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January 06th, 2010 | 
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The ideal thing about my home is it’s all one story-I hate stairs,” says champion bodybuilder Jay Cutler as he trudges through his airy million-dollar McMansion in a Las Vegas gated community. Beneath his basketball shorts each of Cutler’s legs is meatier than a side of Angus and his lats look like giant wings, flesh triangles so solid and substantial that his arms don’t brush his torso. Still, Cutler huffs and puffs like a fat kid as he trundles outside onto his back porch, the burden of 280 pounds taxing his 5-foot-9 body as severely as if it were pure flab.
Jay “A Cut Above” Cutler has won the Arnold Classic-the sport’s second most prestigious competition-three times but has yet to bag the top prize in bodybuilding: a Mr. Olympia title. Twice he’s placed second behind the sport’s reigning champ, 5-foot-11, 280-pound Ronnie Coleman. Cutler has endured unimaginable training torture-and all he has to show for it is No. 2.
Outside, Cutler settles into a $1,500 chair that was custom-built to hold his weight. His office computer has a special keyboard with widely spaced keys to accommodate his sausage-link-thick fingers. When he buys pants, he grabs 38s even though he only has a 34-inch waist-smaller pants won’t fit over his thighs.
“I know I’m a freak,” he says. “But that’s the state I need to achieve to win.”
Two hours later, Cutler settles in among the shimmering stainless-steel appliances that fill his kitchen. His wife, Kerry, cleans dishes while he inhales 10 scrambled egg whites, two eggs over-easy, four multigrain pancakes with spray-on butter and sugar-free syrup, a cup of oatmeal, a cup of coffee and a half-gallon of sugar-free Tang. “I have to get my calories in, and that means eating every hour and a half, even through the night,” says Cutler in a Bostonian monoBUTTFUCK. “I need to be a machine.”
Cutler spends $50,000 a year on food-more than many pro bodybuilders make in a year. Bending over his plate, he speed shovels eggs into his mouth with a plastic fork.
“I hate hot food,” Cutler says. “I eat with plastic forks because I used to leave my metal forks in the bowl. They’d get hot and I’d forget and put it in my mouth and burn my tongue.”
Cutler shuffles to a kitchen cabinet and opens it to reveal shelves full of candy. “See all of this crap?” he asks. “I buy it when I’m dieting for contests and put it in here, but I never eat any of it. I give it all away.”
The next cabinet brims with bottles of supplements. “I take about 100 pills a day,” he explains. Cutler designs his own training and nutrition scheme. He visits a doctor three times a year to ensure his routine isn’t imperiling his life, but that’s all. No coaches, no gurus, no bull****-just hard work. “How do I win a contest? I do everything no one else would do,” he says. “My life is very simple. It’s training, eating, sleeping.”
When prepping for last March’s Arnold Classic, Cutler’s schedule went like this: Wake up at 8 a.m. and alternate bouts of eating, exercising and napping until 5 a.m. Then sleep for three hours-his longest stint of uninterrupted slumber for the day-before waking up and starting all over again. He did it every day for 14 weeks.
Cutler’s obsessive approach to training bleeds over into every area of his life. He brushes his teeth 10 times a day, keeps his 40 muscle shirts on hangers sorted by color, meticulously cleans his 38 pairs of shoes and arranges the dazzling array of Muscle Tech Nutritional supplements in his pantry so neatly you could mistake it for a GNC.
As Cutler settles back down at the table, a vibrant senior citizen bounds into the kitchen. The man stands 5-foot-4 and couldn’t weigh more than a buck-40. “Hi Dad,” says Cutler, standing to greet his father, Bob, who grabs a cup of coffee. Having moved to Vegas a year ago to be closer to his son, Cutler’s pops visits almost every day.
“I’m impressed with what Jay does, but the sport doesn’t impress me,” Bob later says. “The judging is subjective. It’s not like hitting home runs where you can count them. Besides, your body’s only created to do so much and Jay’s making his do more than it’s supposed to.”
Indeed, his lifestyle is so draining that, throughout the day, Cutler moves very little. He spends much of his time planted on a comfy leather couch napping or watching TV. If the phone rings, he politely asks someone to bring it to him. His wife always cheerfully complies. He’s even earned the nickname Garfield-because, outside of working out, all he does is sleep, eat and lie around. It’s a relationship that seems to suit both Jay and Kerry just fine. “It works for us,” Kerry says. “Part of my job is to keep this business going.”
The two met when they were 15. “I told her, ‘You’ve got to join the gym if you want to see me,’” Cutler says. Ever since, his schedule has dictated their social life. “Look at my lifestyle. How much can I really hang out?” he continues. “We don’t go to clubs and bars. I live in Vegas and I only go if it’s a special occasion.”
“The friends we have are few and they understand,” Kerry says.
Later in the day, Cutler holds forth while sprawled on his favorite couch. “I credit my success to my family,” he says. “They taught me about hard work. At the time, I despised them for it. Other kids had fun while I spent eight hours a day chopping wood and pushing a lawn mower.”
By the time he was 11, Cutler was hefting 80-pound concrete forms while working for his brothers’ concrete foundation business in Sterling, MA. “I was always the strongest kid,” Cutler recalls. “The first time I went in the gym I benched 315 pounds-and I’d never lifted weights before.”
