Paradise on Steroids By: Hater Skelter

Spending time in Canggu, Bali can sometimes feel like watching a live soft-porn show. Everywhere you turn, you can see swole guys walking around shirtless, displaying their bare, slimy torsos, even when they’re eating. Go to a crowded eatery such as Sika Warung and you’ll find yourself standing very close to one of these guys in a queue, or having them flash their sweaty, muscular half-naked bodies right in front of you while you’re trying to finish your lunch. 

You also see these guys doing daredevil stunts with their motorbikes in Canggu (the shirtless bule guys are always the most dangerous drivers in Canggu), mostly with their girlfriends riding along and curiously, these girls are usually grabbing their men’s titties while they’re riding pillion, have you ever noticed? What’s the deal with that? If you’re a guy, can you still concentrate on your driving while you’re horny?                                           

But I digressed. Going back to the main theme of this story: it seems like the fitness craze has become the sole obsession of the Canggu residents, no matter where they come from: not just the White guys, we also have Chinese, Korean, Latino, Indian, Black and Malay guys parading half-naked around Canggu. 

Yes, we also do have well-built women who walk around wearing only sports bras in Canggu,but let’s focus on the guys for a while because they seem to be the star of the show here. Open  the accounts of some of the most popular fitness clubs or communities and you’ll see male-boobs aplenty. The main selling point of the reels uploaded by Rise and Run, a Canggu running club, seems to be bare-chested guys whose pec muscles bounce up and down as they do their morning jog. 

Also, if you open the Instagram account for Wanderlust fitness village and check out their stories, all you can see is naked guys’ flesh. People might start to get the idea that if you’re an expat guy living in Canggu, then your shirt is something you can do without. It’s a very convenient way to save money on laundry, you can also use the money you typically spend on a new shirt to fund your pretentious Canggu life for more contents on Instagram.

If you don’t have the perfect physique, or God forbid, obese, then you might want to consider not staying in Canggu (if you still want to stay in Bali, maybe try going to Ubud and Sanur instead), because these guys’ daily soft-porn show in Canggu can have you eat your self-confidence for breakfast. Or maybe, they can actually motivate you to drag your lazy ass to the gym and start pumpin’. 

However, don’t let these guys’ air of superiority intimidate you. The Canggu guys’ obsession with physical fitness also has its own dark side, something which they obviously rarely if ever talk about.

First of all, many of these guys actually have body image complexes. Most research studies focus on women’s body image issues amid the pressure of getting and staying thin, with few researchers examining male body dysmorphia, which mostly manifest in the pressure of getting more and more muscular (while also shedding excess fat along the way). It does not help that the depiction of men in popular culture have become more and more muscular in the past few decades.

Based on my observation, a number of these muscular men in Canggu undergo a tight dietary restriction and therefore they are no fun to eat out with because, no different than their female peers, they always obsessively count their calories before they start eating. 

The reason why they have to monitor their calories is mostly because they want to retain their muscle definition in their belly area. You can still have nice men-boobs or arms or shoulders even though you have a bit of a belly fat, but the stomach area is the trickiest part of all: you eat too much of sugar or fat and then your belly will start to inflate, diminishing the six-pack that you’ve worked hard to sculpt every day at the gym for hours on end.

Speaking of spending too much time at the gym, I know a 37-year-old guy who, because he was so obsessed about getting rid of excess fat and maintaining his bodybuilder physique, got reprimanded by his personal trainer for spending about 4 hours daily at the gym. Yes, when you’re an advanced weightlifter, which means you have already maxed out the amount of weight you can work out with at the gym, the 48-hour recovery rule no longer applies to you. 

However, 4 hours every day at the gym is also a bit excessive. A lot of your endurance at the gym will be largely determined by your genes too; not everybody is born with the genes which bequeathed them with the stamina to work out for hours on end at the gym on a daily basis. Then I heard that the guy was hospitalized from a near-fatal heart attack, which supposedly resulted from his hard daily grinds at the gym. However, he was not deterred at all by his near-death experience and stopped weightlifting exercises altogether; soon as he got out of the hospital, his Instagram contents were filled with pictures of him, again pumping iron at the gym.

The same guy, who was involved in the Canggu fitness enthusiast circle, also told me that so many men in Canggu tried to defy their genetics (which did not predispose them to have the swole ideal physique of their fantasies,) by using steroids. He told me of one bule guy who used to borrow money from his peers in the fitness circle, saying he needed the money to pay for the medical treatment of his sick relative. Then, one day he was found dead in his guesthouse and the forensic team said he died of a steroid overdose.

Not everything is what it seems. If you start to feel insecure around these muscular guys in Canggu, remind yourself that in order to get the body that they’re flaunting in public places, they have to go through lots of painful workout regimes, dietary restriction and even using dangerous chemicals such as steroids.