Bodybuilding doctor reveals terrifying daily side effects of taking steroids
A bodybuilding doctor who takes steroids has warned that using them regularly could 'take years off your life'.
Dr Mike Israetel had a chat with a different doctor named Mike as they discussed steroid use and some of the problems you're likely to encounter if you have them.
A lot of bodybuilders take steroids and many of them take their usage to dangerous lengths in pursuit of a more muscular body, with there being side effects that people have to contend with both in the short and long term.
During his chat with Dr Mike Varshavski, the other Dr Mike said that while many people 'have a great response' to taking steroids the more you piled on after that the worse the balance might get.
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He didn't want people to be thinking 'one shot of steroids, you're just gonna walk three feet and drop dead', but he had a warning for those who were using steroids and decided to increase the amount.
"It starts to be a 50/50 trade off"
He explained that 'a lot of guys are doing 200 to 300 milligrams a week' of testosterone, and Men's Medical Clinic warns this amount is about five times the typical testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) dosage and well into the region of competitive bodybuilders.
Basically, it's a lot of steroids to be taking and the bodybuilding Dr Mike warned that going really high with doses starts to make things worse.
"For many people, the benefits greatly outweigh the costs. Better muscularity, better mood, better libido," the bodybuilding doctor said.
"If you were normal and went high normal, generally many people have a great response to that. You get much higher than that and it starts to be a 50/50 trade off.
"You get much higher than that, it starts to be a way trade off in the other direction where your desire for extreme muscularity has to be the number one thing in your life, because everything else becomes perilous."
"It will take years off of your life"
Explaining further about that peril, the doctor warned of all the ways the steroid trade-off swung back the other way painfully, including some punishing mental penalties and a shortened lifespan.
He said: "It will take years off of your life. Approximately it can increase anxiety, it can approximately decrease your intelligence. It can radically decrease your emotional intelligence.
"It can make you apt to be abnormally aggressive, take things in a very, very wrong way from which they were intended.
"It can do really unfortunate things to your blood work. It can long-term increase your risk of heart disease.
"Short-term it can make your blood work heart disease markers go really, really south and all of that's a really, really bad deal."
"Do you need to be injecting steroids into your body every week?"
While he said he took steroids himself, Dr Mike warned other prospective users that they should work out how sensitive they were to androgens because it affected people differently.
He also suggested people should take stock of how they were doing and what they actually wanted to get out of taking steroids.
"How's your sex drive? Pretty sweet. How's your muscularity look? Pretty good. Mood? everything's great," He listed as the state some people were in before they even started taking steroids.
"Do you need to be injecting steroids into your body every week to do a little better than that? Nah, F that. don't do it."
The doctor said that in many cases people taking steroids 'come in and what they want is a transformation'.
He explained: "They want one thing that's gonna make a more 'grrrrr', and everything better. Pull up in the Ferrari and flash my abs, and the hot girls get in and I drive off.
"They think TRT is it because a lot of the testimonials you get about TRT are the good ones. Who goes on the internet and goes, 'Yeah, I did TRT and it was like meh'. And then like, 'I have inflamed injection sites and I stopped shooting'.
"Very few people say that. When they do say that, those videos didn't get looked at. A lot people, in many cases, they have a problem.
"And so when they look for solutions, they're gonna look for the best cases of the solution and thus all that social media wise gets uploaded."
Joe Harker