story behind Go Ask Alice for decades, and was immediately drawn to the new library acquisition Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson.

Emerson exposed the truth behind the alleged diary’s real author and while the secret had been out for decades, his exposé revealed more about the background of Beatrice Sparks and her motivation to swindle the public. Emerson painted Sparks as a wannabe author driven to achieve the heights of fame and if she fudged the truth to get there, so what? As long as her “anonymous” works were serving their purpose of educating people about the evils of drug use or Satan worship, then her ends would justify the means:

“Sparks was a walking correction. When she talked about the dead girl, dates and details shifted, almost at random. Alice died in May, but sometimes November. Alice gave Sparks the diary, except when her parents did it. Sparks occasionally mentioned ‘interview tapes’ she’d made with Alice, but nobody ever heard them.”

The publishers, who believed the story that Go Ask Alice was based on a genuine diary Sparks had acquired through her dubious claim as a youth counsellor, thought that the book would have more of an impact if it was marketed without her name on it. Teens would be more likely to buy the book if it presented itself as a work created without the intervention of adults, whether they were editors or mail-order PhD’s (as she was). So her books were bestsellers and are still in print and for the rest of her life Sparks remained ticked off that fame eluded her and no one knew who she was.

The Satanic Panic in the title refers to the second diary Sparks acquired, from a real teen named Alden Barrett who died by suicide. In this case Sparks did borrow Barrett’s actual journal, yet created a faux diary (which was published under the name Jay’s Journal) about his obsession with satanism. Barrett was not a satanist yet Sparks linked his suicide to the occult. Jay’s Journal was a complete fabrication created as a cautionary tale to warn teens and their parents about the evil found in Ouija boards, tarot cards, black magic and so on. Sparks would later write other diaries, all supposedly based upon the youth she counselled in her nonexistent practice, to warn teens of premarital sex and pregnancy, STD’s, and running away from home, among other topics. They all shared the common thread of being diaries she obtained from her clients. That sounds too convenient to be true and critics wondered just how she was able to get her hands on yet another diary–which reads exactly the same as all the others.

Emerson did his research, interviewing members of the Barrett family and uncovering documentation to refute the existence of Alice’s diary, but he did find who could very well be the real-life inspiration for Alice.

Unmask Alice was a rapid read, not only because I was enthralled with the subject matter, but on account of its layout: short chapters and multiple sections within each chapter. Thus there was always time to read a bit extra as I am loathe to start reading a new chapter if I know I will have to stop reading within a few minutes. Emerson explained why he avoided including endnotes within the body of text yet the few that he did include I found to be trivial and in some cases snarky, two reasons which should not warrant the need for them in the first place.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue