What You MUST Know Before Bodybuilding - Maryalyce Damman FBB On the OptiCast

🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO
In this episode, Maryalyce Damon shares her compelling journey from health crises and substance misuse to competitive bodybuilding and hormone optimization. Her insights shed light on the importance of medical guidance, self-advocacy, and the realities of PED use. Whether you're interested in health, bodybuilding, or recovery stories, this conversation is packed with valuable lessons.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

If you had like one thing that you're like, okay, from my like the things that I've learned in bodybuilding, if you're thinking about becoming a bodybuilder or doing a bodybuilding show, here's what I would like you to know.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Do your research on gear and talk to your uh trust the doctor, especially if your doctor knows that you want to do bodybuilding. Yeah. And you want to do steroids, talk to them. Yeah. Actually have a doctor who's understanding to where you can check your blood. Having your blood work done and ran, especially when you're cycling, is one of the most important things. If I didn't have a doctor that actually genuinely cared for me, I probably would have had my liver and kidneys completely shut down and I probably went into failure and I probably would have died.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

This podcast right here is just for an interview in purposes. I'm not a medical doctor, not a nutritionist, or a personal trainer. I am barely unqualified for operated toaster. As Ruth Lang was so wisely said, I don't share about fuck. So don't trust me, don't listen to me. We're here just for shits and giggles. And if you trust me with health advice, then that's just natural selection at work. Don't do drugs, always listen to your GP. And with that disclaimer out of the way, let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Welcome to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan and Meow, where we deconstruct what actually happens inside a human system when you push it to the edge, physiologically, psychologically, and logistically. In this episode, we're gonna get inside of the reality of contest prep, weight cycling, and what happens when your hormones and your organs are not okay, but your plea your plans keep pushing, how addiction patterns mutate instead of disappearing, and what it takes to rebuild enough leverage over your own body to then lead other people through it without lying about the cost. Mary Alice, you have a very interesting story.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Hi everyone, I am Mary Damon, um, also known as Miss Beefy. I've been a bodybuilder for probably about five, six years now, and everything you do not want to happen has happened to me. From my very first prep, I had a heart attack. I had a very bad coach, and then I stayed with her. She crashed my hormones, overdosed me on steroids, and then my hormones completely shut down and I went into liver and kidney failure. And I had to work for over 11 months, stressed my body, my CNS system was completely taxed to drop over 80 pounds with a hormone issue. I still have yet to actually have a menstrual cycle that completely shut down back in 22, 23. So after this prep and this contest, that's actually what I'm focusing on, focusing on all next year is trying to fix the rest of my hormones. They're functioning enough, but I still have to have medication. They're not able to function on their own right now.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Man, uh that already got me so many ideas of things that I want to talk to you about, what you can do. Because I that's the area that I work with, right? It's like fixing these types of problems for people. So I'm I'm already here, like, man, I I really wonder like if we put these things together in this, yeah. But anyways, thank you for that rundown. That was uh, that was really I I I hope people are already like, wait, what the fuck? Sorry, can we just circle back to that like first part real quick and something? So before before the bodybuilding life, you also had like quite a past as well, right? And I'm and I'm asking this because people on my podcast, they're used with me. I was in rehab when I was 14. So, like, yeah, like I understand, but what walk us through like what was your life before bodybuilding and like what bodybuilding actually meant to you, like when you were, you know, swapping things around, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

I was a raging alcoholic for many of years. I was completely overweight. I had every health issue known to man. I've been to the doctor countless of times from having gastroparesis to colitis to IBS to pretty much they wanted to put me on a colostomy bag because my stomach wasn't processing. Like I've been on every medication known for everything for stomach issues. And then I had a lot of depressive episodes. And so, because of that, especially with having a lot of like sexual trauma in the past, I just ended up becoming a raging alcoholic. I did become a psych major and a behavioral therapist, and that was like the one way I can give back as I'm fucking myself up. And so that was fun. I did do a lot of emotional eating as well. Like food was a huge coping mechanism outside of drinking. And then when I would drink, I would eat more. So that was just like a vicious cycle. And then for the stomach issues, I ended up just getting my medical license and I smoked a lot of weed. So drinking, eating, and smoking weed, I was severely overweight. I was 200 plus pounds. Mind you, I'm under five foot. That was a lot on my frame. So my body was just uncomfortable. So in 2018, I got a DUI in my driveway. They towed my car, everything. So that was kind of like an awakening for me. I ended up getting a breathalyzer in my car. And then in Oregon, since it was my first offense, I was able to do education. So I did six weeks of education. And during that time, you're getting random UAs. So I needed to do something to kind of cope with the urge to drink. So I started going to the gym, became a cardio bunny, lost about 20 pounds in a matter of weeks. Uh, everyone knows when you're severely overweight and you lose weight rapidly without building muscle, you get very loose and flabby looking. And so at that point in time, I was like, okay, let's try to lift weights. Started lifting weights, absolutely fell in love with it. The way that my body responded, the way it actually mentally made me feel was amazing, paired with detoxing from alcohol and actually learning about what was happening from detoxing, from what was happening from drinking, and then also taking a lot of the prior education and what I did for work with psychology and just knowing how the brain works. Like it kind of was my aha moment. And since then, I have been lifting. I completely fell in love with it. It's helped me turn my life like completely around. I ended up running two businesses and it's just like I do everything health and wellness based.

SPEAKER_03 5:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Wow. That's amazing. That is so freaking interesting. Going to the to the to the alcohol and then like how exercise became sort of a substitution for for um you know the alcohol uh addiction. And uh just looking at like my in my own like way of dealing with with my addiction, it was uh it was because I didn't have like it was just a bunch of medications that they throw you on to like dole you, and then like the only pleasure you get is food. So I I gained a lot of weight, like super freaking fast. And but I mean since then, like that thing actually, I I think that pattern just like it's so fucking hard to snap out of it because one of the like the difficulty with alcohol is that it's very socially acceptable. And the difficulty with food is that it's even more socially acceptable. It's fine, we joke about it, it was like, oh, I'm so stuffed. It was like all of these things. So, like, how was navigating this side of things uh uh as well for you with regards to like your recovery and everything? Did you find food to also be an issue when you were recovering?

