ATOMIC DOG
Dietary Malfeasance
by TC

The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.

It's nothing but a footnote in history, but for a brief period of time, the East German sports machine consistently produced the best athletes the world had ever seen.

Prior to the wall coming down in 1990 and the unification of East and West Germany, this relatively tiny country of 16 million people—less than half the size of California—had produced 519 Olympic medals, 37% of which were gold.

Was Hitler right? Was it just that the Aryan race was just plain superior? Nope. What they had was a supreme dedication to both sport and winning. And I'm not just talking about the athletes themselves; the entire German Democratic Republic (GDR) was programmed to win.

Consider that the West Germans, at the same time, employed 1500 coaches to train their Olympic athletes while the GDR employed 12,000, in addition to over 1,800 doctors and Lord knows how many chemists.

Sports officials routinely scouted every playground in the country in an effort to discover talent. Gifted youngsters were invited to visit regional training centers for free professional coaching. Once they arrived, they were given comprehensive medical exams to determine which sport they were most suited for. They weighed muscles and measured bones. If a child wanted desperately to be a sprinter, testing might reveal that because of his or her muscle fiber composition, the athlete might be better suited for distance running. And of course, the child became a distance runner. Personal ambitions and desires were secondary.

At that point, the Government would begin to subsidize the athlete's training and very existence. It wasn't necessary for him to wash dishes or dig ditches—his job was to train and excel for the glory of the State.

You have to understand that sports—or rather, success in sports—was considered a weapon against the decadent West. Every medal was like a kick in the groin to West Germany, America, France, you name it.

This obsession for numbers of medals was so pronounced that the GDR hardly gave a shit about team sports like soccer. After all, if you won in soccer, it only counted as one medal. Instead, the GDR preferred individual sports where the number of medals could tally up.

You could tell, too, when it was an East German on the medal stand, and I'm not talking about their drab uniforms. Instead, the GDR athletes all had this empty look on their faces. Whereas Americans might wave tiny flags, blow kisses to the crowd, and grin like supremely conditioned Cheshire cats, the East German medalists looked like they were waiting for a bus.

It was much the same before a competition, too. This was the exact opposite of what certain boxers do, or what the Oakland Raiders do en masse. Instead of trash-talking their opponents, the faces and overall demeanor of the GDR athletes offered no challenge or expression at all. This is what they had been trained to do since childhood.

This was probably most evident in their swimmers. These…these droids would come into the locker rooms already wearing their dark goggles—they just plain didn't want any of their competitors to see their eyes. Their goal was to plant the notion in their competitor's minds that since they acted like machines, maybe they were machines, and everyone knows you can't beat a machine.

The lives of the athletes were obviously dedicated to sport and nothing but sport. As such, they all led lives of extreme discipline. They didn't miss training sessions. They didn't half-ass their training sessions. They didn't cheat on their diets.

Once though, gold medalist figure skater Katarina Witt—in a rare case of dietary malfeasance—was caught eating a bag of Western-style potato chips that had somehow made its way into training camp. To discipline her, and to "remind her" how important a good diet was, the coaches forced her to subsist on nothing but apples and mineral water for a week.

Amazingly, this potato chip episode was a harbinger of what ultimately destroyed the East German sports machine.

Obviously, unification of East Germany and West Germany and its economic ramifications played a big part. The united Republic wasn’t so interested in hiring all those coaches and doctors, so many of them left to help fledgling athletic organizations, most notably in Australia and, as is evident by their recent surge in athletic achievement, China.

But what ultimately played a bigger part in the downfall of the GDR's athletic program was freedom, the kind that Katarina Witt had briefly indulged in.

The lives of the GDR athletes had been so disciplined, so regimented, that when the wall came down and they were exposed to Western excesses, they crumbled quickly; as quickly as the wall itself on that night of October 3^rd, 1990. They were like monks let loose in a whorehouse; like teetotalers stranded in a liquor store; like vegetarians locked in a steak house. They were overwhelmed by all the temptations of the West. They had deprived themselves of so much for so long that this sudden overdose of freedom wreaked havoc on their previously strong will.

Katarina Witt got fat and slow. She started to look like one of the pink dancing hippos from Fantasia. And so did many others. Not only that, but their once formidable will to train got sideswiped by nightclubs, shopping centers, and Nintendo. While a few of the athletes still did well in the 1992 Olympics—this time representing a united Germany—the rest faded into obscurity.

