Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeElectronic sectionsVaria articles: 2008-20262026The Morality of Dieting: “Bro-Sci...

2026

The Morality of Dieting: “Bro-Science” and the Regulation of Self in Brazilian Bodybuilding

La Moralité du Régime: « Bro-Science » et la Régulation de Soi dans le Bodybuilding Brésilien
Gabriel Salgado Ribeiro de

Abstracts

How do bodybuilders perceive and negotiate the moral and social demands of strict diets? Which discursive repertoires, including scientific, biomedical, and experiential forms, are mobilized to justify and normalize these regimens? Based on one year of anthropological fieldwork in a Brazilian “hardcore” gym and interviews with athletes and coaches, this article examines the dietary practices and moral rationales that structure this community. I argue that practitioners develop a vernacular theory of health that appropriates biomedical idioms while reworking them through the moral framework of bodybuilding. Central to this framework is a causal narrative in which junk food produces inflammation, inflammation elevates cortisol, and heightened cortisol generates suffering. This sequence operates as an explanatory model through which sensations such as fatigue, irritability, and malaise become intelligible and morally meaningful. Dieting thus functions as a rite of passage marked by deprivation, self-mastery, and identity transformation. Ultimately, bodybuilding rearticulates an askesis rooted in Western traditions of self-care, in which athletes appear simultaneously as patients, diagnosticians, and agents of their own cure.

Top of page

Full text

Introduction

1 In recent decades, bodybuilding has attracted considerable attention from social scientists, who often interpret it as a body project, a deliberate and reflexive endeavor that exceeds the limits of mere corporeal modification or a gendered pastime. They emphasize that building or losing muscle is never solely about physical development or aesthetic display. Rather, it entails a complex negotiation of gender identity and, more broadly, produces a life narrative in which the body becomes the central locus for the construction and expression of the self (Bolin 1992; Synnott 1993; Monaghan 1999; Featherstone 1999).

2Far from being a simple quest for muscular growth, the practice unfolds as a disciplined project of self-formation in which participants craft an ethical way of life through the careful coordination of diet, exercise, supplementation, and the use of performance-enhancing substances. Pain occupies a central place in this order, not as an obstacle but as a vehicle of transformation. Deliberately cultivated and closely regulated, suffering becomes a voluntary ordeal that renders dedication visible. In that sense, it functions as both sign and validation, a ritualized sacrifice through which practitioners legitimize the pursuit of an ideal body.

3Such an ascetic orientation extends beyond the gym. Refusal of indulgence and strict dietary regulation recall older traditions of purification through abstinence, now reframed within the secular routines of health and self-improvement. Once incorporated into everyday life, these bodily disciplines cease to be isolated practices and instead crystallize as habits, forming the embodied ground of ethical identity. Muscle, fat, and well-being appear as visible marks of disciplined effort upon the flesh, as the pursuit of looking good and feeling good converges in a shared moral and emotional register in which beauty and virtue become inseparable (Crawford 1984; Monaghan 2001; Bailey and Gillet 2012; Bailey 2021).

4Athletes devote significant portions of their daily lives to meticulous practices of self-monitoring, weighing, measuring, and recording food intake through scales, nutritional labels, and tracking applications (Jensen 2023). Such routines cannot be reduced to physiological optimization alone and call for closer anthropological and sociological attention. How do practitioners interpret and justify these demanding regimens? What moral and cultural logics render voluntary restriction meaningful? Rather than cataloguing dietary practices, the analysis seeks to illuminate the symbolic and ethical frameworks that sustain them.

5The article therefore moves beyond describing what athletes eat to examining how eating, suffering, and bodily repair acquire meaning within gym culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Brazilian hardcore gym, I argue that practitioners do not merely follow dietary prescriptions but develop a vernacular theory of health and illness that appropriates biomedical idioms while reworking them within the moral universe of the sport. At the center of this framework lies a causal narrative in which junk food generates a series of “side effects” such as inflammation, excessive cortisol, and suffering. This sequence operates as an explanatory model (Kleinman et al. 1978), through which diffuse sensations such as fatigue, irritability, and malaise become intelligible and morally legible. Beyond describing bodily processes, it outlines a redemptive pathway in which ascetic dietary discipline promises restoration. The athlete thus appears simultaneously as patient, diagnostician, and agent of his own cure.

6Participation in this therapeutic trajectory produces more than bodily repair. Dietary restraint, the endurance of discomfort, and visible corporeal transformation become convertible into masculine gender capital (Bridges 2009). A lean and controlled physique materializes moral authority and self-mastery, strengthening one’s position within the gym’s status hierarchy. The capacity to interpret bodily signals, tolerate deprivation, and display transformation serves as evidence of embodied expertise, reinforcing hierarchies of toughness and experiential authority among men. Health thus becomes inseparable from recognition, as bodily discipline is translated into symbolic value.

Dieting, Politics of Metabolism and Orthorexia

7Dieting operates as a moral technology of self-making, delineating a symbolic boundary between ascetic discipline and hedonism through its role as a measure of well-being. Each meal becomes an ethical display in which virtue is performed and commitment to a bodily ideal is inscribed. Mastery over appetite signals self-possession while reflecting a broader epistemic shift in the history of nourishment. The modern athlete’s diet exemplifies a centuries-long transformation whereby dietetics, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, replaced sensory knowledge with chemical analysis and quantification. Nutrients, now invisible and intelligible only through measurement, turned the table into a site of tension between health and pleasure, a tension that athletic asceticism seeks to resolve (Montanari 2008; Hedblom 2009).