SPEAKER_00 6:47

The food wasn't as much as an issue as much as people put the stigma on it. Okay, because once you get into the lifestyle and you start prepping your food or eating healthy and you actually reframe the way you look at food versus just comfort and you know that feel-good to actually knowing that it's full for your body and knowing, you know, there is a difference between eating good food and I hate to say bad food, but you know, it's food better for you. So if you have a goal in mind, certain foods you do kind of want to stay away from. For me, I stopped eating fast food for over five years during my sobriety and everything because it was the same thing to me as um, it was my addiction was food too. So it was just easy to go get fast food and trying to like navigate that. So I stopped eating fast food, I stopped drinking, and so it was hard when you would try to hang out with friends. Either that's what they wanted to do. They wanted to go out to eat or they wanted to go out to drink. Yeah. So I ended up putting myself into trauma therapy. And I did five years of trauma therapy during all this, and a lot of it was learning to put hard boundaries in place or learning to let go of the people that didn't accept and encourage the new things that you were doing that kept trying to pull you into bad habits. So it was really hard navigating family and stuff like that. But once my family saw what I was doing and how things were going, they did become more supportive. It took my mom a very long time to really support what I was doing. My dad was on board with it immediately. But it was still hard. But then they kind of encouraged it. My mom bought me some really amazing, like giant insulated tote bags. She brought me all kinds of different glass-based um meal prepping dishes whenever I would come down to them. They ended up hiding the snacks because they know I would go to the snack cupboard. So they completely hid those, moved them to a different cabinet. They would make me food knowing what I could eat, and then they would tease me ultimately. But it was putting hard boundaries in place and letting friends go and family go that didn't support it, and eventually navigating it that way. Now I can go to a bar with friends, not drink. I can go out to a place that doesn't have anything for me and not eat, but still enjoy my time with people. Sometimes I just bring my own food or I eat before I go.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Yeah, yeah. And that's uh that's that's those are very interesting like strategies to deal with it, especially on how you cut like both the food and the alcohol because they were connected. Um I find that the the hardest the people that have the hardest time in fitness space, in the fitness space in general, are the people that are still trying to hold to something that is literally attached to the identity part of them that they're trying to get rid of. You know? So it's like, oh, I want to lose weight, but I want to continue eating just like I did before. Technically, you can, but don't tell me you can deal with those urges.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

It's like when you're ripping off a band-aid, you gotta rip it off. Yeah. It's gonna be painful the whole way through. Yeah. You just have to do it. And for me, knowing what I wanted in life and how I felt moving forward, as much as it sucks to end certain relationships, ultimately it was for the better. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:56

I have a question. How did you or what was the transition like from going from okay, I'm not gonna drink, like I'm not gonna eat fast food, like I'm not even gonna go to these fast food places to okay, now I feel like I can go out and just not eat. Or just go like I can go hang out at the bar and not just not drink. Like how long did that take you and what was that decision-making process like for you?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

A lot of it was therapy. You have to learn to s know why you have those urges, like what's going on. And so for me, it was addressing the other issues of what drived me to want to like um compulsively eat, what made me want to drink versus because I can sit around alcohol and be like, oh, that looks good. It doesn't mean I'm gonna drink it or doesn't mean I'm gonna eat it. It was addressing the root cause and then learning how to understand my goals and where to put that balance and that line. It probably took me a good year to really understand that, but it also took me learning the education and seeing what I really wanted in place because when you're first on like a health journey, it's back and forth. You're gonna do a lot of mistakes, you're gonna take two steps forward, you're all constantly gonna take like two or three back. So it's that back and forth. And so for me, it was removing myself from the situation, cutting off a lot of relationships and just not going to certain places for a while until I felt like I had enough control before I was able to do it. And then from there, you start easing yourself into it.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Yeah. Yeah, that's and that's very similar to to how it was with me as well. But it's it's like for certain things, it took me like a decade for me to get back to it. Like for a really long time, I was like traumatized by my own experience. Like I couldn't even talk about it at all. Like I wouldn't, I didn't talk about it for like years, years, years. Yeah. And then at one point I just became more and more comfortable with it as I understood why it happened in the first place. And then I was like, Well, of course you're an addict. Like, of course, dude, it makes sense, you know? And then that sort of like allowed me to forgive myself and then be able to move past that and just sort of like, now this is part of my life. Like, I can joke about it, which is which is really cool. Cause when we start when we started seeing each other, I wouldn't talk about it at all, right? Yeah, it was a big taboo, big no no, and we're together for almost 10 years. So how was how is like do you still eat like stuff like will you eat like a burger, like a gourmet burger or like uh like yeah, like a like a like a pizza or something like that, right? Like so, so how was the how was the introduction of like those types of things like the next step, right? Like of achieving balance, of being able to say no, being able to eat your meal before going, but also being able to enjoy the pizza and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

I will say, if you put a cheese slice of cheesecake in front of me, I will eat it. I don't care where I'm at, I'm gonna eat it. That is like the one thing it's blasphemy to turn that down. You have to eat the cheesecake. I don't care. I will be a day out from show. You put a piece of cheesecake in front of me, I'm eating it. I will go do extra cardio. I don't care. And so for me, like certain things I know I won't turn down. I will say one of the good examples is I was in Chicago with one of my really good friends. We went to a show, and the next day she was hungry, and I only brought some meal prep. So as a good friend, I shared my meal prep with her. So I didn't eat all my food. I shared it with her. And then we met with my other friends, and he's a Chicago native, and so she wanted to get pizza. So he took her to this restaurant. He's like, I'm sure you could be able to find something on the menu. I'm like, okay, like I'm really good at knowing how to eat certain things and how to order them to where they can fit my macros, and they're ultimately, they're not like perfect, but they can make do to give you some food. We get to the place. It is amazing pizza. Like, I'm like drooling at the mouth, staring at it. They had absolutely nothing on the menu I can eat. I even asked, like, could we do certain things? They honestly couldn't. So I sat there, pissed off at the world, but not mad at them, mad at my own choices and mad at where I was at in life. But I didn't eat the pizza. I didn't eat the breadsticks. But trust and believe, as soon as we left, I went to a gas station and I found hard-boiled eggs and I ate those and I was happy.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Dude, but that's um, that's that's that's kind of what it takes sometimes, you know. We don't get to choose our bodies. You know, there's some people that can get away with a lot, and there's some people that can't. Like for me, gaining fat is super fucking easy. Like, I'm telling you, like, I'll have one off meal plan and my weight will go up like three pounds, like it does for the normal person, but it stays there, it don't go down. You know, that's the fucking difference. And people are like, oh, it's just water. I'm like, motherfucker, my folds did not increase by a millimeter overnight just by water, man. Come on. Yeah, don't bullshit me, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

For me, after my hormones completely crashed, I became insulin resistant, so I couldn't eat carbs. I still have a very hard time eating rice. If I eat too much rice, my watch actually will go off because my heart rate increases to about 150, 160. Just sitting here after eating rice, I will start to float, I get super crampy, and I don't feel good. Whereas before, rice was perfect. I had it in all my other bodybuilding preps. But after having this health issue and finally getting the weight off, I wasn't able to eat carbs. I'm able to eat them now, but I can only stick to potatoes. So I do sweet potatoes and red potatoes, and that's like my safe zone. I can have rice cakes and I can have some cream of rice, but when I go to actually eat like rice rice, my body can't process it.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

