I’d like to think of myself as a healthy person.
I run regularly. I lift weights sometimes. I’m eating a bit better than I used to. I drink a lot of water, despite its alarming lack of sugar and carbonation. In some ways, I’m healthier at 45 than I was at 18 or 22.
Which makes me wonder whether all the mirrors in my house were reclaimed from a sideshow fair. I still see paunch around the middle, skinny little legs, flabby little arms. This is not what a fit person looks like, I think to myself. Why don’t I look like some of the folks I see in the movies? Why am I not looking a little more like, say, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?
Well, now I know.
Dwayne Johnson, the star of the newest Hercules movie (opening tomorrow with some advance screenings tonight), not only has an entirely different physiology and body chemistry than I do. He not only works out about 17 hours a day (well, 2.5, but you get my drift). He eats pretty much all the time. In fact, his 4,500-calorie “Hercules Diet” has become something of an Internet fad.
To get his Herculean physique, Johnson ate seven meals a day for 22 weeks. Seven! And we’re not talking about a ham sandwich and some chips from the vending machine times seven: For breakfast, he’d down a 10-ounce steak filet with four egg whites and five ounces of oatmeal. His second breakfast (in true Hobbit fashion) consisted of an eight-ounce slab of chicken, a couple of cups of white rice and a cup of broccoli. Then he’d eat—I’m not kidding, people—a third breakfast, this one an eight-ounce piece of halibut, another two cups of white rice and, just for a little variety, a cup of asparagus.
And then he’d go to work.
And forget ambiance: No white tablecloth or candle for The Rock. No family chit-chat. No china or grandma’s silverware. “I preferred a bigger (plastic) container,” he told USA Today. “I take a spoon, and, in a polished, poised way I shove it all in.”
Johnson says that the only really difficult meal to choke down was meal No. 7—30 grams of casein protein (a protein found in cheese and dairy products) and 10 egg whites (scrambled with onions, peppers and mushrooms). You can only eat so many egg whites, after all. But eat them he did.
There were a few tweaks along the way. Johnson’s trainer would take pictures of the actor and, based on what he saw, juggle the diet a little bit to make sure Johnson looked his Herculean best.
We talk a lot about body image here—how girls, especially, look at Photoshopped images in magazines and think that that’s the way they, too, are supposed to look. But guys do it, too. Action movies are filled with flesh-and-blood action figures—ripped actors who dedicated a good chunk of their working lives to getting their bodies to look just so. Sometimes guys can see those folks and wonder, “Why not me?”
That’s not all bad, I suppose. If watching a superhero movie inspires someone to work out and eat better, that’s just fine. But to get a superhero-like body, you gotta become a slave to that self-same body: hours of painful workouts. Crazy diets. Some resort to steroids or unhealthy supplements. And even then—because everybody is genetically different—you still probably won’t have the physique you’re shooting for.
And at the end of the day, you might not even be that healthy. Sure, 250 pounds of muscle comes in handy if you’re wrestling with the Nemean Lion, but it’s not so helpful if the fight goes awry and you need to, say, scramble up a tree really fast.
Hey, I’ve got my share of vanity. I’d like to look a little better. And maybe, with work and time, I will. But the operational words here are “a little better.” Seven meals of broccoli and egg whites? Dwayne Johnson can have it.
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