8Anthropologist Hannah Landecker observes that the nineteenth-century concept of metabolism, emerging from chemistry and physiology, redefined the organism through the idiom of industrial modernity. The organism was imagined as a mechanistic engine converting inputs into energy, with pathologies interpreted as “inborn errors” or internal mechanical faults (Kamminga 1995; Bing 1971; Landecker 2013). More recently, biomedical thought has undergone an epistemic shift in which the mechanical model has gradually given way to a communicative one. Physiological processes are now conceived as dynamic regulatory networks in which disease reflects disturbances in exchanges between internal systems and the external environment. Such changes have transformed the meaning of nourishment: eating no longer represents mere sustenance but is a form of biochemical information capable of influencing mood, metabolism, and gene expression (Landecker 2013). Yet older moralities remain influential. The arithmetic of calories, inherited from industrial rationalities that equated bodily management with efficiency, continues to shape cultural interpretations of conditions such as obesity (Nestle and Esheim 2011; Landecker 2013).

9Practices of nourishment unfold within a liminal domain where multiple metaphors of corporeality coexist and intersect. Each one carries normative expectations, turning the act of eating into a performative practice through which boundaries between health and deviance are continually negotiated. Feeding oneself entails an encounter with alterity and incorporation that exceeds biological necessity (Derrida 1991). Alimentary mediated practices therefore operate as moral and social inscriptions through which identities and forms of belonging are produced and stabilized.

10Strict nutritional regimens organize not only patterns of consumption but also the ways practitioners evaluate themselves. Hierarchies of value become inscribed upon the flesh through everyday dietary discipline. Such hierarchies resemble classificatory schemes of purity and danger in which edible substances acquire symbolic meaning within a broader cultural order (Douglas 1966). In athletic milieus, nutritional practices establish a moral distinction between items labelled “clean”—lean meats, chicken, fish, vegetables—and those marked as “dirty,” typically associated with fats, sugars, or heavily processed products.

11Caloric or biochemical properties alone do not explain these distinctions. Food categories help sustain an idealized corporeal regime oriented toward muscular definition and control. Substances considered “impure” threaten this normative arrangement and come to symbolize risk for the ideal physique. Compliance with prescribed dietary routines functions not only as a physiological strategy for regulating weight and muscle mass but also as a moral technology that distinguishes legitimate corporeal conduct (Kinnunen 2004). Communities organized around the sport further reinforce these moralized norms surrounding nourishment. As noted by Perera and Perez (2024), peer networks and coaching relationships operate as “prescriptive arenas” that stigmatize certain behaviors while legitimizing others according to shared expectations. Through repeated participation in such regimes, sensory dispositions gradually shift. Preferences and aversions are reshaped, and satisfaction becomes increasingly associated with experiences of mastery, restraint, and measurable progress. Over time, eating is reframed as an instrument for optimizing physical form, a mode of “nutritioning” oriented toward functional outcomes rather than sensory gratification (Perera and Perez 2024).

Embodied Knowledge and Lived Expertise: Ethnographic Insights from a Brazilian “Hardcore” Gym

12An emergent anthropology of the body moves beyond biomedical or purely structural accounts of strength sports by foregrounding athletes’ lived experiences (Piatkowski et al. 2023). Such perspectives resonate with phenomenological approaches that treat health, selfhood, and physical practice as inseparable dimensions of everyday life (Sothern and Reid 2018). A longitudinal ethnographic design was therefore adopted to apprehend the practical competencies through which bodybuilding habits are cultivated. Culture was approached not as a static system of symbols but as practical knowledge enacted through disciplined routines, training, and everyday physical work.

13Participant observation involved regular training sessions alongside practitioners, attendance at competitions, participation in communal “cheat meals,” and informal social gatherings outside the gym. These activities provided sustained access to athletes’ moral and sensory worlds, as well as to the everyday conversations through which ideas about health, suffering, and discipline circulate.

14Fieldwork was conducted over twelve months between 2019 and 2020 in a well-known “hardcore” gym in Juiz de Fora, Brazil. Entering this milieu presented classic ethnographic challenges. My own physique diverged from the local ideal of muscularity, and I initially lacked familiarity with bodybuilding’s technical vocabulary, marking me as an outsider. Over time, however, embodied participation became an important methodological resource. Through shared workouts and daily interaction, the gradual accumulation of what Wacquant (2006) terms “physical capital” contributed to building trust and credibility among members. Integration was further facilitated by a respected senior practitioner who acted as a cultural broker, a common strategy in studies of enclosed physical cultures (Monaghan 1999). I openly identified myself as a researcher; however, as time passed my presence increasingly resembled that of a novice trainee, which eased interaction and deepened social ties.

  • 1 IPED: Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs.

15Initial research focused on the social organization of “lived expertise” surrounding IPED1 use (Underwood 2017). Early observations examined how practitioners learned about substances, dosage cycles, and strategies of risk management (Sá 2023; 2025). As fieldwork progressed, it became clear that pharmacological practices were inseparable from a broader moral and technical assemblage involving dietary discipline, training routines, and ethical self-fashioning. Athletes frequently emphasized that the effectiveness of anabolic substances depended on strict adherence to diet and training cycles. Discussions about pharmacology repeatedly returned to questions of food, inflammation, hormonal balance, and bodily suffering.

16Over time, these interactions revealed a shared explanatory model circulating among practitioners. Across informal conversations, training sessions, and interviews, athletes articulated a causal narrative in which “dirty” foods were believed to generate inflammation, elevate cortisol levels, and ultimately compromise both health and muscular development. These interpretations also established moral parameters of conduct among practitioners. Rather than originating from a single individual, this model emerged through the accumulation of similar explanations across multiple encounters within the gym.