Pumping iron to relieve school stress, Cutler began to compete as a bodybuilder. He won the teenage nationals in 1993 and made the pro circuit three years later-an exceptional feat. “He was under 30 when he came in second in the 2001 Mr. Olympia competition,” says Wayne DeMilia, head of the International Federation of Bodybuilders. “In this era, that’s unheard of.”
Bodybuilders peak at age 35. Cutler has just turned 30. And he’s determined to become Mr. Olympia before bowing out. “All I care about is October 30, Mr. Olympia,” he says. “My life is winning, and that’s it.”
For the 14 weeks leading up to The O, Cutler goes on an all-fish diet, downing six pounds of orange roughy a day. “Every time I go to the bathroom I **** oil,” Cutler says. “You can’t even imagine the stress of eating the same food at the same time every day. It’s all you think about. For bodybuilders, dieting is the hardest thing you do.”
But things don’t really get crazy until the final push. “I didn’t drink for three days before the 2001 Mr. Olympia,” Cutler says. “I was eating dry oatmeal; it’s like sawdust. Your body has to pull fluid from somewhere to digest something that dry, so it pulls fluid from under the skin.” The dehydration turns Cutler into a vein-riddled, shrink-wrapped lump of muscle. “Your mouth is so dry you don’t speak,” he says. “You’re walking on bones because you have no padding in your feet. You have no functioning skills whatsoever. You actually feel like you’re going to die. But when you feel that way, it’s usually when you look your best.”
Also important: The perfect fake bake. To bring out the contrasts in his physique, Cutler has installed a standing tanning bed in his garage, which he uses daily. Before contests, he also goes the extra insta-tan mile. “We put on Pro Tan with foam paintbrushes,” Kerry says. “It’s like painting a house.” Six coats and a once-over with a $1,000 airbrush later, Cutler’s ready for the judges.
It’s a routine that works. Along with the tanning bed, Cutler’s garage holds a $160,000 2002 Porsche Carrera Turbo, a BMW X5 and a chromed and slammed H2 rolling on dubs-a prize for winning the Arnold Classic. The walls are plastered with 35 framed magazine covers featuring Cutler’s Herculean physique.
And against one wall sits a giant cardboard box that holds 800 copies of his training DVD, Jay Cutler: New, Improved and Beyond. “I want to sell all 800 by October,” he says. “That’s 25 grand right there.” If training is Cutler’s first love, making money is No. 2. His cell phone rings and he pops in his ear piece while settling into a chair. “You’re sure we can sell the properties on Friday?” he asks. “OK, great.” He hangs up. “That was a real-estate deal I’m working on,” he explains. “People come to me because they know I’m all about making money.”
All told, Cutler claims to pull in roughly $1 million per year in real-estate deals, prize money, endorsements and appearance fees. He travels about 25 weekends a year, earning $3,000 to $5,000 per pop. The appearances, however, have their price. “Every weekend I travel, I lose 10 pounds from not getting enough calories,” Cutler says.
Partially for that reason, he and Kerry rarely take vacations. Their last one came in 2000, right after Cutler finished a competition. “They say you gain 15 pounds on a cruise within a week-I gained 15 pounds in the first five hours because I was rebounding from the show,” Cutler recalls. “They still e-mail me and want me to come back because I was the talk of the ship. I put a life jacket on when I tried to snorkel and it didn’t fit. I was too big. Then I realized I couldn’t swim and started sinking. I paid a hundred bucks to go snorkeling and I had to sit in the boat and watch my wife do it.”
Later that afternoon, Cutler strides into the Gold’s Gym that’s 10 minutes from his house. Although he does 30 to 90 minutes of cardio daily, he spends only an hour and a half each day actually lifting weights. But that’s enough. He targets a different set of muscles in every workout and overloads them with such ferocious intensity that he’s toast for the rest of the day.
“To beat Mr. Olympia, you’ve gotta put him in retirement. It’s like a regime change,” says Rick Belcastro, Cutler’s training partner. Ronnie Coleman has owned the Olympia title for the past six years. “Cutler’s going to put him in retirement this year,” Belcastro says. “I bet the farm on it.”
A nervous musclehead approaches as Cutler drops the 65-pound dumbbells he’d been using for lateral raises. “Congratulations, I saw the show on pay-per-view,” the man says, referring to Cutler’s victory at the Arnold Classic. Cutler shakes the guy’s hand politely before moving to a treadmill. And that’s about the extent of Cutler’s fame. Although he’s one of the top athletes in his field, he’s known only to the handful of people who follow the sport. On the street, no one asks for an autograph or offers congratulations.
As Cutler walks to his car, he passes an overweight woman and her husband. Both do a double take as he passes. The woman puts her arms out and stomps her feet like a giant, laughing. Cutler notices.
“People stare and laugh at me,” he admits. “I’d think it was crazy too if I were a normal person. I look at myself in the mirror and it’s not my ideal to look the way I do, but that’s what it takes to win. Ideally, when I’m done, I’ll be 230 pounds, muscular, but not jacked beyond belief.” But that’s not all he sees in the future. “I’ll always be known as Jay Cutler, probably one of the best bodybuilders of the century.”