That's like that's also something that happens very commonly with bodybuilders. And this is this is something that I that I deal with a lot with clients as well. There is an issue with overeating the same amount of the same foods over and over and over and over. So bodybuilders in general, they receive very poor-made like meal plans because they're aimed at just making it easy for you to execute it six times a day and not it's just repeatable, it's just a process, right? But the gut can really, really suffer from that. And the way these uh these conditions happen, it's basically an overactivation of your immune system. So a lot of these things are reversible with uh, you know, certain protocols and things like that. Yeah. Like like IBS, for example. But it's just that there's an overactivation in the immune system, and the immune system is basically starting to recognize these things as a as an uh it's it's something that deserves a threat alarm. And the reason it does that is because there are these tight junctions in in the gut and they start opening. And when they start opening, it basically allows like your outside world has direct contact with the inner world, and it shouldn't happen that way. There should be a layer in the gut that actually keeps that from happening. That's like leaky gut, for example, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:29

So that eventually happened to me towards the end of my prep because I have colitis, and so I know certain foods will trigger me no matter what, and then I know my yellow foods that I can have, but once I have them in overabundance, they start to turn to red foods because once again it's overconsumption. Your body's like, what's going on? Um during prep, towards the end, because it was for volume to fill me up. I was eating a lot of cucumber and a lot of um spinach and like red leaf and arugula and stuff like that. That ended up causing my colitis to flare up two weeks before show to where I peaked too soon. And then I ended up gaining 10 pounds before I stepped on stage. We pulled it, we pulled everything immediately. We pulled everything we could. At that point, it was we did the best we could. So I stepped on stage, probably 10 pounds heavier with inflammation that we didn't want, but it was a lot of it was we tapped my CNS system. And when you tap your CNS system, your gut's gonna be the first thing that responds. Since I already have a uh pre-like condition, mine just went rampant. And so, still after all of this time, I still haven't ate a salad. I'm afraid to eat a salad.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Interesting. That's interesting. Now that's uh no one deserves to live that way. So we we we should definitely talk about this. But what what are some things that you have done or or or tried, like certain approaches that you tried? Because you obviously went through all the normal routes, right? Like you went through doctors, you went through different supplements and different options of like food choices and diets and stuff like that. Like, have you found something that would made it the situation a little bit better, or was it just the process of elimination?

SPEAKER_00 18:10

A lot of it was process of elimination. And then um, I have a hormone doctor. I'm on HRT and TRT to help with my hormones. And then from there, we did fettermine, which is a weight loss drug that didn't really work for me. And then we did try the GLP3. We went through it at True Tide Route, and that's actually what was the connecting piece. Nice that paired with a very healthy diet and a very good exercise regimen that allowed me to finally drop the weight and ultimately be able to process carbs. Nice. I did get off of it because I was on off season, and I will say after a few weeks of getting off of it, that's when I no longer could eat rice again. So I tried rice, I was fine. I was off of it for probably 12. Same issue happened. I ate rice and beans from a Mexican restaurant that I loved. I had my quesopiri tacos. I was living my best life.

SPEAKER_03 19:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

But my uh heart rate went off and I felt pulsation. I felt dizzy and I felt sick. Back on the Reddit now, because we're about 24 weeks out from show, so we're on a very small dose just to help with processing everything. I went and had sushi Friday night, no issue with the rice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

Yeah, sushi rice is different. What?

SPEAKER_02 19:21

No, it no, so it's so sushi rice actually is very different. And and this is like she she's asking because whenever there's like a gut flare up or like I started getting bloated, or like I can't eat, I lose my appetite. I go to a diet that is strictly steak, sauerkraut, and sushi. So that's all that I eat for like two days or so, three days, and then I'm back to normal, like 100%.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

It is just yes, but before I got on the retta, I went out and had sushi. Yeah, it happened for meating the rice.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

But when I'm on the retta, for some reason my body can eat rice. If I'm off of it, I can't eat it, but I can eat potatoes now on or off and be perfectly fine. Interesting. But uh for me, eating good beef and good chicken, asparagus and green beans, and then eggs, and then yeah, I'll like to go eat sushi every now and then, that seems to be safe for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then do you have a plan on like anything to start to expand on that to expand the menu and like try different doses and stuff? Because like I found that I can't have like 150 grams of broccoli plus 150 grams of beans. That's a no-no. But I could have, but I could, but I could have 300 grams of beans or 400 grams of broccoli, just fine. If I'm gonna have both, it needs to be limited to 100 grams each. So it's like that's that's how I found that it works.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

We did broccoli and I was fine for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden I got really bloated. I was getting really gassed. Yeah, that happens a lot. And so we decided to pull it, it went away. Um, I could be on asparagus, I can eat as much as I want, and I can eat as much as green beans as I want, perfectly fine. I went out to dinner Tuesday night, and I got green beans with squash and zucchini. I did really good on that and with bell peppers, loved it. It's just for the prep plan because of we don't know exactly what's gonna flare it and what's not gonna flare it. You gotta be very safe zone, and that's just what Shelby wants me to stay on because he doesn't want to risk causing other inflammation and other issues. We spent 11 months putting out fires. We at least want one good prep.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. No, absolutely. That makes sense. Now, back to the back to the Retta, because I've I um so I did I did two growth phases in between. I had surgery and lost everything because I had complications from the surgery and couldn't train for like four months. So so so that was a bitch, but it pretty much allowed me to compare two different approaches because my starting point was pretty similar, and on one of them I Used um insulin to control my own production of insulin, right? Okay. And then on the second one, I used Retta on a growth phase. And uh Retta at a dose of like two milligrams a week was able to maintain my A1C and my glucose and insulin. Like on my home IR was like under one. Like everything was just perfect. Have you found to be useful in the off-season as well? Or is are you just leveraging these prep?

SPEAKER_00 22:26

It worked really good for part of the off-season. I just got tired of doing injections. I got really over it. I was injecting a lot of things to where I'm like, I'm over it. I was doing a lot of peptides as well, especially for um PCT. I was doing um glutathione, I was doing NAD, I was doing uh quite a few things to make sure everything was processing good. And then I also was doing growth-based factors as well. And so I was doing probably four or five injections at that point in time. I'm like, I have to go take a hot shower to loosen the skin to get the needle in because I did all in my abdomen. I'm it's over it, I'm done. And so I stopped doing my TRT injections. I was done. I'm like, can I stop being a pincushion? So now he has me. My guy, he used to give me 30s. I was getting 30 milligram um Retta, but something happened with this processor. So I have 15s and 20s. And so playing around with the dosing on that's been fun. I'm like, hopefully it's right. And just do what looks good at the moment. And I've been pretty good about it. It's been working. I do it um anywhere from every two days to every four days.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

Okay. So cheat sheet on how to dose this stuff very easily for someone who doesn't understand math at all. If it's 15 milligrams, add 1.5 cc's of water.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Yeah, I did do that. It's just um in the insulin syringe. It's whatever I was taking. So I was taking one IU for that. It was 30 milligrams with um the three uh milliliters, and I was taking 10 essentially. 10, yeah. That was what I was yeah. So from there, I was just like, well, then 20 probably at 15, and then 15 at like 20.