17The analytical corpus draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve cisgender men aged between twenty-three and thirty-five years old, all deeply involved in Brazilian bodybuilding culture. Interviews were conducted in quiet spaces outside the gym, usually after training sessions, and lasted between twenty-five minutes and one hour. Recruitment followed a snowball strategy (Parker et al. 2019), relying on interpersonal trust within a socially guarded milieu where stigma and legal ambiguity shape disclosure.

18Participant selection followed the logic of purposeful sampling (Patton 2002). The aim was not statistical representativeness but the identification of information-rich cases capable of illuminating central dynamics of the inquiry. The study therefore focused on athletes and coaches with at least two years of sustained IPED use. Efforts were made to include individuals occupying different positions within the gym hierarchy, including competitive athletes and experienced coaches responsible for training guidance and pharmacological advice. Attention was given to participants engaged in “blast and cruise” regimes (Sagoe et al. 2015), a pharmacological strategy in which periods of higher anabolic dosages (“blast”) alternate with maintenance levels (“cruise”) rather than complete cessation. Focusing on individuals following this regimen provided access to actors with extensive experiential knowledge of pharmacological cycles, diet, and training. Because these athletes and coaches rarely interrupt substance use, they tend to accumulate long-term familiarity with the interaction between pharmacology, nutrition, and bodily transformation.

19Two interlocutors whose trajectories are examined in detail in the following sections were selected from this corpus as paradigmatic cases (Patton 2002). André, a veteran coach in his mid-thirties, represents a strict and disciplined approach to dietary application and strongly advocates the explanatory model circulating within the gym. Mateus, an athlete, reiterates this model but does so while positioning himself in explicit opposition to conventional weight-loss approaches associated with nutritional science.

20Quotations presented in the article are illustrative rather than exhaustive. They were selected not as standalone evidence but because they clearly capture explanatory models that circulated more broadly among practitioners during twelve months of ethnographic immersion. Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to interviews and field interactions. Participants were informed about the aims of the study, the voluntary nature of their participation, the intended use of the data, and their right to refuse or withdraw at any time. Given the sensitive nature of IPED use, written signatures were not collected in order to preserve anonymity and minimize potential risks. All identifying details were replaced with pseudonyms, and digital materials were stored on encrypted, password-protected drives in accordance with Brazilian data protection regulations.

The Neurochemistry of Appetite in Bodybuilding

21Since the 1970s, the meaning of addiction has undergone a deep reconfiguration. What was once interpreted as moral weakness or social deviance gradually became reframed through a biomedical lens as a condition rooted in biology, increasingly described as a “brain disease.” As historians of science have noted, the transformation can be genealogically traced alongside the rise of neurochemical research, propelled by the political and financial imperatives of Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. The isolation of opiate receptors in neural tissue in 1973 offered a new model of dependency, one that relocated compulsion to molecular exchanges between receptors and neurotransmitters. Questions once debated in pulpits, clinics, and courtrooms were rearticulated through the circuitry of the brain. During the 1980s and 1990s, neuroscientific study of pleasure and desire intensified, fueled by the spread of neuroimaging technologies that made the living brain appear increasingly transparent. Positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging translated craving into color-coded maps of neural activation. What had been a moral or philosophical inquiry into the nature of will now appears as an observable event, materialized in visual data (Campbell 2007; Fraser et al. 2014; Vrecko 2010; Raikhel 2015).

22Consequently, the conceptual field of addiction expanded beyond illicit substances to encompass behaviors such as gambling, compulsive shopping, and overeating. The shift signaled a broader cultural and epistemic transformation in which neuroscientific findings and psychiatric taxonomies began to redefine the experience of desire. Pleasure, self-control, and accountability migrated from the realm of ethics into the language of neurochemistry, in a form of “neuro-essentialism” (Satel & Lilienfeld 2013), a reduction of human complexity to the operations of the brain. Behaviors once understood through social, spiritual, or moral frameworks increasingly came to be interpreted as disturbances in neural regulation.

  • 2 This logic of quantification aligns with Porter’s (1995) argument that numerical standardization pr (...)

23Moreover, the concept of food addiction has recently attained a new form of measurability. This shift is exemplified by the work of Gearhardt and colleagues (2009), who introduced the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS2). Their endeavor sought not only to legitimize food addiction by drawing parallels between substance use disorders and compulsive overeating, but also to address a methodological absence: the lack of psychometrically validated instruments for assessing these behaviors. The YFAS is paradigmatic not merely as a measurement tool, but as a cultural artifact that actively constructs the very phenomenon it purports to quantify. It operates by translating the complex, subjective experience of a perceived loss of control overeating into a structured set of diagnosable, operational criteria, thereby creating a new diagnostic language and a moral and clinical reality within which it becomes legible.

24In bodybuilding, the neuroscientific model of addiction finds a potent home. The “hijacked brain” framework, often intended to destigmatize, undergoes a cultural translation that renders it not a pardon but a scientific indictment. The shift is embodied in the counsel of figures like Coach André, for whom sugar-fat combinations are not merely nutritional failures but neurochemical saboteurs. Each act of eating becomes a performance, a test of character in which pleasure signals a potential compromise of neurobiological integrity. The quantification of food addiction thus forges a moral universe, providing the scales on which a bodybuilder’s will is weighed and turning daily consumption into a site of ethical judgment and disciplined selfhood.

