‘I felt dizzy’: bodybuilder recalls how drug abuse caught up with him | Health
J.Amie Mantzouridis vividly remembers the first time she used steroids. He found someone else to inject him with and his mind was racing. “What if it hits an artery? What if there’s an air bubble?” But Mantzouridis says he is young and fearless.
When he was little, he was growing, skinny and confident. When he started training seriously in his early 20s, he noticed that the other guys in the gym were much bigger, and they revealed they were also taking steroids. “They seemed really nice,” he says, “and they said that’s what they did.”
He was 21 and impulsive. “Basically, if you do everything right, steroids can fast track your results,” he says. “But it’s not a direct cheat code. It can come with some pretty dramatic risks.”
His first cycle was trenbolone, a powerful compound developed for cattle and among the harshest anabolics available. He says it’s easy to get. “All you have to do is ask the biggest guy in the gym… They will either make it happen for you or point you in the right direction.”
Results began to be seen within a year, but side effects were also observed. The acne had spread all over his back and chest, bad enough that he didn’t want to take his shirt off. Then one evening a routine injection went wrong. The needle wasn’t quite in the right muscle; tweaked it rather than starting over with a clean one. He got infected. He was hospitalized for a week with antibiotic treatment. “They said I was lucky,” he says. “That they didn’t have to cut tissue out of his leg.”
He lied to his mother about why he was there. He didn’t believe him. “He talked to the doctors,” he says. “He said: ‘Why are you talking nonsense?’”
He continued. Being hospitalized at 22 feels more like an inconvenience than a warning sign. “When you’re young, you don’t develop the sense that it’s going to cause long-term damage,” he says. “That’s what you worry about in 10 years.”
Over the next few years, he experimented with growth hormones and insulin, a drug for diabetics that is taken off-label by bodybuilders to help push carbohydrates into muscles and can put a healthy person into a hypoglycemic coma. “It’s incredibly dangerous in the short term,” he says. “In the long run, anabolics are worse. But you don’t see the damage right away.”
He met his end in the bathtub about four years ago. “I remember feeling really dizzy,” he says. “I had to go out and get some candy because I felt like I was going to pass out.”
He says: “‘This is ridiculous. What am I doing to myself?’ “I thought,” He stopped that day.
Mantzouridis, 29, currently works as a nutritionist and online personal trainer. He says there’s a lot of pressure on men these days about body image, partly due to the influence of social media. “Everyone believes they have to look a certain way,” he says. “A successful person has a Ferrari and a six-pack. Some people will never achieve that, and that prevents you from acknowledging what you’ve achieved.”
