\n<\/p>\n
J<\/span>amie Mantzouridis vividly remembers the first time he took steroids. He got someone else to inject him and his mind was racing. \u201cWhat if he hit an artery? What if there was an air bubble?\u201d Mantzouridis, however, says he was young and fearless.<\/p>\n He was small growing up, skinny and self-conscious. By the time he started training seriously in his early 20s, he noticed other guys at the gym who were much larger, and they explained they were taking steroids. \u201cThey looked really good,\u201d he says, \u201cand they said that was what they were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n He was 21, and impulsive. \u201cFundamentally, doing everything correctly, steroids can fast-track your results,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s not a direct cheat code. And it can come with risks which are quite dramatic.\u201d<\/p>\n His first cycle was trenbolone \u2013 a powerful compound developed for cattle, and among the harshest anabolics available. Getting it was easy, he says. \u201cAll you need to do is ask the biggest guy in the gym \u2026 They\u2019ll either supply you with it or point you in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Within a year the results were visible, but so were the side effects. Acne spread across his back and chest, bad enough that he stopped wanting to take his shirt off. Then, one evening, a routine injection went wrong. The needle was not quite in the right muscle; he adjusted it rather than starting again with a clean one. It became infected. He spent a week in hospital on antibiotics. \u201cThey said I was lucky,\u201d he says. \u201cThat they didn\u2019t have to cut tissue out of your leg.\u201d<\/p>\n He lied to his mother about why he was there. She did not believe him. \u201cShe\u2019d spoken to the doctors,\u201d he says. \u201cShe was like: \u2018Why are you talking shit?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He kept going. At 22, a hospital stay does not feel like a warning sign as much as an inconvenience. \u201cWhen you\u2019re young, you don\u2019t develop that sense that this is doing damage in the long run,\u201d he says. \u201cYou worry about it in 10 years\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next few years, he experimented with growth hormones and insulin, a drug meant for diabetic people, taken off-label by bodybuilders to help push carbohydrate into the muscle, and one capable of sending a healthy person into a hypoglycaemic coma. \u201cShort-term, it\u2019s incredibly dangerous,\u201d he says. \u201cLong-term, anabolics are worse. You just don\u2019t see the damage straight away.\u201d<\/p>\n The end came in a bathtub about four years ago. \u201cI remember feeling really dizzy,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to run out and get some sugar because I felt like I was going to collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n He says: \u201cI thought: \u2018This is fucked. What am I doing to myself?\u2019\u201d He stopped that day.<\/p>\n Mantzouridis, 29, now works as a nutritionist and online personal trainer. He says there is a lot of pressure on men nowadays around body image, partly due to social media. \u201cEveryone believes they\u2019re meant to look a certain way,\u201d he says. \u201cThat someone successful has a Ferrari and a six-pack. Some people will never achieve that, and it stops you acknowledging what you have achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jamie Mantzouridis vividly remembers the first time he took steroids. He got someone else to inject him and his mind was racing. \u201cWhat if he hit an artery? What if there was an air bubble?\u201d Mantzouridis, however, says he was young and fearless. He was small growing up, skinny and self-conscious. By the time he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[682,11660,1864,24974,252,3735,37,3794],"class_list":{"0":"post-51069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-abuse","9":"tag-bodybuilder","10":"tag-caught","11":"tag-dizzy","12":"tag-drug","13":"tag-felt","14":"tag-health","15":"tag-recalls"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}