25André (Bodybuilding Coach): “When you consume sugar, you have to understand that your brain doesn’t know the difference between drugs and food. Do you know what happens to your brain chemistry when you eat sugar, saturated fat mixed with a high-glycemic carbohydrate? You alter your entire brain chemistry. There are a lot of studies on this. Why do you think so many people are obese? Could it be because tasty food affects something in the brain? Why is it so hard for an obese person to lose weight? Sometimes you see someone who weighs 400 kg (~882 pounds), it’s intense. If you can’t judge people, imagine that it’s like a drug that’s available all the time, sugar. Society doesn’t judge, your family eats beside you or even encourages you, you know?[…] When obese clients come to me, their diet is usually ketogenic or involves fasting. You have to approach it from the neurochemical side rather than thinking about metabolism or whatever, like thinking the obese would function better with carbs. »

26The coach’s perspective reveals how moral judgment is not displaced by neuroscience but rearticulated through it. Moral discourse is translated into technoscientific language, where dietary discipline becomes evidence of cognitive will triumphing over biochemical drives. Bodily self-optimization aligns with broader cultural narratives of health, purity, and control (Douglas 1966). The brain appears simultaneously as culprit and battleground, while the successful dieter emerges as a rational subject capable of mastering neurochemical impulses. The discourse echoes a broader condition of the twenty-first century: the emergence of the “neurochemical self,” where scientific knowledge provides the framework for moral self-governance (Rose 2007). Individuals become responsible for regulating desire in environments saturated with hyperpalatable and potentially addictive foods (Nestle 2002).

27Solutions are framed primarily through personal responsibility. Interventions such as ketogenic diets or prolonged fasting appear not merely as nutritional strategies but as moral imperatives. This perspective obscures structural determinants such as industrial food production, socioeconomic inequality, and aggressive marketing by translating systemic conditions into individual duties. The result is a biopolitical regime in which the “good citizen” is defined by the capacity to discipline the body and mitigate risk. Stigma is thereby reinforced, legitimizing punitive social attitudes toward obese individuals (Puhl & Heuer, 2010) and consolidating enduring cultural associations between thinness, moral worth, and modernity (Bordo, 2023). The metaphor of “food as drug” amplifies moral accountability, transforming neurochemistry into a new idiom of ethical failure, as illustrated below.

André (Bodybuilding Coach): “[...] I’ve been a coach for—I don’t even know how many years—maybe eight or ten. Motivational stuff and self-help don’t really work; if it were that simple, everyone would succeed, and that’s not how it is. [....]Now, when it comes to dieting, people often say they start a diet but quit after having a “cheat meal” because it gets too hard. Well, in that case, what’s happening is a neurochemical deregulation and insulin resistance, and once you go back to eating carbohydrates, it becomes very difficult to get back on track with the diet. So, when someone is in that situation, I tell them to do a cleanse: go zero-carb, do fasting. From years of training obese clients, what has the highest success rate is a ketogenic diet, because it cuts the person’s urge to eat carbs. But for someone starting this kind of diet, you will feel withdrawal symptoms just like with drugs, especially in the first two days. You’ll get stressed, have insomnia, feel depressed, and have trouble concentrating. It lasts two or three days, and after one or two weeks (this applies to any kind of addiction) your mind starts to get better. It’s just a phase, everything will pass, and that’s the approach you need to take.”

28André’s narrative translates complex scientific concepts into a culturally potent logic for governing the body. Carbohydrates cease to appear as mere nutrients and are recast as addictive and pathogenic agents, while the obese body becomes a site of neurochemical dysregulation. Dietary lapses no longer appear as failures of will but as signs of biochemical imbalance, through which everyday behaviors are redefined as medical problems. People’s embodied experience is often imagined through the “brain hijack” model of addiction (Leshner 1997). Physiological discomfort such as stress, insomnia, irritability, and transient depression appears not as weakness or moral failure but as predictable withdrawal effects. Experiencing such sensations becomes a structured ordeal that transforms eating into a moral and biochemical trial. Endurance of discomfort emerges as a modern rite of passage signaling the capacity to govern both body and desire.

29The early phase of the ketogenic regimen, often described among bodybuilders as the “keto flu,” illustrates a ritualized passage rather than a physiological adjustment. “Side effects” appear as culturally legible signs of transformation underway. The pattern resembles van Gennep’s schema of rites of passage (2022[1909]) and Turner’s elaboration of liminality (1969). The process begins with separation, an exit from the carbohydrate-saturated world that structures everyday eating. Abstention inaugurates a liminal phase marked by instability, where practitioners dwell betwixt and between. They are no longer ruled by sugar and starch yet not fully reborn as disciplined subjects. The body becomes both site and symbol of ordeal, and discomfort is narrativized as proof of moral resolve and commitment to an ascetic ideal.

30Enduring the threshold constitutes an achievement that is simultaneously biochemical and ethical. Struggle against cravings and exhaustion materializes self-mastery and demonstrates the capacity to regulate appetite and desire through control. Reincorporation follows once metabolic adaptation stabilizes, accompanied by peer recognition that consecrates the passage. Shared accounts of dizziness, irritability, or euphoria become affective currency that binds participants through a moral and somatic fellowship grounded in hardship and resilience.

31André’s prescription of a strict ketogenic regime combined with fasting therefore acquires meaning beyond medical rationality. Reduction of obesity to a singular biochemical fault produces a self-reinforcing moral–technical logic. If carbohydrates are toxins, abstinence becomes the only cure, and any lapse signals weakness of both chemistry and character. The diet operates simultaneously as scientific intervention, ethical test, and technology of the self. Nutritional management becomes a ritual of purification in which suffering is valorized as the crucible of renewal. Acts of eating and abstaining function as performances through which neurochemical, moral, and social orders intertwine. Biomedical truth and moral virtue converge, generating habits of corporeal optimization in which science, suffering, and ascetic devotion sustain one another.