SPEAKER_04 24:06

I was trying to think of the I'm just a girl. The same way. I'm constantly, I'm like so.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

She asked me later every day. We start doing our injections together, and she's she asked me every day, like, is it this one? And I'm like, no, it's not okay.

SPEAKER_04 24:23

But this is it's because I'm using it as my crutch. If I have to do something on my own, yeah, I come up, like, I'll write it down, I'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

Wow, just admitted it. Just admitted it. It's a crutch.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

So what's hilarious is I'm on TRT. Yeah. And they were giving my my prescription. They would send me like five vials every 10 weeks, which I thought was overkill. And they had me my prescription and my levels kept crashing. Like they kept crashing. My doctor's like, Are you doing your injections? I'm like, Yeah. He's like, Are you doing them two times a week? Yeah. And he was like, What is going on? So we were just like, Oh, my body's just metabolizing it. So I went back to him probably a few weeks ago and I was like, Can we just up my concentration so I can pin less? He was like, Yeah, absolutely. So they sent it to me and I'm still pinning twice a week. And I'm like, fuck. Like I told you, I wanted to pin less. So I'm sitting there reading the two labels. I just realized why my levels were crashing. I was not injecting the right mouth because my ass can't read and do the same thing in a syringe. The math wasn't mathing. So I sat there because I'm supposed to be taking five, which I'm like, okay, 3.5. I was like, three and a half on the syringe. I was like, okay, golden. They sent me my new one and it's 0.35. I'm like, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

What did I do? Rah. Fuck, dude. Well, I just, I just, I just always add the same amount in cc's of water to whatever it's in it. So like 15 goes to 1.5. So that every 10 units is one milligram always with anything that I'm taking. So like if it's if it's 30 milligrams, I add three cc's of water. For my NAD, it's 5,000 milligrams per vial. I added five cc's of water into that bitch. I pumped it up. And now, but now every day I gotta inject one goddamn cc of this shit under my skin after doing SS31 and after doing MOT C and after doing my fucking TRT. That's just the morning routine. Fuck, man. I'm tired. I am tired. It ends in two weeks, so I'm I'm like, yes, fuck yes. Never been so excited to not pin anymore.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

I don't blame you. I was too lazy. I didn't feel like reconstructing my MOT C because I'm like one less injection at the moment.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Two to three times a week. It's like this one is gonna be two. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

I'm like, I'll just wait. One day, one day I'll make it again.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Now, um, back back to that to to to something you said about your story that was the prep that you had that your coach pretty much like almost killed you, right? So my story is very boring, but I'm just gonna let you in on what happened with me. I was getting into bodybuilding, got into this community, which back in the day was really big, GH, and then I managed to hire one of the coaches because I was like, I want to get really big, right? So I want to hire a guy that knows what he's doing. So I hired this guy, and I'm like, yo, I'm pretty serious about it. Here's what I've used before, this is where my body's at. Take me to this level. And he's like, cool. This motherfucker gave me three grams of gear out the gate. Girl, I was 17. Like, there was no reason for me to be on three grams of gear. So my previous experience was all like 1.2 grams, like pretty reasonable shit. And then he put me on three grams. I couldn't walk from like my my car to the fucking classroom. It was it was horrendous. But I didn't get kidney failure or or or anything like that, but you did like walk us through that. What was the mistake?

SPEAKER_00 27:45

I've never done gear before. And because mind you, she was a coach I was with when I had the heart attack. Yeah, I decided I'll give her a second chance. Maybe it was a fluke, maybe it wasn't her fault. Maybe it was your fault. No, I'm loyal. I'm a very loyal person. So I was like, you know, there's usually our man.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

And I'm like, girl, be loyal to your own progress in your journey. Don't be loyal to your coach, goddammit.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Yep. I should have, and I was like, oh, she's a female, she has my best interest, you know, at heart. No, she didn't. Yeah. Just because you like to be at like 2,000-level testosterone doesn't mean I need to be that way. Like, my hormones were already compromised from the heart attack and the weight gained from that, that putting me on as much gear as she put me on right out the bat when I've never had anything was overkill. I was essentially doing like an elite male bodybuilder toast of Mastron Primo, a proviron. I was doing test ethanate, and then I tried test um proponate. Then I was on Annavon and I was on Winnie on Winnie all at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

Fuck, that hurts so bad. But I've seen I've seen these cycles. I've talked to people that I've seen this shit. And that's that's why when I whenever I hear people like, oh, coaches are all the same, and I'm like, motherfucker, you don't know what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

This is not true at all, okay? You really have to talk to your coach and you have to advocate for yourself these days, and you really have to have enough understanding of what you're using and not just trust somebody blindly. And that's where I was. I trusted blindly, and everything you don't want to happen, I had happened because of that.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

Yeah, yeah. And I and I want my clients to make informed decisions. So whenever I I whenever I suggest like something, I always make sure that I do a presentation. I'm like, hey, this is why you're taking this, this is why we're leveraging this at this time and stuff like that. And then if there's questions, I usually just record a full video like just breaking down this compound of like what it does, like what to expect from it and stuff like that. And then now I'm creating an academy where like everyone can just go in and learn what everything that I've learned about literally everything, just like be able to go through all of this stuff. And I I think that if more people had access to this type of stuff, I just think they would be able to like call shots a little bit better. Because a lot of times I feel like coaches just don't know better because they only learned from like their previous coach. You know, they I agree with that.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

They don't actually have like thought about this stuff before you're gonna hear me yell at my cat look like intermission. Our dog was just gonna be her. Hold on. Let's show her character to the audience. Hi Kiki.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

This is Sujinha. Sujinha was found on the street. Sujinia is Portuguese for like a little mess, and uh she has no tail. She was born that way. So we saw that she was pretty fucked up, and she uh basically grabbed me and wouldn't let go of me when I met her. So we picked her. And uh at the time we couldn't have animals at the place that we were living because it was like college place. Uh so we had to hide her. So we basically hid this bitch for like a year and some change. Just basically, like, we would put her inside of a cooler and then bring her it to the car to take it to the vet and like bring it back, or like put her in like bottles of uh like boxes of like uh like liquor and stuff from the ABC store and everything, and we would have these things on the doors and the windows so that she wouldn't get close to it, it would just like like hiss at her and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_04 31:25

Free box.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

So that's that's how we that's how we were, that's what we did like to make it work with the kitty cat. But the dog that you guys have already met before, the dog is a different story. Um, the dog was actually a Facebook post that we just randomly saw. It was like um a a friend of a friend of ours, our photographer, right, or writing photographer. Yep. She posted like that, hey, there's this animal here, like who's a rescue, and then she saw it and she showed it to me. And I've been like asking for a dog for a really long time.

