Mr. Big (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine September 2003

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Mr. Big (Cont.)


	SUPERSIZE IT: "Everybody has the power to change," Phillips insists. "To be better." (Jeff Riedel)

PRONOUNCEMENTS LIKE THAT are a mystery as well. Are they sincere statements from a fitness visionary? Or prefab sound bites from a smart businessman who wants to seem inspiring but doesn't quite know how?

Looking for answers to such questions, I've spent a year chasing Phillips and trying to get a feel for his public persona—which turns out to be tricky, since there isn't one. Little has been written about him except for puff pieces extolling EAS or Body-for-Life. Even as he quietly amassed a legion of zealous followers, he materialized only at book signings, on the rare morning show, or for prescheduled online discussion. When I asked to meet him in person, his publicity people turned cagey, stoking my curiosity even more. Who was this reclusive cat whipping America into shape? He should have been huge, but no one seemed to know a thing about him.

There are reasons for that—one being Phillips's own awkwardness in the spotlight. "When you see him in one of his videos, he comes across as really canned," says Michael D'Orso, 49, a nonfiction author who cowrote Body-for-Life. "And when you meet him, you can't help but ask, 'Is this guy for real?' He's a perfectionist, and there are some control-freak issues, but strip everything else away and Bill's a philosopher at heart. He's voraciously curious and earnest, and sometimes that doesn't translate as well as it should."

Body-for-Life is the biggest fitness phenomenon the country has ever seen, helping Phillips amass a fortune of over $100 million. He did it by creating fired-up customers who thrive on intense workouts, rigorous diet, and extreme commitment.

Another, I think, is that Phillips knows that not everything about his life story would look great on a billboard. He got his start in hardcore bodybuilding, a world where steroid use is routine, and he first made a mark with a book called the Anabolic Reference Guide, a kind of Steroids for Dummies that covered everything from how to acquire the drugs in Mexico to where you stick the needle. Phillips makes no apologies about this aspect of his past—"It's just what you did if you wanted to be a bodybuilder," he says—but he doesn't advertise it, either.

Whatever his motives, Phillips prefers a business plan that doesn't require him to be out there selling and yelling like Tony Little—a plan that fuels itself with a self-energizing network of excited customers. Body-for-Life accomplished this with gusto.

BFL's widespread appeal has as much to do with its inviting and addictive team spirit as with its promise to deliver a fantasy figure. The workouts are brief and intense, involving three days of weight lifting alternating with three days of aerobic conditioning. The BFL diet is a bit more challenging. You're told to eat six small meals a day—balancing protein, carbs, and fat—which in practice is a daunting chore that devotees handle by planning weekly menus, supplemented with EAS products like Myoplex protein shakes and AdvantEdge bars. You get one free day to eat what you like, but the rest of the time you draw from a spartan list of "authorized" foods—no booze, no Ben & Jerry's, no bacon double cheeseburgers.

When Body-for-Life hit bookstores in 1999, it was stuffed full of "Real-Life Success Stories"—BFL-speak for before-and-after images of dramatic physical transformations. The bulked-up changelings wrote emotive testimonials about the value of goal setting, but the stories paled in comparison with the pictures. It was one thing to show photos of elite athletes who had built on their God-given superbodies, quite another to present page after page of shlumpy middle-aged professionals next to their new, sculpted selves.

"The idea to include the before-and-after pictures was Bill's," says David Black, 43, the literary agent who negotiated the deal between Phillips and Body-for-Life's publisher, HarperCollins. "He had very clear ideas about what he wanted. But two other basic things made the book so popular: The program works, and it fits the harried time frame in which we all live."

The proof is in the numbers. Last year, more than 750,000 people requested the free BFL Challenge enrollment kits. Only about 5 percent of that total see it all the way through, but even the dabblers have helped Phillips rack up substantial earnings. Though he no longer keeps royalties from the Body-for-Life book and gives large sums to charities like the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Phillips is now worth well over $100 million. On the supplement front, EAS attributes about 20 percent of its $300 million in annual revenue to Body-for-Life Challenge participants.

Who were all these people gobbling down protein and powering out reps on the incline bench? A month before I went to Golden, I traveled to New York to meet a few living, breathing BFLers, specifically Thomas Phillips (no relation to Bill) and Jill Augello, two winners from the 2002 Body-for-Life Challenge. A curious dimension of the Body-for-Life phenomenon is that very little of it is tangible. There are no mass rallies starring Bill, no infomercials, no BFL classes after work at Bally's. It's a virtual community, united by rah-rah chat groups in which program participants dish training tips, offer encouragement, and hash out thorny existential problems like whether to load up on Betagen before going to bed.

In Manhattan, I spent the day accompanying the champs—who each received an EAS leather jacket, a year of free supplements, and a $50,000 cash prize—on a citywide victory lap, a stretch limo carting us to in-store appearances at assorted vitamin shops and gourmet grocers. During the day, a crew from EAS shot footage of the winners that would later be edited, dubbed, and distributed to EAS outlets to help attract new customers. Although the winners were constantly told that this day was "all about them," it was, in fact, mostly about the ritual baptism of EAS's next wave of marketing infantry. Running the show was Porter Freeman, 53, a former bar manager from Orlando, Florida, who'd become a BFL champ in 1997, the first year of the contest. As the limo lurched through midtown traffic, the bronze, fit Freeman peppered the champs with well-rehearsed questions.

"Thomas, what's the most important tool in the program?" he asked. Phillips, a stout special-ed teacher from New Jersey, thought about it while the camera rolled. Then, with a little hesitation, he said, "My body."

Freeman turned to Augello, a lithe, blond Scot living on Long Island. "Jill, what's the most important tool in the program?"

"My body!" she blurted.

Freeman was sandwiched between the two winners, and he slapped his hands on their knees simultaneously, shaking his head with theatrical disappointment. Phillips and Augello were rapt.

"It's the fork!" Freeman declared. "Every time you raise food to your mouth, you're making a decision. Is it the right one? You need to ask yourself this: Is a bite of the bait worth the pain of the hook?"

Everyone in the car nodded. We'd seen the light. But then the cameraman stopped shooting. There was a problem.

"Um," he said, gesturing for Freeman to take a look at the rear dash, where someone had left an empty Doritos bag. Freeman snatched it and threw it on the floor.

"Was that in the shot?" he grumbled.

The cameraman nodded. Then he raised his lens again.

Freeman looked at Thomas Phillips. "Thomas," he said, "what's the most important tool in the program?"

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