32Dieting emerges not merely as a nutritional strategy but as a deeply gendered ritual system of purification. The “obese” or “untrained” body is framed as polluted by the excesses of modern consumption such as sugar, gluten, and processed foods. Fat becomes more than stored energy; it appears as material evidence of disorder, indulgence, and failed self-control. Among the men I interviewed, bodily fat signified not only aesthetic deficiency but compromised masculinity. As Connell (1995) argues, bodily hardness often operates as the corollary of hardness of character, while softness evokes not only flabbiness but also moral frailty. Cutting thus functions as a rite of expulsion through which toxins, softness, and weakness are purged.

33Hunger, fatigue, irritability, or the “keto flu” are reinterpreted as signs that purification is underway. Discomfort becomes a marker of commitment, transforming pain into masculine gender capital earned through ordeal and displayed within the homosocial gaze of the gym (Bridges 2009). The capacity to endure deprivation signals toughness, rational self-governance, and superiority over those perceived as lacking discipline. Experiential knowledge, commonly described as “bro- science,” validates dietary practices not through academic credentials but through visible proof: suffering endured and flesh transformed (Moreira 2025; Sá 2025). The reshaped body that emerges from the cutting process stands as embodied testimony that pollution has been expelled and masculine order restored. Dietary discipline thus operates as a moral and gendered technology through which men confront the perceived corruption of the modern food environment, converting bodily control into a public sign of self-mastery, virility, and renewed masculine legitimacy.

Contesting Traditional Nutrition Expertise

34The ideology of Nutritionism (Scrinis 2008, 2013) profoundly reshaped modern dietary worlds by interpreting food through a nutribiochemical lens. Foods are mapped onto bodily processes and decomposed into functional components associated with health outcomes and biomarkers. Increasingly, health and disease are understood as cascades of metabolic signals, extending the concept of metabolism beyond digestion to include the processing of drugs, neurotransmitters, and environmental toxins (Landecker 2011; Solomon 2016).

35In everyday life, risks are reframed in terms of exposure, encouraging continuous vigilance and self-monitoring. Under such conditions, the legitimacy of dietary interventions becomes a contested resource, legitimizing some practices while dismissing others as mere folklore. Through its quantitative worldview, contemporary nutritional science often subordinates subjective experience, pleasure, and taste to biochemical reasoning (Hedblom 2009; Paxson 2013), positioning itself as a central arbiter of moral and material relations with food.

36Yet familiar paradoxes resurface as Nutritionism advances the maxim “we are what we eat” through relentless quantification, envisioning bodies as assemblages of amino acids, bones as matrices of calcium, and vitality as caloric arithmetic (Scrinis 2008; Mudry 2009). Such reductive framings, often imbued with moral overtones, soon reveal their limits. Phenomena such as food addiction and compulsive eating, shaped by emotion, habit, and social context, generate new tensions, pitting the self-experimental asceticism of bodybuilders against the standardized, evidence-based protocols defended by nutritionists.

Mateus: “The nutrition school, they have a course that they teach throughout the program. I forgot the name. Let’s say they take an obese person—he’s in trouble. Then he goes to see a nutritionist. What is the nutritionist taught to do with this person, assuming he has a basal metabolic rate of 2,000 calories but consumes 5,000. He eats junk food, sugary drinks, sweets, the guy only eats garbage. He consumes 5,000 calories and burns 2,000 per day, right? That’s a surplus of 3,000. What the nutritionist is taught to do: when this person becomes a nutritionist, he will look at roughly what the client eats, which is why he always asks what the client eats. Then he estimates the total calories, in this case 5,000, and he will tell the person to start eating 4,500, 4,000, 3,500, 3,000 until reaching 2,000 and starting to lose weight. The problem is the following: if the person burns 2,000 calories but consumes 4,500, will he lose weight?

Researcher: Not at all.

Mateus: He will keep gaining weight. To get to the point where he wants to lose weight, the person is usually very motivated: “I’m going to the nutritionist, I’m going to start losing weight.” But he starts the diet and either maintains or gains weight, which is discouraging. In his mind, he’s on a diet—he can’t eat what he used to eat—but he keeps gaining weight, just at a slower pace, you know? Then he gives up. That’s the problem with the nutrition program and with the diets they prescribe.”

37The passage portrays a linear, formulaic approach to weight loss structured by a bureaucratic and calculative logic that treats the body as a machine and positions the nutritionist as a technician executing the rules of an expert system. From an anthropological perspective, it illustrates how scientific knowledge becomes codified into rigid institutional routines, often overlooking emotion, habit, and the lived realities of individual experience.

38Mateus’s critique moves beyond the familiar charge of reductionism, revealing a deeper systemic tension. He highlights a persistent gap between the principles taught in nutrition schools and the outcomes experienced by clients, where long-term weight loss rarely unfolds as predicted. The discrepancy exposes the limits of decontextualized expertise when confronted with the complexities of embodied practice, including the experiential knowledge bodybuilders often describe as “bro-science.”

39More profoundly, the gap generates a ritualized pattern of psychological and systemic failure. Clients, initially motivated and disciplined, engage in a form of sacrifice, adhering to prescribed regimens without achieving the promised bodily transformation. Weight gain despite compliance does not register merely as a metabolic anomaly; it produces a narrative of personal failure, leading to discouragement and, ultimately, abandonment of treatment.

