As late as when I wrote my last post I was assuming that I’d need to diet down before turning to a steroid-fueled muscle-building regimen…but that assumption apparently is wrong, at least if ChatGPT is any indication (yes, ChatGPT will answer your questions about anabolic steroids, quite openly and without needing to be “tricked” like is the case for more politically sensitive topics; take advantage of it while this openness lasts).
I’m at the point now where I’m not at my flat-tummy weight yet, but I’ve just got a few pounds around the midsection, plus some flabbiness from where I let my strength training program falter over the past…I think it was 6 months? Kinda hard to keep up with gym work when you’re changing hotels almost every day and seeing Europe (though it was probably good for the cardio part of my regimen, all that walking through the tourist destinations…). In any case by dieting down seriously I could easily lose that remaining weight in a matter of months.
Ask online in bodybuilder forums and you’ll get advice to wait until you’ve approached your natural potential before starting anabolic steroids; certainly the conventional wisdom is to wait until you’re lean. But you don’t have to do it that way. Indeed, anabolic steroids will not interfere with the process of losing weight: that’s primarily a function of diet, exercise, and genetics. To the extent they have any effect on it at all it’ll be positive: by pushing the body to build more muscle, the resting metabolic rate will be greater, which will burn more calories, which will (if you’re dieting in a caloric deficit) come from fat!
At the point I’m at in my fitness journey the visual impact from steroid enhancement would still be dramatic and decisive, so I really see no particular reason not to start my first cycle as soon as I start weight training again.
Well…there is one reason. Steroids make you infertile; the effect is temporary, yes, and in studies literally 100% of participants recovered enough fertility to father a child, but I’d prefer not to take the chance in any case. Fortunately there are fertility clinics that will freeze sperm for you, a rather reliable process (sperm banks have sometimes thawed out sperm that’s been on ice for decades and babies are always made, no problem), and a surprisingly affordable one: perhaps $1000 to freeze, and several hundred dollars a year to store. Less than the platinum blonding of my hair will cost!
Once that’s done, there’s no obstacle to trying out the muscle juice as far as I’m concerned. The only showstopper risk to it will have been effectively insured against.
According to ChatGPT, since I haven’t been doing any weightlifting in several months, it would be best to start out naturally in order to let my body get used to the load, even if it’s just for a few weeks, and only then go enhanced; a gradual change, even if it’s rapid, is less of a shock to the system than just going all-in from zero.
Dianabol is the choice that intrigues me the most for enhancing my training regimen. It’s a steroid that can be taken orally, meaning no carting around a bunch of needles, no injecting yourself, no need to make sure everything is sterilized, et cetera. None of those godawful chores; just pop a pill down the hatch and you’re good to go. Oral administration also takes effect much faster; injectables like testosterone often require weeks to show their effects, but anecdotally certain oral compounds make themselves felt in just hours (the flip side, of course, is they leave your body faster as well). All of which is much more my speed.
Also my speed is the effects of dianabol; it’s a “wet” steroid, meaning water retention is a side effect, making the muscles that are developed with the stuff appear fuller, rounder, and with a layer of softness above them. At high doses and with intensive training, a peak dianabol-fueled physique will be strong and big, but relatively undefined; think less the lean and shredded look favored by the bodybuilding mainstream today and more the Roman gladiator look. You’ll still see the muscles, but they’ll look less like an anatomy textbook come to life and more like what a normal man would have…a normal man with a lot more muscle than what’s really normal, but you’re hopefully getting the idea.
Luckily for me that is the sort of physique I’m after. I have no interest in becoming a competitive bodybuilder, but a physique similar to a fitness model or a hot actor is a dearly held goal for me at this point. Dianabol alone won’t give you the sort of physique the former path requires, but it would be more than sufficient to achieve the latter goal.
Yes, it will tank my natural production of testosterone, and dianabol alone doesn’t give you a “testosterone base”, but you know what? None of the golden-age bodybuilders used testosterone bases either, and they were perfectly fine. Dianabol in fact was perhaps the most decisive drug in developing the distinctive “golden age” physique enjoyed by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger; the go-to regimen at Gold’s Gym back in his days was primobalan and dianabol. See this fascinating article that uncovers what Schwarzenegger was almost certainly on (it was never really a secret, but it has been kept a bit hush-hush over the years).
“Post-cycle therapy”, which is considered indispensable by modern bodybuilders, also wasn’t a thing back then, and once again they all seemed perfectly fine. The older protocol for these drugs is a simple tapering, where after reaching the peak dose in a cycle the dosage is gradually ramped down (for instance, by 1/6 of the full dose every week for 6 weeks, until the dosage reaches zero). This enables the body to recover; this same approach to this day is the standard when taking courses of corticosteroids, which I have personal familiarity with from childhood.
My body reacts very well to simple tapers of corticosteroids, recovering natural cortisone function very quickly, and while this isn’t directly translatable to anabolic steroids (which affect a totally different part of the endocrine system), it suggests that my body might respond well to the older tapering protocol. Tapering also insures I won’t have to acquire a whole ‘nother series of drugs for post-cycle therapy, which I would have to vet for safety and reliability, and keep track of, and spend money on, blah blah blah. Compared to just tapering off the stuff PCT seems quite tiresome and unnecessary. Tapering has the elegance of only requiring one drug: the one you’re already on.