SPEAKER_04 31:58

Yeah, I kept I asked questions about it just and researched it and did the budget for what it would cost to have a dog and all of this stuff. And then I said, Hey, I found this dog. I think she would be perfect for us.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Yeah, yeah. And then I I I saw the dog and I was like, Cool, looks like a dog, let's do it, let's do dog things with it. So we got the dog, and then first thing, I'm like, I want to play with this bitch, right? Because you know, she is a bitch, she's a female dog, and uh we played with her a lot. Like on the way from where we picked her up, we stopped by a park and immediately went running and everything. She was clearly dehydrated because we had to take her to the vet the very first fucking night. It was like already vet bills, like and she was foaming through the mouth and all of these things, and it was like, okay, guys, she's actually like she needs a few days of rest before you guys do it. Because she was a rescue, you know, she was in very poor conditions and stuff. She still doesn't drink water, she still doesn't drink water, but she does if we put like omega threes and sixes in them. So that actually works. Were were you able to get your cat back? Yeah, I got the cow. Awesome. The cow that's funny. I accidentally dragged her face against the asphalt. Whoops. See, our cat likes to go outside, but I think our cat is way too fucking stupid to survive. She's just she is dumb. Yeah, my cats aren't the smartest, they're pretty retarded.

SPEAKER_05 33:10

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

But they're happy. That's what matters.

SPEAKER_04 33:15

Well, you can watch you can come back and watch her intermission. We just shared our cat.

SPEAKER_02 33:20

Our cat and dog story. Oh, I love it. I have five cats and they're all fat and happy. That's awesome. Fat and happy. So what was I gonna ask? Well, yeah, so to the to the coaching experience, what is it that like because you hadn't done PDs before, right? And then you saw that massive list that was just basically like just get the compounding list from the from this underground lab, just give one of each, and let's go for it. Like, what was your reaction about it?

SPEAKER_00 33:50

At that point, it was after my heart attack, and it was kind of like yellow.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

I already had a heart attack. How did you give a how did you get a heart attack without was it diuretics? It was a lot of stimulants and over exertion, and she had me doing two-a-day workouts. I was expending probably 5,000 calories and only taking in about 15. And I was only 100%. How do you do over an hour a day?

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Okay, over an hour a day for like 1,500 calories. But you were taking like how much Clinton are we talking about? Like 80 micrograms, 120? I don't know. It was liquid. Oh fuck. Those are the worst because it's awful to dose, man.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

So that's uh that's why I'm you're not able to get an accurate dosing with it. You never know how like strong the compound was. And on top of that, it was a lot of caffeine. And on I was doing um two-day workouts on top of three sessions of cardio. Okay, yes. So it was stress related. My body was too stressed. There wasn't enough rest and recovery and food.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's why that's why I'm so big on instead of just pushing athletes, which when I say people, uh people sometimes are like, no coach does that. I'm like, motherfucker, they literally do. They see that you're in the gutter and they push you harder for no goddamn reason. When in reality, they should be restoring your capacity so you can actually get the fucking benefits from a shit. How many stories do we have to go through of people who are like, yeah, I started training less or like less days of the gym, or like just doing more cardio and not training so much, and then they got better. They grew more. Like, how the fuck does that keep happening? You know, like how many times does it need to happen? It's just random.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

It was special, it's just that.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I I I think it's crazy because I I I was doing my uh my growth phase and I was training five days a week, doing about 26 sets per session, so pretty like long, and I I don't know how to train unless I go to like close to or at failure, like just when the weight doesn't move anymore. And I was tired, I was very, very tired. And then I got back to TRT to um to just like do a health phase, and uh as I'm doing TRT, I'm also doing like uh a mitochondrial phase as well on top of that. But I brought my training down to like three to four times a week, doing about 14 sets per session, and my weights are moving up on TRT alone. And I'm like, bro, how badly was I recovering on my previous phase that I can raise my weights from that? Because usually they drop a little bit, you know, like about 20%. That's expected, you know. Yeah, but being able to go up on a lot of these lifts, like I'm not gonna say it's holding all of them, but a lot of them, yeah, it is. And it's uh it's pretty crazy. Like, what how many how many sets per workout do you normally are doing?

SPEAKER_00 36:34

My plan's pretty crazy, but I can get the whole workout done, including my cardio, anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours. And that's what the sauna set from too. Okay. This program is a lot better than his other ones. Those other ones would take me a long time. This one I actually enjoy. I decided not to do my own programming with him. I was just like, I'd rather have you do it. I don't want to think about anything right now. So with his program, um, I was in the gym six to seven days with the last phases. On this phase, I've only been in the gym five days a week. I only had cardio four days a week. We just increased the cardio. It was four days at 20 minutes, and then it went to four days at 30. Now it is five days at 30 minutes, which is not bad. And then the workouts, they're they're good. Like I'm able to push good weight. Um, I'm probably doing 20 plus sets though. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

Yeah. That's uh that's pretty standard in bodybuilding, I see. I just find it unfortunate that it's I'm I'm not really measuring my like how many sets I can recover from from a muscle recovery standpoint. I'm measuring from a I own a business standpoint, and if I dig myself too hard, I can't think. Like it's kind of like when you run your doses too high, or like when you're like too high in body fat and your brain is just like foggy all the time. Like I can't, I can't work, be productive like this. It's like when I'm taking high doses of growth from my own, yo, it's impossible to think. Like I just my brain doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

For me, um, recovery is very important because my job is very labor-induced. I do a lot of deep tissue massaging, and that's what I do for my own business. So being able to work on clients, to move the clients, to provide enough pressure with that. I have to be able to use my own body. So I have to be able to know the threshold of what's going on. I ran some growth. It wasn't growth hormone, but it was like IGF, Ipamerolin and stuff like that. So it increased my natural production. Oh, that stuff hit. It hit hard. Within six weeks of using it, I gained 15 pounds of actual mass. Like I blew up quick. My levels went from single digits to 400, like within just weeks, to where I was like, oh. But on top of that, it pulled fluid into all of my joints and everything. These three fingers on each hand are still numb. It was to the point to where my nerves were compressed. I was getting nerve pains down my arms and I couldn't use my hands. Yeah. So we had to pull everything out, and then we had to jump into prep early so I can get some of the weight off to relieve some of the pressure.

unknown 39:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:08

So that was fun.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

Yeah. Dude, that's crazy. Because women are so sensitive to it. And it's it's wild because the the effects of growth hormone, they're actually dependent on your your actual biological sex. So you're gonna get like different responses, guys and women. Like women need a higher dose than guys to get to the same levels of IGF 1, but they can't because in general their system doesn't tolerate high doses of growth hormone because of their randidendiotensin and aldosterone system. So it's just it's just so interesting how it's like physiologically built to like not be absolutely massive or something like that. Oh, it's like there's this cap. But I found that uh women tend to respond a little bit better to secretagogs like Tesla Moralin instead of like growth hormone directly.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

So I did Tesla, I did Ipermoralin, I did CJC with DAC and then no DAC, and then I did IFG or IGF.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

IGF1LR3.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:02

So you did all of them. Which one did you like the most?

