Joe Weider

Weider was born in Montreal, Quebec, to Louis and Anna Weider, Jewish immigrants from Poland. Weider's unique accent displayed his old world roots, described by his nephew Eric as "somewhere between Yiddish, Canadian, old Polish...this Montreal kind of stew of accents." Weider began weight training in his teenage years in order to stand up to bullies, and participated in his first bodybuilding contest at the age of 17.

Weider published the first issue of Your Physique magazine in 1940, and built a set of barbells out of car wheels and axles the same year out of the family garage on Coloniale Street in Montreal. He designed numerous training courses beginning in the 1950s, including the Weider System of Bodybuilding.

Weider worked alongside his wife Betty, together authored books on bodybuilding. Joe and Ben together were the co-founders of the International Federation of BodyBuilders.

In 1968, the brothers brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to California.

Weider married Hedwiges "Vicky" Uzar, with whom he had a child, before divorcing in 1960. In 1961, Weider married Betty Brosmer, who was then the highest-paid pin-up girl in the U.S.

Weider died of heart failure on March 23, 2013, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at the age of 93.

Legal issues

In 1972, Weider and his brother Ben found themselves the target of an investigation led by U.S. Postal inspectors. The investigation involved the claims regarding their nutritional supplement Weider Formula No. 7. The product was a weight-gainer that featured a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on the label. The actual claim centered on consumers being able to "gain a pound per day" in mass. Following an appeal wherein Schwarzenegger testified, Weider was forced to alter his marketing and claims. Also in 1972, Weider encountered legal problems for claims made in his booklet Be a Destructive Self-Defense Fighter in Just 12 Short Lessons.

Weider was ordered to offer a refund to 100,000 customers of a "five-minute body shaper" that was claimed to offer significant weight loss after just minutes a day of use. The claims, along with misleading "before and after" photographs, were deemed false advertising by a Superior Court Judge in 1976.

In the 1980s, Weider found himself answering charges levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In 1984, the FTC charged that ads for Weider's Anabolic Mega-Pak (containing amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and herbs) and Dynamic Life Essence (an amino acid product) had been misleading. The FTC complaint was settled in 1985 when Weider and his company agreed not to falsely claim that the products could help build muscles or be effective substitutes for anabolic steroids. They also agreed to pay a minimum of $400,000 in refunds or, if refunds did not reach this figure, to fund research on the relationship of nutrition to muscle development.

In 2000, Weider Nutritional International settled another FTC complaint involving false claims made for alleged weight loss products. The settlement agreement called for $400,000 to be paid to the FTC and for a ban on making any unsubstantiated claims for any food, drug, dietary supplement, or program.