40In effect, the rigid application of institutional protocols generates the very dropout it seeks to prevent. A fundamental flaw emerges in translating abstract scientific models into practices of care, as the internal logic of the model supersedes the lived experience, agency, and psychological trajectory of the client. The bodybuilder continues:

Mateus: “[…] I have my own opinion, and I think 90% of bodybuilders agree. If a guy consumes 5,000 calories and burns 2,000, and you immediately cut it to 2,000, of course the obese person is going to have a breakdown, a total meltdown, you know? But if you reduce it only a little, it’s also going to fail, the person will give up. So either you cut it to 2,000 or 3,000, but you’re also going to change the foods, you won’t keep the same junk. […] But, dude, it really depends on the individual. For this type of obese person, I think it’s far more efficient to give them a reality shock, you know? You have to rewire their mindset completely and put them on a super-restrictive diet, even though it’s going to be unpleasant, whether it’s a mediocre diet or a bodybuilder’s cutting plan. […] The bodybuilder’s diet is more efficient than a nutritionist’s because the results are immediate. […[ I’ve seen it in coaching: a very obese client arrives, struggling, and then drops 20 kilograms in 2–4 months. That’s a lot of fat. They’re still overweight, but their appearance changes completely, which affects their psychology and boosts motivation.”

41 Bodily transformation through sport can be understood as a modern rite of passage (Van Gennep 2022; Turner 1969; Sá 2026), structured around three stages of immersion in bodybuilding culture. The first stage, marked by “reality shock” and severe dietary restriction, separates the individual from previous habits, daily routines, and the stigmatized “obese” identity. The second, liminal stage places the practitioner between selves. No longer anchored in the former identity yet not fully realized as the envisioned “new body,” individuals undergo rigorous training, strict nutritional protocols, and often the use of IPED. Suffering, deprivation, and physiological trial become central to this phase, testing resilience against both the discipline of new habits and the expectations of the community. The final stage, aggregation, reintegrates the transformed self into social life. Visible aesthetic change, reinforced by psychological affirmation, signals the consolidation of a new identity and, in some cases, the acquisition of gendered and social capital.

42Visible transformation becomes the most compelling evidence of the method’s efficacy. The phenomenon also reveals a tension between popular and institutional epistemologies. Nutritionists embody formal academic expertise, often perceived as slow, bureaucratic, or detached from the realities of training. Bodybuilders and coaches, by contrast, represent experiential authority grounded in visible results. The maxim that “results are immediate” serves as a core principle of validation, tested through personal experimentation and peer observation. In other words, bro-science operates as a distinct epistemic system. It functions pragmatically, guiding practitioners to maximize benefits while minimizing risks associated with substances, and experimentally, as knowledge circulates through gyms, social networks, and digital media (Monaghan 2001; Underwood 2017; Sá 2025). For bodybuilders, however, the process extends beyond the physical.

Researcher: “Many people report unpleasant effects when they start a diet. What causes that?

André (Bodybuilding Coach): It’s normal and expected to have some kind of negative reaction. I don’t really know exactly what happens; I’ve talked to many coaches about it. Could it be that people just don’t get used to the pain, let’s say, of eating gluten, for example? Like, if you eat gluten and have even a slight intolerance, when you eat bread you feel some intestinal pain. So I believe that people don’t just go on a diet. They get used to lack of concentration, irregular bowel movements, and then when they start a diet for a while and later stop, they feel side effects from exiting the diet. They notice it. I think that’s one possibility. […] And I’ll tell you, any local inflammation, if it persists, eventually becomes systemic. That’s where adrenal fatigue comes in, due to chronically high cortisol. I’ll tell you something funny, but it’s serious. Have you ever heard of post-masturbation or post-sex depression? I’ll tell you, there’s also post-bread depression. For those who stop eating junk food, going back is really tough.”

43His testimony constructs a compelling causal logic within bodybuilding’s food culture. According to his account, practitioners gradually become accustomed to discomfort, pain, and deprivation. Dieting is therefore reinterpreted not merely as restriction but as a ritual of purification promising the restoration of authentic health. For the uninitiated, bodily awareness remains muted, leaving individuals unable to recognize or interpret physiological signs of distress.

44By contrast, initiated practitioners cultivate heightened bodily sensitivity, where even subtle sensations signal imbalance or harm. Over time, a hierarchy of knowledge emerges. Individuals outside strict dietary regimes remain largely unaware of their physiological responses, whereas coaches and experienced practitioners develop more refined interpretive repertoires.

45Dietary discipline also establishes symbolic boundaries between purity and pollution: clean foods and regulated physiques on one side, junk foods and inflamed or maladapted bodies on the other (Douglas 1966). Consuming forbidden items is experienced not simply as dietary failure but as contamination capable of provoking both physical and moral consequences. Adaptation to disciplined eating gradually produces a self-regulating organism that begins to police its own transgressions, often through intolerance toward foods once tolerated.

46Maintaining this regulated condition becomes central to personal narratives and processes of ethical self-formation. Within such a framework, adherence to strict dietary practices generates bodily sensitivity, moral knowledge, and embodied authority. Transgression, by contrast, produces discomfort and social disapproval, reinforcing hierarchical distinctions and moral expectations within bodybuilding communities.

47Eating gluten/junk food → Local inflammation → Chronic/systemic inflammation → Chronically high cortisol → Adrenal fatigue → Depression

48Among the bodybuilders with whom I conducted fieldwork, malaise and illness are collectively interpreted through practices resembling an Explanatory Model (Kleinman et al. 1978; Good 1994). Such a framework performs several functions. It provides a cultural etiology that transforms diffuse sensations such as fatigue or irritability into a coherent “syndrome of experience,” while linking moral choices, particularly dietary discipline, to physiological consequences. A relational semantic network emerges in which terms like “depression” or “adrenal fatigue” acquire meaning by connecting bodily states to moral categories (Good 1994). Biomedical vocabulary, including “inflammation” and “cortisol,” frequently appears in these accounts. Yet such concepts are reinterpreted through a local knowledge system that assigns distinctive causal pathways and ethical significance, often tracing disorder to dietary transgression and locating redemption in purifying abstinence.