SPEAKER_00 40:06

I really liked Tesla a lot.

SPEAKER_02 40:08

Yeah, that's that's so on my course on peptides, that's the only one that I'm covering. Reason being it's so far superior than all of the other ones.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

I did like if um I liked Tesla a lot, but I also liked pairing it with um IP. It was either or did CJC with uh I prepared, and then I did them singular. And I will say if I used Tesla as the base and I ran either one of those with it, I felt great.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Yeah. Now the the one that makes sense out of those two options is uh Tesla Moreland plus CJC with no DAC. Because the Half-Life is shorter, whenever they add DAC, uh it extends the half-life. So the life, the half-life of CJC on its own of the GHRH, it's actually just about five minutes. Like, so it's really, really low. So when they add like that 90 uh that uh the CJC 90 uh 191295 to it, um, it basically made it a little bit longer into like four hours or so. So you could dose the testamorlin at night to mimic the natural production of it, and then dose the CJC without DAC, like pre-training or pre-faceted cardio, even though I don't know if you ever tried this, but there is a compound that has been abstracted from this, and it's uh AOD 9604, and AOD9604 acts like directly in visceral fat and like like the stubborn areas and stuff, so you don't get the carpal tunnel. Yeah, you don't get the carpal tunnel, you don't get so I think the perfect pairing would be like Tessa at night and then doing um AOD in the morning before fasted cardio.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

I have the AOD, I still have Tessa, but with the nerve and I'm still numb, I'm afraid to run growth again. And so I wouldn't interfere with growth hormone at all.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

It doesn't no, no, no, it doesn't no Tesla Morelin, yes, but the AOD, it doesn't act with it.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Yeah, I would do AOD then, and I was reading that AOD running that in the morning before fastocardio is better because I have AOD, um SLPP, yeah, and then I have injectable L-carnitine and then the REDA, and I was looking at the best compound to use to help with retaining my size, but still adding sides and for a fat burner, but also growth. And so it was saying AOD is a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

It knocks all those boxes.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 42:16

Yeah, so SOU really did knocks all of those boxes because it's also an exercise mimetic. So it's it's it's being used now for like studied for uh, you know, just people that have con like they have a car accident and they can't train. So how are they gonna maintain their muscle? SLU could be one of the ways that helps you maintain your muscle. So it's sort of like anti-catabolic. And then if you want to avoid a stimulant like Clembuterol, because I just subjectively don't like the feeling of it, um, and it keeps me up at night. So you can actually just go straight to the beta-3 adrenergic receptor and then just target that directly with a medication like um uh why why is the name just running away from my brain right now? Miribron. So instead of using Clembutro, you can use that. So you so you substitute all of the stimulant load to Clembuterol plus SL SLU plus Miribron. And then to support the other parts of like fat burning and stuff, you have the AOD, and you could even layer in like MOT C because with the Retta, it's going to improve your insulin sensitivity even more. Like it actually changes, like it makes you more metabolically flexible so you wouldn't crash from the carbs in the first place, even before fixing your insulin sensitivity. So it would act also much faster than RETTA in case like something bad happened or something like that. That's also the reason why some people feel worse in it. It's because for the few first few days, your your system is still like shifting gears into like a new way of using things. But that the experience like of like feeling anxious after eating or having a raised heart rate or blood pressure that just goes up a lot. Like I used to have that. And then when I had more built more metabolic flexibility with HIP cardio, plus some different compounds and like L carnitine and things like that, I don't really have that anymore. Like my blood pressure is just steady.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

You know? I do my I have to track my blood pressure every four days when I do my check-ins. And so I check that and my resting heart rate to see where I'm at. And I will say it's a lot better now than it was before. And when I was on the CLEN, we jumped all the way up to 60 a day. Like it was, yeah. I was on 60 CLEN and then we jumped up to 75 for T3 too. Like it was a lot on my system.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

And so 75 of T3, it's could happen for some people because it doesn't work like testosterone, right? It doesn't shut off your system. It just acts in conjunction with it. So it's kind of like stimulating the production of it more and more and more. So that's why it's also like people are like, Oh, I don't want to take T3 because it's going to shut the system down. It's like we have actual studies, it comes back in less than a week. Like it that's how it works.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

So it's it's I know of people who just to maintain normal levels, they need to take 50 at that's um we're back down to 25 right now, but um we'll go up to 50s here soon. But my body does fine on it. Uh at 75, I just because I hit a plateau before the health flare up, and so we jumped to 75, and that got everything to run smoothly.

SPEAKER_02 45:07

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:07

And then the food caused me to crash.

SPEAKER_02 45:10

Yeah, yeah. So you're you I like the T3. It just makes me very happy to hear someone who's not afraid of T3 because it was it burns muscle, which like I've like I made a post joking about this stuff because it is a joke. There's literally one study that looked into this, just one, and it was over the course of two fucking weeks, and they noticed no loss of muscle. It's just a fucking useless study. You know, it's just a there's there's no study that's looking into people who are training their fucking ass off and also taking buttloads of anabolics, just like it's the case with Reddit. But for some reason, bodybuilders are like, Reddit is fine because it if you train, you won't lose muscle. But with T3, they think that mechanistically there's something built into it that just makes it catabolic. I'm like, why do you think every virtually every bodybuilder is using it, bro? Like, what do you what do you mean? Yeah, man. It's uh I I was thinking about this when I was driving today from the gym. I was like, man, some people just really play their life in hard mode for some reason, you know? Like they just like to put as many obstacles on the road as possible. It's like, I want to lose weight, but I don't want to go to the gym. I also hate cardio. What can I do? And I was like, well, just expect it to take about three years. Um, you know, that's that's one. Also expect to look worse than you look right now because you're just gonna be flabby because there's no muscle.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

At first, I was hesitant using Reddit because I didn't know anything about it. And all you hear about was the GLP ones and twos out that were destroying people. And so my buddy, he owns veteran peptides. He's the one that he's what he was one of my clients. So as I do his body work, we would talk about it. We talked in depth about it, and then I reached out to a few people that did this like some studies and personalized things with a lot of actual insights and statistics. I read the articles and I did my own research and I was like, maybe this is something that I need. When I got on it, it was literally night and day. My energy went up, my body felt better, and the weight literally finally came off.

