Well, birthday month is here, February, and I’ll be the supple young age of…32. Ugh. I dread birthdays now, because I was denied the young adulthood I would have wanted to live, I wear the mark of that on my face and body, and there’s no way to erase the past…or is there?
Anabolic steroids are famous as agents for building muscle, but you know what else they are? Hormones, that’s what. And they do a heck of a lot more than just build muscle. To the point one has to wonder if we discovered the fountain of youth already in the 20th century. Yes, really.
Oh, muscle-building is fantastic. I did a cycle for that purpose myself back in 2024, which was my first time taking anabolic steroids, and so help me it worked. For the first time in my life, exercise led to results that felt worth the effort. Week by week I visibly looked better. My drug of choice was dianabol, which is a “wet” steroid. That means that it promotes water retention and volume, which for some bodybuilders adds more bloat and padding and obscures muscle underneath, but does lead to a look that for the general public is very aesthetically pleasing. Muscles, but with a supple tight layer of softer tissue draped over it.
You know where I see this “look”? At the gym I go to in Hollywood. Where it’s the prevailing sort of physique. Larger-framed heftier people like me who are well-conditioned? Muscular underneath but with that supple padding that looks deliciously tight, if we’re being honest. Even many thinner people in there have that same sort of physique. Yes, you see plenty of men who are obviously on the classic high-dose “dry” steroid cycle who cut and try to look shredded, but these more soft yet extremely healthy and glowing types are who intrigue me, because I never see anybody else anywhere else who looks like that…except the escort I hired in Europe. But even in her case she had a body that registers to me as having been “pushed” into that shape much less than the Hollywood girls I see. Aha. So in her case she’s (probably) natural, but what I see in Hollywood, both statistically at the population level and even at the individual level, screams “wet steroid use”. So how come I don’t look like that?
Well…my research has suggested it’s precisely because I’ve done just one cycle. Oh, my cycle was honestly very aggressive for a beginner. I titrated up over a few weeks to a peak dose of 60 milligrams a day…but jumping from 50 to 60 milligrams a day made me feel a bit worse, so I went back to 50 milligrams for two weeks, before tapering off gradually over a few weeks. A bit long for a dianabol cycle, but I seemed to be an excellent responder, and I had literally no side effects the whole time. My body seems to love steroids; I felt more energetic and like it was easier to think (less brain fog!) but also like my mood was smoother and more stabilized even though it was elevated slightly. Which ordinarily would lead me to go “hmm well I could be more muscular and feel good”, and hey, that alone might tempt me back to doing another cycle.
Hey, they do say “there’s no such thing as one cycle”: once you’re breached that barrier and enjoyed the results, you’re very likely to turn to the drug again, even though steroids are very much not addictive drugs, physically.
But what really throws me for a loop, and what tips me off as to what’s going on with all these perfect Hollywood gym bodies, is that the non-muscle-related characteristics I see reminded me strongly of “hey, that was like me when I was on dianabol”, but much more so. What gives with that?
Well, it turns out that repeated cycling of dianabol or similar “wet steroid” hormones over years not only builds muscle, it improves fullness across the body, and the effect is cumulative. Dianabol will not burn fat, but the extra muscle you gain will help passively burn more fat; in my case, with perhaps 20 pounds of excess fat left on me, the extra muscle from a few cycles of gains should burn about 10 pounds off in a year, assuming my appetite doesn’t increase.to compensate (notably, last time I took dianabol, if anything my appetite was suppressed slightly, so in my case the tactic could work). So if I started now, by my 33rd birthday, I’d be 10 pounds less fat. Where it gets really fancy is that the 10 pounds that remain will be instructed by all those extra hormones to gather much more tightly around the muscle. So the net effect is you still have your fat, but it looks like it’s much less weight, and that the weight you do have is tight, smooth, and supple…a lot like a young person who has been training and has been well-conditioned for all of life.
The reason for that is simple: because a hormone like dianabol is a youth hormone. At my stage in life natural decline in testosterone and other markers of youth is starting to set in, so the skin is simply less able to hold itself in youthful shape, and the body injects less fullness and fluid into the tissue. So it starts to look subtly older, more decayed, worn out, et cetera. But when you’re in your thirties, especially in my case where I could still pass for being a decade younger (good genetics say hello), your skin and subcutaneous tissue is structurally about as elastic as it was when you were in your twenties or even your teens. Your body is simply lacking the hormonal instructions to configure itself that way. There is no way to replicate that effect naturally, but with exogenous hormones? It’s no trouble at all.