49Practices of classifying foods, narrating contamination, and enforcing purification can therefore be understood as a classic system of purity and danger (Douglas 1966). In this moral cosmology, disciplined physiques and clean diets become visible emblems of order, control, and virtue, while junk food and bodily inflammation appear as pollutants threatening personal integrity and collective moral hygiene. Training and dietary regulation thus take the form of corrective rituals aimed at expelling disorder and reaffirming boundaries between the pure and the impure. The sport consequently unfolds as a broader cultural system in which physical health signals not only bodily management but also moral alignment between the self, the community, and the social order to which practitioners aspire.

The Morality of Dieting

50In contemporary bodybuilding, strict dieting operates as far more than a nutritional regimen. It functions as a disciplined technology of the self in which athletes engage in continuous self-surveillance, follow structured regimes of macronutrient calculation and scheduling, and internalize an ethic of performance and appearance. Conceived as a form of askesis rooted in Western traditions of self-care and bodily transformation (Foucault 1984; 2010; Jensen 2023), dietary practice becomes a means by which individuals act upon their bodies, conduct, and desires to cultivate discipline, purity, and self-mastery. Within this framework, the body serves as a visible medium in which virtues such as resilience, control, and dedication are inscribed. Eating practices simultaneously establish symbolic boundaries separating disciplined subjects from a hedonistic and polluted external world. The opposition between “clean” foods and junk food thus structures a classificatory system grounded in the management of purity and danger (Douglas 1966).

51Bro-science amplifies and circulates a practical and experiential form of knowledge that legitimizes bodily practices not through academic authority but through visible results (Underwood 2017). Scientific vocabulary is frequently appropriated and reinterpreted, transforming notions such as inflammation, cortisol, or food addiction into moralized explanations of bodily disorder. Eating becomes a neurochemical arena of struggle in which abstinence operates as a rite of passage and mastery over appetite emerges as both moral achievement and corporeal evidence of discipline.

52Dietary practice in bodybuilding can therefore be understood as a ritualized passage (Van Gennep 2022; Turner 1969). Athletes undergo an initial rupture with prior habits, enter a liminal phase marked by deprivation, testing, and physiological discomfort, and eventually achieve incorporation into a transformed identity. Suffering and abstention function not as incidental byproducts but as constitutive elements of social and subjective transformation, rendering bodily discipline simultaneously ethical, aesthetic, and epistemic.

53Even illness and discomfort acquire meaning within this same order. Narratives linking junk food to inflammation, hormonal imbalance, or depression operate as explanatory models (Kleinman et al. 1978), making diffuse sensations such as fatigue, irritability, and malaise intelligible and morally legible. Beyond describing bodily processes, such accounts outline a redemptive pathway in which ascetic dietary discipline promises restoration. The athlete thus appears simultaneously as patient, diagnostician, and agent of personal cure.

54More broadly, bodybuilding emerges as a site of epistemic contestation. The transformed body functions both as the object of labor and as empirical proof of a rival knowledge system commonly referred to as bro-science (Underwood 2017; Sá 2026). Here, truth becomes grounded less in institutional authority than in visible, disciplined embodiment. Diets thus operate simultaneously as a moral technology, a social performance, and a lived epistemology, crystallizing the entanglement of science, ethics, and practice while redefining who holds authority to interpret, discipline, and optimize the body in the making of the modern athletic self.

Top of page

Bibliography

BAILEY B. & GILLET J. 2012. « Bodybuilding and Health Work: A Life Course Perspective », in A. Locks & N. Richardson (ed.), Critical Readings in Bodybuilding: 99–106. New York: Routledge.

BAILEY B. 2021. Men and bodybuilding: A study of health work, masculinity, and bodybuilding. Doctoral dissertation, McMaster University. MacSphere.

BING F. 1971. « The History of the Word ‘Metabolism’ », Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26(2): 158–180.

BOLIN A. 1992. « Vandalized Vanity: Feminist Perspectives on the Cultural Construction of Female Bodybuilding », in M. M. Crain (ed.), The Cultural Construction of the Female Body: 335–352. New York: Prentice Hall.

BORDO S. 2023. Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CAMPBELL N. D. 2007. Discovering addiction: The science and politics of substance abuse research. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press.

CRAWFORD R. 1984. « A Cultural Account of Health: Control, Release and the Social Body », in J. McKinlay (ed.), Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care: 61–103. New York: Tavistock.

DERRIDA J. 1991. « Eating well, or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida », in E. Cadava, P. Connor & J.-L. Nancy (ed.), Who Comes After the Subject?: 96–119. London: Routledge.

DOUGLAS M. 1966. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

FEATHERSTONE M. 1999. « Body Modification: An Introduction », Body & Society 5(2–3): 1–13. [https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X99005002001]

FOUCAULT M. 1984. « Docile Bodies », in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

FRASER S., MOORE D. & KEANE H. 2014. Habits: Remaking addiction. London: Springer.

GEARHARDT A. N., CORBIN W. R. & BROWNELL K. D. 2009. « Preliminary validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale », Appetite 52(2): 430–436. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2008.12.003]

GOOD B. 1994. Medicine, rationality, and experience: An anthropological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HEDBLOM C. 2009. “The Body is Made to Move”: Gym and Fitness Culture in Sweden. Doctoral dissertation, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis.