SPEAKER_02 47:07

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. And I I bet with G3, it was also a similar experience. Whenever you hit the right dose, it's just like shit just flows. You know, it does.

SPEAKER_00 47:15

Yeah, it's it's really cool. As long as you're educated, like educated about things, you don't need to be afraid of them. You've got to learn what you're doing, and you have to talk to other people who have good experience, who actually know what they're talking about. And you guys pull together, you share sites, you share resources, and you share that knowledge and help each other grow.

SPEAKER_02 47:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, after after a poor experience there, was there like certain things that you learned that you're like, okay, so like I will do my prep, but I will not do this compound, or we don't mix as many compounds, or like I refuse to use like Clend or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

At first, I was very hesitant on using Clend and I was really hesitant on using Yohenbeam as well. Like I was when it comes to stimulants, I still get very weary. As it was when I got on the Federmine from my actual doctor, I stopped drinking coffee and pre-workout for three months because I didn't want to mix combinations of stimulants because I'm I'm not at risk of a heart attack. But once you get your heart rate like that and you feel it, you never want to feel that again. No, it's scary. Even having an anxiety attack, having your heart rate reach that level, it causes more anxiety because I'm like, oh shit, I'm gonna have another heart attack. Like it's a feeling I never wish anyone to have. It's very scary. So a lot of it was I love Shelby. Shelby was always a coach that I knew I wanted to have just because he is very well educated. And for me, I did many conversations with him and I really advocated my fears and where I fell and what I didn't want to do and my concerns. And one of it is it sounds counterproductive. As a bodybuilder, I want to preserve my hormones as much as I can, even though I know the last during like the last few weeks of prep, you're going to crash them. But there is that sweet spot of where you can kind of go without shutting them down completely and destroying them and still being able to have a good level to where when you reverse, you can repair them. So talking to Shelby and just telling them my concerns, when he wrote me my protocols and everything that's on it, I questioned him. I talked to my hormone doctor. We went over it together, and then I questioned him some more. I questioned both people. I wanted to hear it. I looked into other alternatives that I felt were going to be safer for me and I talked to him about that. And that's where he was just like, you know, you're absolutely right. This would be a better compound because of this and X, Y, and Z. So for me, he wanted me to use a Rimidex, but instead I chose a Myrosin just because instead of the ups and downs, it's a little bit more level. So instead of crashing them and going through a hard spike and low spikes, we picked one that would kind of be a good plateau. And then with that, my hormone doctor, he was like, make sure you're taking glutathione and you're taking um NA or NAC NAT because of your liver. It's very liver toxic. It's going to cause a lot of inflammation. So it's talking to the two people that I do trust and then advocating for myself and doing my own research and finding other alternatives. Um, for him, I will say Shelby is very conservative when it comes to running stuff. And he doesn't run everything at once. He actually does it in phases. He does about eight-week phases of certain things. He runs really low dose and he does cycles. And so he does eight-week cycles of maybe one or two compounds at once, and then he phases those out and he moves into the next batch. You're never on anything for duration, and you're never on a bunch of compounds at once.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

How long, how long in between cycles do you normally stay off? Um, I was off for over 12 weeks this time. Okay. Before that, I was off everything for almost a year and a half. The only thing I was on was on my TRT, but after that, I haven't touched anything until I got with Shelby. And then being with Shelby, we didn't start anything until 16 weeks out. And that's because we wanted to preserve any uh any of my size at that point because that's when it was kicking in harder. So we wanted to keep what I had. That's the only reason we ran anything. And then as soon as it was eight days before show, we pulled everything, and then from there we didn't start a new cycle until like maybe two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_03 51:14

And we're just on primo right now. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 51:18

Do you like Primo injectable, right? Not oral. Yeah, it's injectable. Okay. I'm an idiot. I was so happy that I just told her, like, hey, I found Primo, I got your Primo. I bought fucking oral Primo like an idiot. So yeah, it's pretty much worthless. Like you're like it's useless. Yeah, your stomach burns 50% of it like upon consumption immediately. So take the whole bottle to get a normal dose. Yeah, yeah. So I'm just I'm honestly just gonna have like a normal growth phase with whatever, and then just take this as a pre-workout as like cherry on the cake. So what am I gonna do now? I'm not you're you're probably gonna use Nandrolone.

SPEAKER_03 51:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:55

See, he gave me a choice between Nandrolone, um, EQ, or Primo. Yeah. And I was just like, well, because the stock is running low, I said, which one am I not gonna be on the longest? Yeah. He's like promote it.

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's it's it's hard to find stuff right now, especially stuff that is reliable. I bought a I bought like 10 vials of tests from this provider that has been pretty good, and it's uh awful, literally fucking horrendous. Like I started having acne breakdowns and my my mood, my libido, my like restless legs and anxiety, and then like just getting more inflamed, and I'm like, what the fuck is going on? It's the fucking test, isn't it? Yep, I pulled it out and back to normal.

SPEAKER_00 52:35

So that's a fear of mine. It's getting bad gear. I hear so many people are getting bad gear. So typically I have one to two people that I trust, and those are the ones that I go through. Yeah. Because um, I know who they're getting it from, or I know the source cur like directly. Yeah. Those are the only people. And right now, my doctor, that's my doctor's my drug dealer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I with him, I'm on SIP, and I will say SIP is what's worked for me. Ethanate and propionate did not work for my body. I broke out, I have acne scars still on my ass to this day from both of those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

But you were also doing only two injections a week, right?

SPEAKER_00 53:11

No, I was doing three before when I was with my last coach. We were doing it um three injections, and we were doing a lot. Right now, I only do two injections with my hormone doctor, and I variate between my shoulders and my um hip glutes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:25

Cause I because I I find that a lot of like the issues with like breakouts and stuff is just moving to daily administration, it solves it immediately.

SPEAKER_00 53:33

That's what I heard. Microdosing daily is actually one of the best ways to reduce the side effects. I just I can't be bothered. I don't want to inject myself literally.

SPEAKER_02 53:42

She does some Q, because you can do that as well. So she just does she I I I I basically got her like a formulation that just allows us to inject like 10 units a day. So she literally just pulls a tiny 31 in. Yeah. Oh, it's five units a day. Yeah, it's nothing.

SPEAKER_04 53:58

It's like a little drop.

SPEAKER_00 54:00

Yeah. So it's just yeah, mine's all in insulin syringes for my test, it's the way it goes. So it's all sub Q for um the doc the test I got from the doctor, which I appreciate because I'm not doing IM with test every fucking day or every two or every four days. Nope.