I've seen this type of phenomenon before on a much smaller scale. About 10 years ago—when I ran the now defunct Muscle Media 2000—the magazine teamed up with MET-Rx to organize a Caribbean fitness cruise. As I recall, about 80 people signed up. The first night on board, during our first dinner together, virtually all of the guests turned their nose up at the dinner entrée. The ship had the temerity to serve unskinned chicken, covered with some kind of sauce that probably contained butter or fat!

Nearly everyone present spent the evening cutting their chicken, removing the skin, and then dipping it into their water glasses to rinse off the sauce. It looked some bizarre type of fondue where instead of dipping their food in cheese, diners dipped their food in murky mud-colored water. Each diner was trying to show that he or she was more food pious than the next.

The following night wasn't much different but by the third night, cruise attendees were leaving the skin on, using butter on their bread, and ordering seconds.

By the fourth night, they were doubling up on desserts. Come the last night, all their resolve had been dumped overboard into Davy Jones' locker. They were devouring everything in sight with the earnestness of those guys you see in the hot-dog eating contests at Coney Island. They reminded me of those gluttonous Romans who'd feast and purge, only there was no purging going on here. Nope, these people were storing those abundant calories.

Their tables were covered with shots of Tequila and they were taking extra portions of food to their cabins and then setting their alarms so they could attend the midnight pastry or pizza party.

It was surprising to see, but in retrospect, quite understandable. These people had spent so much time being disciplined that indulging in the slightest temptation had caused their will to collapse like a house of fudge being eaten by someone with a real bad case of the munchies.

And I'm sorry to say that I personally experienced this same phenomenon a week ago. Now I haven't had ice cream in probably two or three years. I haven't had a McDonald's hamburger in 15 years. I haven't had a doughnut in five years. As such, I was probably ripe for something like the "East German Phenomenon."

So when my friends took me to a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, my Spidey-sense was tingling like a tambourine player hopped up on meth. Sure, I'd heard about Krispy Kreme and seen the lost souls—the lost fat souls—lining outside their stores; knew all about the deep-fried cakes that move along a conveyor belt underneath a waterfall of sugar glaze, but I'd never tried one. Never had the urge to try one…until I was offered one by a little temptress wearing a white Krispy Kreme hat stationed at the end of the conveyor belt.

She was like one of the Sirens that tempted Ulysses and I was not immune to her call. Would that I, like Ulysses, had asked my friends to strap me to the grill of our vessel—a Chevy Tahoe—so that I might have just enjoyed the smell rather than succumbing to their taste! I took one, looked at it briefly, and with trembling hands raised it to my mouth. I sank my teeth into its warm shell. I immediately felt like Alex from A Clockwork Orange:

"It was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar and I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise, and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again."

I ate it in four bites. And then I had another Krispy Kreme. And another. And another. I ate 12.

Shades of the GDR athletes, was I doomed to turn into Katarina Witt? Would I turn pink, don a tutu, and pirouette my way into Tubby City? I could see the greasy writing on the wall. Vaguely, from some part of my self-conscience, I could hear a small, donut-muffled scream.

But you know what happened the next morning? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I didn't suddenly look like Lee Priest in the off-season. My gut hadn't expanded to the point where I could no longer see my genitalia. Sure, my insulin levels had probably spiked so high that it hit Mars in its pretty red caboose, but my ironclad pancreas had done its job and I was no worse for the experience.

And luckily, this brief dance with the dietary devil didn't send me on any kind of prolonged eating binge. I haven't had any more Krispy Kremes and I probably won't for awhile, but it made me realize that there's a potential downfall to being so strict, so disciplined. Maybe an occasional indulgence here and there would be better. Maybe moderation isn't a bad idea and being fanatically strict day-in and day-out, eating to perfection, training balls to the wall all the time, leaves you open to big setbacks.

Something that bends isn't likely to break. Those that never let up in the slightest often take one step forward, two steps back, while those that are a little cyclical in their approach take two steps forward and only an occasional step backwards.

I'm sure my career and experiences won't even merit a footnote in history, but regardless, I want to stay in this game, this iron game, a long time and maybe occasional moderation is the key.