I suspect also from my experience taking corticosteroids that dianabol, or another “wet” anabolic, might not even put much extra water weight on me at all, aside from the “full” look that always complements the muscles. Neither me nor anyone in my family ever got any noticeable water weight when on corticosteroids, even (in some distant relatives’ cases) taking relatively high doses for years at a stretch, despite water retention being one of the hallmark side effects of the stuff. Again, this won’t necessarily port over to anabolic steroids, but it is a good sign that my body handles fluid distribution well. And even if I do get water weight ChatGPT quotes a high figure of 10 pounds, which for me is hardly alarming. Unless you’re trying to get really lean (which I’m not), you might not even notice…
So with the tapering being how I’m going to end the cycle, how will I begin? The general idea I have is to start at a rather standard dose, considered to be in the beginner realm. According to ChatGPT this would be something like 20 or 30 milligrams per day. If I respond well to this dosage, the plan is to gradually escalate to a moderate dose, 40 to 50 milligrams per day, which is favored by experienced users. If I keep doing well, an escalation to even higher doses could be attempted, as high as 80 to 100 milligrams, which is considered very high.
With the tapering protocol, it’s likely that I’d spend only a brief time at the highest dose anyway, perhaps as little as a week or two, before ramping down, so I’d feel more comfortable experimenting with higher doses, much like I’ve done with corticosteroids (occasionally I’ve been like “I’d usually take just 10 in this situation but add another 2 milligrams and see what that does”; results have been mixed).
All this ramping up and tapering would be a bit tight to do in a standard 4-6 week cycle; ChatGPT recommends I extend my regimen to an 8-10 week cycle. The biggest pitfall is that the longer you do oral steroids the worse the effects are on your liver; but if you are taking a lower dose for a large portion of the cycle it mitigates that factor, and you can always take more time between cycles to give your body a break and time to recover. Though to be honest I’m pretty sure my habit of often consuming a bottle of wine a day is harder on the liver than a dianabol cycle would be, so it’s doubtful I have much to worry about anyway.
8-10 weeks also extends the muscle-building effects of the ever-exciting first steroid cycle. In my gym days I could manage three days a week of hard workouts, but I found it a godawful chore to do any more than that; despite actually liking weightlifting, I just don’t have the personality required to make it my life, hence why I’m bent on turning to steroids to gain a physique that would be “naturally attainable” for me…but in practice might as well be impossible, since at a psychological level I can’t stand the effort it would take to get it.
In so much of life the effort to reward ratio seems so very poor to me, and weightlifting is no exception; performance-enhancing drugs are the way to turn it in my favor. Is that working through the dark side? Well…yes, it is, but why should I care? Society had its chance to reward me for “working hard and playing by the rules”, but all I’ve ever gotten in return for being a good little boy is stabs in the back; after thirty years I say time’s up. That approach served me well when I decided, in an uncharacteristic act of will, to eschew trying to find the needle-in-a-haystack girlfriend through dating in my local community and instead go overseas and hiring myself one. I had such a good experience it might rank as the best decision I ever made. So shall it be with the gym, lite though it may be compared to what the professionals do.
It might even be possible, however, that I could gain the will and discipline required to work out hard more often once I’m on the steroids! Such is commonly reported among bodybuilders and anabolic steroid users. So I’ve asked ChatGPT to assess how much muscle I might gain on three days a week versus five days a week. For my first cycle the gains are rather proportionate to how much training I do…but even on three days a week I could pretty much get to my goal physique in one cycle. Wow.
More specifically ChatGPT suggests that to get a fitness model or hot actor type of body (and I described it in detail), I’d need to gain 20 pounds of muscle from where I am now. The three-days-a-week workout regimen on a moderate dose of dianabol might gain me 15 pounds of muscle, close to that goal. Upping the dosage to very high levels and assuming I could train for five days a week for two weeks at a stretch during the peak dosage period (I have maintained that for two weeks even without enhancement in the past; I just can’t stick to it any longer than that…) means it’s very likely I could reach 20 pounds of growth in one cycle, albeit a somewhat long one.
You tend to maintain the gains you make on-cycle once you come off as well, though there will be some losses; in general it’s much easier to maintain muscle than it is to build it, especially if you’re within the realm of naturally attainable physiques.
By contrast, achieving 40 pounds of muscle would require multiple cycles almost no matter what dosage or training regimen I used; the first cycle might gain me 20 pounds, but returns diminish, to the point that after a few cycles the total gains per cycle might be just 3 pounds or so. 2-3 years would be required to pack on 40 pounds even with consistent cycling of steroids and constant gym training. 40 pounds is a lot, though; according to ChatGPT that’s enough to make me look as muscular as Thor from the titular movie, Chris Hemsworth tier. With more frequent training like 5 days a week it could be done in about a year…which is about the time Chris Hemsworth took to bulk up for “Thor”. Uh huh. Totally natural, I’m sure. Hehehehe.
But superhero physique is not my goal. 20 pounds would make me look athletic, whereas 40 pounds would make me look beyond athletic and into the outright muscular realm. Not really what I’m after. Though an intermediate option of gaining 30 pounds, a bit bigger than a merely athletic physique but still accessible-looking (and thus desirable in the modeling and acting field for a variety of roles) is intriguing. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Which might not be long! I’m on my tanning regimen now, I have an appointment to begin my blonding regimen, I’ve already done my full-body wax, and I even know where I’ll be living for the next six months or so in the Greater LA area. All I really need do is find a gym, start training, get my sperm frozen at a clinic, and then order the stuff online and have it shipped to me. That”s all it would take.
At that point only one cycle might stand between me and my dream body. Certainly by then I’ll have a deep even tan all over my body and my hair will be platinum blond. By the end of the year I may well diet myself down to a flat tummy. Might I achieve a fitness model physique at the same time? It seems mind-boggling to think I could have all that by the end of this year, or at least my thirty-first birthday, but everything I’ve seen indicates it’s feasible.
That’ll launch my looks into the stratosphere and complete my glow-up, which is what I need to be a success in life in the time I have to make it happen; I always said I needed a miracle to make my vision for my thirties work, and I might just have found it…