There are a lot of people out there that are using PED's and specific sorts of steroids. This used to be something that was rather isolated and was only something that serious bodybuilders and celebrities (or people who are celebrities for being bodybuilders) but these days it seems as though almost everyone who attracts attention to themselves on social media is juicing to some degree. I appreciate the ones that are open about it, but the fact that they are being honest is kind of a non issue because DUH! It's obvious that you are on the sauce bro.
The problem that we are facing today is going to become much more of a problem later in the coming decades, especially if medicine isn't able to keep up with countering the damage that steroid use, especially steroid use that is just done "willy nilly" doesn't have some sort of medical counteractive that is developed for the damage that these people are doing to their internal organs.
I'm going to go ahead and admit to you guys that I have in fact used steroids in the past. I did this with no medical supervision and just purchased it off some shady as hell website using crypto to pay for it. I halfway didn't even expect it to turn up but lo' and behold, it arrived at my house wrapped in a package of tea with some very ambiguous and probably fake return address on it.
I got a drug called Trenbolone, which is one of the easiest steroids to get your hands on inside the black market. As far as I can tell, this drug was never intended for human use and was developed to make livestock huge in a short period of time so the profits for the slaughterhouses could be maximized. I don't know who the first guy was that thought "hey, maybe this make muscles big for me too!" was but he was right.
The thing about this drug is that well, sadly, it really fucking works. Combined with a high protein diet you see results extremely quickly and this is especially noticeable if like me, you have been lifting to some level for a number of years. In the short amount of time that I was on the "juice" I saw gains over a few months the likes of which would have taken me years had I used traditional methods.
There are of course side effects, but my own vanity, just like so many other people, took over the situation, I kind of pushed those side effects to the side and instead just focused on the good. I have told stories about friends of mine that have also done this same thing and injured themselves quite rapidly because when you are on Tren, you don't feel the pain that you normally would if you were working out "clean."
I made the decision to get off of the stuff once I read into it a bit more and realized that even though I really liked how the guy in the mirror looked, I wanted to be smarter and think more long-term about my overall health in the long run and how I would kind of like to not be dying early from liver or kidney failure. For a cow, the owners of the farms are not concerned with how long they live provided they make it to the time that they are meant to be cut up into steaks. People should probably be a bit more concerned about their longevity though.
This is why the trend of very young people becoming instagram famous from working out and clearly using steroids is something that I find so alarming and dangerous. For some of these people, they haven't even fully developed as an adult yet and they are already damaging the absolute hell out of their internal organs.
It is a lot more prevalent than you might be thinking as well and this isn't just some dumb ass poll done by phone by some shock journalism outlet either. According to The Journal of Performance Enhancement & Health steroid use among teens and young adults who work out has been found to be as high as 25%. This statistic was taken from the bodybuilding community though, so it isn't a sample of all youths. The figure of all males (and this was just from North America) in boys and men aged 15-25, whether they are active or not, was 3%, which is still a pretty high number when you consider that not just everyone goes to the gym regularly, despite what their Tinder profile indicates.
The reasoning behind the increased use in bodybuilders or regular gym goers was exactly what you would expect it to be and this is that the people who were clean were never going to see the results that the people who were juicing were going to see. It simply isn't anatomically possible.
This combined with an increased addiction to social media exposure has encouraged more and more young men and even teens to get involved and addicted to steroids and once they reach that point they have two choices: Stay on the sauce or lose their gains.
I know from my own experience that even though I only used for several months, I was unable to keep my muscle mass no matter how much I worked out. I simply got fatigued too quickly and the normal recovery time kicked back in and well, you simply cannot work out any more after a certain point without hurting yourself.
So in the end of all this I think we have social media to blame more than anything else because years ago when you would see a beast at the gym, it was just one or two guys and we just assumed they were super dedicated. These days when you go to the gym it seems like almost everyone is a beast and nowadays people are honest and even boastful about their use of steroids in order to achieve the gains that they do.
In 20 years a lot of these people who engaged in this sort of thing are going to have very serious regrets unless we come up with a way for people to grow a new liver. The short-sightedness of today's world has people engaging in self destructive behavior the likes of which the world has probably never known before.
When I lost my roid-gains, I missed it, but I was clever enough to realize that the downfalls far outweigh the benefits. This, combined with the fact that once you start using it that you can never stop lest you lose all your gains, is a powerful reason to never get started on the stuff in the first place. Are you going to be smaller than Joey Swole? yes, of course you are. But when he is on dialysis in his 50's and you are running around playing frisbee on the beach, I think then and only then are we going to realize exactly how amazingly stupid this trend actually was.