The surprising and hellish way action stars get that ripped look: severe dehydration

Before sharing his regimen in preparation for shirt-off scenes, Hugh Jackman once offered this sage advice: “Don’t do this at home.”

A three-month intense training run-up finishes up with induced dehydration, Jackman, who played the Marvel Comics superhero Wolverine, told The Late Show host Stephen Colbert several years ago.

First, “you increase your water intake to, like — I’m trying to think what the gallons is — but you have about 10 litres of water, which is, what? Three gallons of water a day?”

“And then you stop about 36 hours before you shoot,” Jackman said. “But, because you’ve drunk so much water, you are peeing, all the time.”

Other movie stars have spoken out about what it takes to achieve their muscly looks, including Zac Efron, who starred in the 2017 Baywatch film.

“That Baywatch look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable. There’s just too little water in the skin,” Efron told  Men’s Health in 2022. “Like, it’s fake; it looks CGI’d. And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don’t need to do that. I much prefer to have an extra, you know, two to three per cent body fat.”

Body builders have long used water loading followed by restriction in the days before competition to enhance “leanness and vascularity ,” or veiny arms.

But some worry the “dry look” is becoming part of a broader trend of the pressures boys and young men are facing to adhere to body ideals. Dehydration “risks becoming normalized as a practice necessary to achieve male beauty,” Dr. Michelle Cohen wrote for Healthy Debate .

“The significance of making the dry look a male beauty standard isn’t small and shouldn’t be dismissed as pop culture excess,” Cohen wrote.

“Normalizing this aesthetic and the extreme behaviour needed to achieve it risks serious damage to the physical and mental health of men and boys.”

Eva Pila, an assistant professor in Western University’s School of Kinesiology, and Kyle Ganson, an assistant professor in the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto, helped the National Post dig into why.

“By ‘water loading,’ the body can hold more total water, and sharply cutting intake manipulates the body into reducing water just under the skin, so muscles look a bit sharper, but only for a short period of time,” Pila wrote in an email.

“Severe water restriction also drains muscle glycogen, which holds water, so muscles can look ‘flat’ within a few hours — leading to a fleeting aesthetic effect that serves as a ‘camera trick.'”

This kind of behaviour “can be described as muscularity-oriented disordered eating, and carry dangerous health implications,” Pila said.

Ganson has published several papers on muscle dysmorphia in boys and men in Canada and the U.S. With muscle dysmorphia, people, usually males, are preoccupied with their muscularity, or perceived insufficient muscularity.

“Most people with muscle dysmorphia are actually quite muscular, quite lean, quite strong,” Ganson said. “But they perceive themselves to be otherwise.

“There is an intense drive for muscularity, for doing anything and all things possible to be as muscular as strong, as lean as possible,” whether by using steroids, dietary practices, over exercising or other means.

“It manifests in lots of different ways. It’s really that intense body dissatisfaction, and drive to change that,” Ganson said.

It’s much more common in males, mainly because the male body ideal is so much more focused on muscularity, like the image of Jackman’s “hyper masculine, hyper muscular body,” Ganson said.

In one recent study, 2.8 per cent of the boys and men sampled met clinical criteria for muscle dysmorphia.

Ganson is currently interviewing men who engage in “ looksmaxxing, ” which has been defined as “maximizing one’s physical appearance to attract partners and receive the social benefits that accompany being attractive.”

“Many boys and men, for the first time, are spending much more time focusing on their skin care, their hair care, really trying to not lose their hair,” Ganson said. “There’s a lot of focus on appearance ideals in an almost mathematical sense — formulas of how a chin line and jaw line should look, how far apart your eyes should be.

“For some young people and men, it’s very simple, benign behaviours, like skin care and buying topical lotions, getting different hair products,” Ganson said. “For others, it can be much more extreme, like getting Botox or plastic surgery, engaging in different facial exercises in attempts to try to change their appearance to meet that sort of standard.”

Some of those he’s spoken to have also referenced water fasting. “Obviously, if you are dehydrated in some way, your skin changes,” Ganson said. “For some men it might accentuate their chin and jaw line, or their cheeks, making them look a bit more defined and chiselled.”

Women have long been subjected to societal pressures to adhere to ideal, and often unattainable, appearances. “It’s definitely an interesting dynamic that men are being pushed to do this,” Ganson said.

Images like those of a ripped, shirtless Jackman give the impression “that that’s, like, possible for young people,” Ganson said. The Deadpool and Wolverine star has himself described how it took a team of eight to achieve his uber sculpted physique, including trainers, someone to tally up his macronutrients (how many grams of protein, fats, carbs he’s consuming), a year-and-a-half of chef-prepared meals and a make-up artist using “some kind of oil” to make his skin glisten.

The amount of water typical in water loading can overwhelm the kidneys, Pila said. “The kidneys can only excrete a limited amount of water per hour, making such volumes dangerous.”

With hyponatremia — water intoxication — excessive water dilutes the body’s electrolytes, she said, causing confusion, vomiting, muscle cramps and other symptoms “that, at worst, can be fatal.”

In addition to kidney damage, reduced blood volume, low blood pressure and impaired organ function, Pila said, “chronic or repeated dehydration stresses organs and can cause long-term harm.”

Cavill’s reference to smelling water signals that “the brain’s alarm bell for dehydration” has gone off, she added. “It’s similar to what happens in restrictive eating disorders — when the body is short on caloric energy, the brain elevates the salience of food.

“People think about it constantly, notice every smell and feel pulled toward it. In both cases, it’s the brain’s survival mechanism to regulate intake.”

The weight lost is water, not adipose tissue, Pila said.

“In an effort to achieve a very temporary aesthetic, these extreme behaviours perpetuate dangerous muscularity sociocultural ideals, and are linked with many dire psychological, and medical, consequences,” she said.

“It’s quite improbable for many, and that does lead to body dissatisfaction and maybe some disordered behaviours,” Ganson said.

“Of course, seeking help and reaching out is a really important thing to do.”

National Post

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