JENSEN W. 2023. « The Strength to Diet: If it Fits Your Macros Dieting as Masculine Body Work », Men and Masculinities 26(3): 398–414.

KAMMINGA H. 1995. « Nutrition for the People, or The Fate of Jacob Moleschott’s Contest for a Humanist Science », Clio Medica 32: 15–47.

KLEINMAN A., EISENBERG L. & GOOD B. 1978. « Culture, Illness, and Care: Clinical Lessons from Anthropologic and Cross-Cultural Research », Annals of Internal Medicine 88: 251–258.

LANDECKER H. 2011. « Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism », BioSocieties 6(2): 167–194. [https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2011.1]

LANDECKER H. 2013. « Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge », Public Culture 25(3): 495–522.

LESHNER A. I. 1997. « Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters », Science 278(5335): 45–47.

MONAGHAN L. 1999. « Challenging Medicine? Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk », Sociology of Health & Illness 21(6): 707–734.

MONAGHAN L. F. 2001. Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk. London: Routledge.

MONTANARI M. 2008. Comida como cultura. São Paulo: Editora Senac.

MOREIRA L. 2025. « Virilidade e Temperança: sexo, desejo e moralidade entre marombeiros de rua », Equatorial – Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social 12(23): 1–24.

MUDRY J. J. 2009. Measured meals: Nutrition in America. Albany: State University of New York Press.

NESTLE M. & NESHEIM M. 2011. Why calories count: From science to politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

NESTLE M. 2002. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PARKER C. et al. 2019. « Snowball Sampling », in SAGE Research Methods Foundations. New York: Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

PATTON M. Q. 2002. « Two Decades of Developments in Qualitative Inquiry: A Personal, Experiential Perspective », Qualitative Social Work 1(3): 261–283.

PAXSON H. 2013. The life of cheese: Crafting food and value in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PERERA É. & FEREZ S. 2024. « Se nutrimenter pour dégraisser et gagner du muscle. L’ascétisme égotique du body-builder », Anthropology of Food.

PIATKOWSKI T. M., NEUMANN D. L., KEANE C. & DUNN M. 2023. « “More Drugs Means More Stress on My Body”: Exploring Enhancement and Health among Elite Strength Athletes Who Use Performance and Image Enhancing Drugs », Addiction Research & Theory.

PORTER T. M. 1995. Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

PUHL R. M. & HEUER C. A. 2010. « Obesity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health », American Journal of Public Health 100(6): 1019–1028.

RAIKHEL E. 2015. « From the Brain Disease Model to Ecologies of Addiction », in Re-visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health: 375.

ROSE N. 2007. The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton NJ : Princeton University Press.

SÁ G. 2026. « Crafting the Ideal Body: The Role of Injections in Brazilian Bodybuilding », Etnográfica 30(1): 95–116.

SÁ G. & FREITAS M. 2025. « Masculinidades intoxicadas: capital de gênero e uso de drogas no fisiculturismo », Cadernos Pagu 74: e257406.

SAGOE D., MCVEIGH J., BJØRNEBEKK A., ESSILFIE M. S., ANDREASSEN C. S. & PALLESEN S. 2015. « Polypharmacy among Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Users: A Descriptive Metasynthesis », Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 10(1): 12.

SATEL S. & LILIENFELD S. O. 2013. Brainwashed: The seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience. New York : Basic Books.

SCRINIS G. 2008. « On the Ideology of Nutritionism », Gastronomica 8(1): 39–48.

SCRINIS G. 2013. Nutritionism: The science and politics of dietary advice. New York: Columbia University Press.

SOLOMON H. 2016. Metabolic living: Food, fat, and the absorption of illness in India. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

SOTHERN M. & REID B. 2018. « Placing the Human in Health Geography », in V. Crooks, G. Andrews & J. Pearce (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Health Geography. New York: Routledge.

SYNNOTT A. 1993. The body social: Symbolism, self and society. London: Routledge.

TURNER V. 1969. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

UNDERWOOD M. 2017. « Exploring the Social Lives of Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs: An Online Ethnography of the Zyzz Fandom of Recreational Bodybuilders », International Journal of Drug Policy 39: 78–85.

VAN GENNEP A. 2022. The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

WACQUANT L. J. 2006. Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Top of page

Notes

1 IPED: Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs.

2 This logic of quantification aligns with Porter’s (1995) argument that numerical standardization produces authority in contested domains. Metrics do not merely describe reality but stabilize it, lending certainty for external audiences such as funders, regulators, or scientific peers in ambiguous contexts. The YFAS exemplifies this process by translating subjective experiences of overeating into measurable criteria that enact objectivity. Anthropologically, these effects are visible within bodybuilding’s moral economy, structured around ideals of purity, sacrifice, and control, where food choices are deeply moralized. Rather than introducing new distinctions, the scale provides a metric through which values are recalibrated. By framing the consumption of sugar or fat not simply as dietary failure but as quantifiable “neurochemical deviance,” it intensifies the stakes of consumption. Rather than being imposed, biomedical authority is syncretically incorporated, appropriated by a community that seeks to legitimize its practices of self-discipline through scientific language. The result reinforces perceptions of certain foods as polluting, strengthening bodily governance through the discourse of “objective” science.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Gabriel Salgado Ribeiro de , The Morality of Dieting: “Bro-Science” and the Regulation of Self in Brazilian BodybuildingAnthropology of food [Online], Varia articles: 2008-2026, Online since 28 May 2026, connection on 09 June 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/aof/17325; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/16btm

Top of page

About the author

Gabriel Salgado Ribeiro de

PhD. Instituto Federal do Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso, Brasil. Gabrielsalgado4@hotmail.com

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search