Your body will not only look tighter, trimmer, stronger, more supple, and healthier, your face will too, because wet steroids like dianabol lift and inflate facial volume as well. Your face will look fuller and younger when on the substance. I encountered some of that myself during my first cycle and enjoyed it, since there is a subtle “glow” that results. This effect is cumulative across cycles, since the body is gradually retrained to assume a new, younger, more desirable shape. After two to five years, even starting at my age, 32, you’ll look like you were always full, supple, youthful, and perfectly conditioned.
No natural weight training program can get results remotely similar to that. And no diet or weight loss program can do that either. Indeed, especially at my age, a traditional fat-loss program would be counter-productive. When I was on my steroid cycle, my face still looked supple, full, and youthful, despite having lost a lot of weight since my earlier twenties, yet when I was off the steroid cycle and I tried GLP-1s, my face looked less vibrant and more hollow, sunken in and frankly older. “Fried” in some way. I learned recently that indeed this is the mildest symptom of the infamous “Ozempic face”, though my doctor who was administering GLP-1 to me at the time was smart enough to titrate up to a low dose. I was on only 1 milligram injections per week, but even that was enough for my face to look noticeably worse.
Of course that’s not an effect of GLP-1 itself; how the likes of Ozempic work for weight loss is by suppressing your appetite, which then reduces calories put into the body, which then lead to weight loss. The same mechanism as dieting, and frankly the same mechanism as results from amphetamines or even DNP: weight loss. And the cruel aspect of weight loss is that even if you take care to strength train and direct the body to keep muscle, the body doesn’t care where you want to lose fat. And in my case, where my facial volume has decayed to the point I need filler injections to keep a full youthful appearance but I still have excess fat in my core, chest, and neck…the body draws fat away from the face frankly before it does the core, chest, or neck.
So I’m left with the classic dilemma where aesthetically I have to choose between a youthful attractive face and an athletic body that doesn’t make go “ew” any time I see my stomach in the mirror. Or do I? Consider that dianabol builds muscles, which passively burns fat, even as it fills out the face and lifts and tightens the whole body. I experienced that the last time I did a cycle, but what I didn’t realize at the time is just how cumulative the effect can be over years of taking this stuff and training well. It’s a literal “wow” factor that frankly you just can’t get naturally…and a lot of the natural-looking bodies who just seem like they belong to gorgeous people who’ve led great lives possess. Well, the secret is out! They usually don’t get that way because they’ve led such clean lives, they get it from a pill in their medicine cabinet.
It helps too that, while effects vary and frankly some people just respond poorly, that dianabol and other “wet steroids” are “feel-good” drugs, often lifting and stabilizing mood and improving energy. The effects have been particularly pronounced in my case, though frankly I feel lethargic, easily fatigued, low-key sick, and like I have brain fog anyway, and corticosteroids work like a magic spell to just take it all away; dianabol, interestingly, has weak glucocorticoid effects (so a moderate dose of dianabol literally does the same thing to the body as a low dose of, say, dexamethasone), and the androgenic effects are well known to help with autoimmune disorders (which run in my family and are the genre of problem I have, though mercifully in my case it seems to be sub-clinical in severity).
So you’re left with a picture where you have some fit, muscular, well-conditioned person with a full lifted volumized face and a thick tight layer of padding on them, who is low-key happy and energetic all the time. Too good to be true? Often, it’s not: it’s just hormones. Optimized beyond what nature is willing to provide.
Again, no weight loss program or drug is going to do that: only steroids can. Indeed, in my case, like most other patients, I was referred to go onto a GLP-1 program because it’s apparently the sanctioned way to lose even modest amounts of fat. In my case I was barely even overweight on the BMI metric, but my doctor — a private concierge who took no insurance, by the way — just prescribed it to me because I wanted to lose weight, I had some excess fat on me, and I was otherwise healthy. Well…I learned just recently that apparently my treatment was “off-label” by FDA standards, so even if I wanted to hop back on again, there’s no getting around those hundreds of dollars extra a month that an actual doctor working in person would demand over an assembly-line “telehealth” service (which won’t prescribe it to you unless you’re severely overweight).
