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Bodybuilding with
Jerry Melhuish
Bulging muscles ripple smoothly. Triceps tighten. Biceps curl. Satiny skin bathed in blazing light slides taut over ropey, shifting, bunching brawn. Abdominals contract and shoulder blades spread wide. Every move is practiced. Every pause is planned. Pumping music climbs to a crescendo, the crowd goes wild and the copper god halts.
Behold the world of competitive bodybuilding. A world of power, strength and masochistic self-discipline. A world in which skin acts as Saran Wrap and body fat is a memory. Not a place for everyone.
To many, the idea of adhering to a rigid diet, hitting the gym six days a week, stripping down to a Speedo, and climbing onstage coated in Pam Cooking Spray would be difficult and even a bit scary. But JSC sophomore Jeremiah Melhuish, 20, loves the struggle.
“I like it because it’s hard,” he says. “If it was easy, I wouldn’t do it.”
Having fully immersed himself in the bodybuilding lifestyle for over a year now – a decision that has affected him profoundly, from his social life to his physicality to his mental endurance – Melhuish is now preparing for his first bodybuilding competition. But competing wasn’t always on his list of things to do.
“It originally just started out as me wanting to get into shape,” Melhuish says. “Then I just wanted to get a little more lean. Then I did research on bodybuilding.com, started looking at the lifestyle as a whole, and decided that I wanted to compete someday and that I wanted to look like that.”
Easier said than done. But on December 24, 2006, Melhuish embarked on a dietetic adventure that commanded very big changes to his overall way of living.
“I definitely had to clean up what I ate. No fast food – you’ve really got to watch the fats. You’ve got to watch the empty calories. You’ve got to watch your sugars and your sodium,” Melhuish says. “I miss ice cream and pizza and, on a lot of days, just a sandwich… because I can only have one slice of bread a day.”
Melhuish’s diet is all business. He doesn’t eat to curb boredom, relieve stress, or fulfill a craving. And he never eats ‘just because.’
“I don’t eat to satisfy myself. I eat because I have to eat,” Melhuish says. “I’ve trained myself when to eat and how much to eat. Maybe I’m hungry or maybe I’m not, but I know that I have to eat it anyway because my body needs it.”
Because 30 carbohydrates can mean the difference between a good day and a bad day, Melhuish needs to be fastidious when it comes to prepping his food—most of which comes from home. At the end of each weekend, he comes back to JSC with turkey burgers, boxes of rice and two pounds of chicken that he picks off the bone and portions into four to six ounce servings using the scale in his bedroom.
He brings his own food to the dining hall, including his cereal, and eats nothing using his meal plan save egg whites, salad, and milk. Each day, he is allowed to have 40 individual unsalted peanut pieces. According to Melhuish, he eats them one at a time “to make them last longer.”
Although it must be painful to surrender indulgent food in pursuit of a passion, perhaps more painful is the need to eat foods that aren’t appealing at all.
“I eat tuna and cottage cheese every night – half a cup of cottage cheese and a can of tuna,” Melhuish says. “I’m not allowed to have a lot of empty calories, so I can’t have mayonnaise or Miracle Whip. So I mix them [tuna and cottage cheese] together and it’s really gross, but it’s a lot of protein and it’s real low carbs. I hate it. I actually despise tuna very much, but I eat a can of it every night.”
Building muscle requires large amounts of protein, which Melhuish obtains largely through his cottage-tuna-squish and powdered protein shakes. Once, on a financial splurge, Melhuish treated himself to a 10-pound bag of protein powder that he left out in his suite. “Everybody said that it looked like a dog food bag,” he says, laughing. And it did.
\When in training, bodybuilders alternate between two phases of dieting: bulking and cutting. Bulking is when a bodybuilder consumes larger meals with more carbohydrates in order to gain weight, which is then turned to muscle through intensive weight training.
After that muscle is developed, cutting is the process by which bodybuilders consume smaller portions, reduce their carbs, and up their proteins to drop the spare body fat gained during the bulking process. At the end of cutting, the fat percentage is low and the new muscle looks defined.
Achieving efficient muscle growth with minimal fat gain requires a lot of math. Melhuish has a notebook that he uses to record the foods he eats and his caloric intake at each meal. According to him, he carries it “everywhere.” Having dropped 23 pounds since beginning the cutting process in February, Melhuish looks forward to bulking after the competition if for no reason other than “the luxury of real cheese and 2 percent milk.”
Although the end result looks good, the road there is demanding. Melhuish hits the gym six days a week. Between that and his intensive diet, having a social life can be challenging.
“I haven’t gone anywhere since February,” Melhuish says. “I haven’t gone out to dinner. I haven’t gone to the movies. Movies are a good hour and a half to two hours and you have to drive there and you’ve got to drive back, and so that’d be cutting into a time that I was supposed to be scheduled to eat.”
Bodybuilding is more than a pastime to Melhuish. It’s a lifestyle and he takes it seriously, so seriously that when it comes to wearing little Speedo-style “posing trunks,” rubbing himself down with Dream Tan, and completely shaving his arms, legs, and chest, he has no hesitation. No reservations. No second thoughts. He handles it with good humor.
“The backs of the legs are a pain in the ass!” he says, laughing. He shrugs. “It’s fun though. It’s like, ‘Yeah! I’m going to go shave my legs. Cool.’”
It’s apparent that it takes a lot of drive and commitment to adhere to such a strict lifestyle, especially in a collegiate environment. Melhuish finds it disappointing and unfair that bodybuilding, the one thing he’s working so hard for, holds such negative connotations in today’s society.
“Everybody thinks we’re just meatheads and that we’re gym rats and that we’re in the gym every day and we don’t know nothing… you know, which makes it sound like we don’t.” He pauses, smiling at his mistake and shaking his head, continues. “But, I mean, there’s so much you have to know. You have to know so much about how the human body works. You have to know so much about nutrition and supplementation. After I work out, what’s going to make my insulin levels peak the best? What’s going to make my muscle recover to the best of its ability? How much creatine will saturate the muscle? How much protein do I need? You need to know about body kinesthetics, how the body operates, how it moves. You’ve got to know how to lift the weight the right way. There’s a lot more to it than going to the gym and throwing around a bunch of weight. You have to be smart to body build.”
And Melhuish feels he has been smart.
“I feel like I’ve done a real good job of balancing everything,” he says. “I’m still doing real well in school and I’m still there socially. I feel like, if anything, this was an addition that I needed to my life, like something was missing before. I think it was something that needed to be there that was just waiting.”
At the end of the day, for Melhuish, that’s what it’s all about – the passion, the challenge and the love for what he’s doing. And when he steps onstage at the 2008 New England Vermont Body Building Championship on April 26, obstructing his hard-earned muscles with nothing but his posing trunks, a generous coating of Pam Cooking Spray—to help catch those flashy lights—and a tan, his intensive effort will have paid off, and he’ll be staying true his motto: Give big to get big.
“This is the first thing I’ve ever really been into that I know I can succeed at,” he says. “It’s the only sport I know that whatever you put into it, whether it’s your life or two hours of your time, you’re going to get that much out of it. It’s a really good feeling. Just the satisfaction of knowing you’re improving yourself in every aspect of your life is rewarding.”