But should I even want to? After all, even a regimen ineffective at burning my core fat was still effective enough to drain my face of much-needed volume. But what’s even the alternative? Well…consider that there is no drug, steroid or otherwise, which will burn fat from specific sections of the body. Fat is like a dial that can only be turned up or down body-wide…at least with hormones. Oh, steroids will help the fat look better, and indirectly more muscle will help to burn fat as well by raising your resting metabolic rate, but on dianabol alone if you have excess fat when starting it…you’ll always have it. But there is another option: liposuction surgery.
Plastic surgery is often not considered for situations like mine, and it’s certainly not advertised everywhere like GLP-1 (telehealth providers who spam Reddit with bodies thinner than what you’ll help me achieve with your goddamn guidelines, I’m looking at you!)…but in my case surgery would actually be the best option. Liposuction surgery is often kept low-key because fat people assume that they can just get fat sucked away, even though the maximum plastic surgeons recommend to suck out of the body surgically is 20 pounds or so…which I’m within range for at this point in my weight loss and workout program!
Liposuction doesn’t help you of course if you want to permanently lose fat all over the body. How fat works is that we’re basically born with all the fat cells we’re ever going to have within us, and gaining and losing fat doesn’t consist of the body creating or destroying fat cells, but rather enlarging and shrinking the existing number of cells. Therefore, if you have fat cells surgically removed, the fat will go away and stay away (assuming you’re at maintenance). The fat cells themselves can expand to almost arbitrarily large sizes, if you eat enough, so liposuction by itself does not really constitute a weight loss technique. What it really excels at is redefining proportions.
To wit, the proportions of your body when you gain weight are determined by the distribution of fat cells. If, in a case like mine, you leave the fat cells intact elsewhere but remove, say, half of the fat cells from the core, chest, and neck, then even if I gained weight, the body would inflate the remaining fat cells…which means the other areas of my body inflate like before but the core, chest, and neck would inflate less. That is, the fat gain would look much more proportionate than before. Freaky, isn’t it? And again, no drug can do that, only surgery can.
So should I book myself a liposuction appointment? Maybe. Frankly, though, it’s been a long time since I did my last steroid cycle, and I’m eager to experiment with that first, and build muscle and heck perhaps make the fat I’ve got tauter…which makes the chances of success with liposuction go way up. The techniques they have in Beverly Hills these days are frankly impressive compared to what you might have heard about, and while the canonical case for a liposuction surgery is someone who’s already thin but just has a couple pockets of fat, if you want comprehensive re-proportioning, then as far as I know…as long as it’s something like 20 pounds or less, a good plastic surgeon can do it, and make it look really good. These days top Beverly Hills providers use incisions so small they barely even leave any scars, and young skin, especially with the aid of the hormones we mentioned, can adapt so well it would look to the outside world like the patient has always had such proportions.
A life lived poorly, marked on the body? Well, with hormones and surgery, that can be erased from history. Even the mental marks, the nerves that are always on edge, bracing for threats, uneasy at taking up space because of a lifetime of exclusion and hatred…there are pills in the medicine cabinet that can help with that too. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is conceptually viable for optimization, not just restoring function, and not just for clinical PTSD either…frankly the hallmarks of such a regimen are everywhere in Hollywood if you know what to look for, most of them probably having done it by accident after being introduced to “party drugs” and then figuring out what feels good rather than a deliberate medical-style program, but the results are the same: a less-than-ideal youth perhaps, but with the wonders of modern biotechnology, for all practical purposes it’s erased from time. The body won’t show it, and the mind won’t feel it. Mentally or physically.
Freaky stuff, but for someone like me? This full treatment starts to look really tempting. I’m already a literal Hollywood platinum with my hair, which is growing out in glorious fashion despite me putting it through hell day-to-day. I’ve gotten back on my tanning-bed regimen, and I’ve even stepped up my involvement in the gym. Filler I’ve neglected with the hard year I’ve had post-Palisades-Fire, but I’ve also recently resumed my botox treatments, and so help me if it doesn’t feel like much-needed medicine (I get awful lines in direct sunlight and godawful headaches…which is a problem in a low-latitude sunny place like Los Angeles; ugh). I have some momentum at long last, and for the first time in my life a population of people I look at every day and make me feel “I want that“…and, biotech willing, maybe I can have it.
Wouldn’t that be nice? To just be able to be somebody for a change? I’m looking forward to it already…