SPEAKER_02 54:14

Yeah, yeah, no, fuck that. I do that every day, and I know fuck that. So I wish I wish my doctor could prescribe me one gram of test though. I would love to be able to buy pharmaceutical tests. It's the best. Yeah, it's good. In in Brazil, I always get it because in Brazil, like access to this type of stuff is it's much more easy. Really? Oh, yeah, like legit pharmaceutical stuff with like Brazil has some of the most advanced testing for health of bodybuildings in the world. And and people don't know that enough. But I I was able to do this cardiac output under strain test that's basically like an EKG under stress, but it measures like the shape and the rhythm of it, like way more precise than an EKG. And and also it's able to catch like a heart uh hypertrophy months before an MRI is. So it's really, really interesting because on that in that study, it showed that my heart is actually has a little bit of enlargement, but overall, not just on the left ventricle, which is normal and expected when you're training.

SPEAKER_03 55:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:13

But the MRI showed nothing, you know. The MRI was fine, and so was the AKG. The AKG was fine as well. But why was it fine short thinning? Yeah, yeah, talking about the the doses and stuff in in Brazil, it's pretty easy to find all this stuff, and uh you get a lot of pharmaceutical things. Like, I mean, right now it's not as free, but when I started taking gear, you could just buy like the notepad from the doctor and then just write whatever the fuck you wanted. So that those were good times. Unfortunately, that's not how things work anymore. But like most medication that you need a prescription for here, you don't there. So think like nabivolol, proprenolol, fucking salbutamol, albuterol, uh, T3, T4, metformin. You don't need a prescription for any of these things. Like Telmasartin, you don't need if if it's basic health, if it's solving the major problems in health, which are heart disease and diabetes, then it's it's it's also subsidized by the government. So I was paying like a dollar fifty for a monthly stock of metformin.

SPEAKER_00 56:14

Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

Yeah, yeah, it was pretty neat. Um, they it also subsidizes things like Cialis and things like that because it's also used as blood pressure medication. So it's it's very, very accessible to be an enhanced bodybuilder in Brazil. I it lowered down our costs a lot when we were there by just the medications alone. Apparently, I didn't think to go there then. Dude, no, prepping in Brazil, and especially if you have a source, because they they have like good communication with the customs, so they always know when it's a good time to order or not, which is nice because they will tell you, like, nope, don't order right now. And it's like when a provider tells you don't order right now, it's kind of it's it's nice, it establishes trust, you know. So, like, yeah, it's I want to do a show in Brazil eventually and just prep, like, do the full prep in Brazil. I think that would be super cool. Just want to try their gear again and stuff and uh run crazy things, like they run a lot of injectable wind straw, like water-based wind straw. Really? Yeah, a lot. I did that before, painful as a bitch. Um, and uh women love it there, like a lot. They they they take a lot of wind straw.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

I feel like that I will say Brazilian bodybuilders that are women are massive.

SPEAKER_02 57:20

They are, of course. But have you seen the amount of gear that they take? It's it's dude, Brazilians take so much gear. We literally take like fucking, they go to the to the fucking like um what's the name of that store where you buy a bunch of stuff for like bigger animals and shit. It's not a pet shop.

SPEAKER_04 57:37

Oh, it's like track the version of tractor supply.

SPEAKER_02 57:40

Yeah, like a version of tractor supply, and you buy like these fucking things that you can use as a pre-workout for a horse and you do it for yourself. God damn, that's uh that's a no, no, no. Combuter is an asthma medication for horse. Much different. There are boundaries here, there are limits here with what I will and will be.

SPEAKER_00 57:57

I was just watching a video the other day, and it's like, why is everything that's made for a horse better? And then you see people using it, and it's like, oh, this is the best thing ever.

SPEAKER_02 58:07

Dude, I was I was looking into like cutting the cost on some supplements, and I found a way to cut down the cost of electrolytes by buying electrolytes for horses, bro. Because it's the same fucking thing, it's literally the same ratios and everything for horses. Like I'm just gonna buy that shit, bro, and make it my own. Add some like water like flavor to it, bam, infinite stock of electrolytes.

SPEAKER_04 58:34

Scooping it out, yeah, dog.

SPEAKER_02 58:37

At this point, just get a feeding trough, call it good. That would be awesome, man. So you're 24 weeks out right now and uh feeling good?

SPEAKER_03 58:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:46

Um, he just asked me that too on Tuesday. Yeah. He was asking me how everything's going because he likes to do check-ins, like, how's your you know, your mental, how's your clarity, how's your like body feeling? Like, how are you recovering? And I have a lot of injuries, like a lot of injuries. I have torn everything in my shoulders, like, yeah. My my body's a hot mess. So he wants to make sure, like, are you okay? Are you recovering? And so, especially because we're not running any stimulants right now, and I don't take pre-workout anymore. I do a few cups of coffee and then I'll just do an energy drink before the gym, and it's all lower energy because a lot of lower base um pre-workouts have creatine monohydrate, and I'm actually allergic to monohydrate. I can take HCL, but can't take monohydrate. So 90% of 150 to about 300 milligram base pre-workouts all have monohydrate in it. And so I can't take it. There are some that don't, but at this point, I've been off pre-workout for over a year. I'm just like, what's the point of taking it? I could just finally go raw dog the gym or just take an energy drink and a pump supplement, and I'm good to go. So for him, he just had me add in two new supplements. So now I'm on um trizine, um, theocrine, and theanine first thing in the morning. Okay. And I also take um Lion's main, and that's been helping a lot with just feeling more focused, more awake, and able to process versus getting like that midday crash and wanting to take a nap. I've been able to actually push through it and feel pretty good.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:18

Yeah. Lions main is an interesting compound because when you look at the actual roof, you were fat ass fuck.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:24

My cat found the hole in the fence. My other one, I gotta go get him. What the fuck just happened?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:28

But anyway, as I was saying, uh Lionsman is pretty interesting because when you look at the research, it's actually pretty fucking weak. It looks like shit. It looks like it doesn't work at all. Look at that fat cat in the background. Um, like it looks like it doesn't do anything, like it's very poorly absorbed. We just don't know how it does a lot of the things that it claims it does. But subjectively, people have really good results with it. It's also like one of the few compounds that could be leveraged for like brain protection. Uridine monophosphate would be another one that I would actually prioritize if when you're taking back here. So, like now that I'm gonna run trend in the offseason, I'm gonna be taking certain things that work against plaque buildup. Because we know from studies that trend builds up a plaque in your brain. Yeah, but my my theory is just that, well, we don't have studies of that in other compounds. Every single anabolic does that. Like it's not just trend. So just like it's oh uh bold and own is kidney toxic. Every single compound is kidney toxic under those conditions. So it's it's not bold and own, it's just the fact that we don't have studies comparing this for other compounds, you know. So people tend to over-categorize because they did they just want to know about these things. So they they get like, oh, this compound has like the fact that it like blocks cortisol, right? It lowers cortisol. And I'm like, yeah, but like they all do, right? And then but this one does by three percent more. So it becomes like, oh, if you want to lower your cortisol, then use this one. If you want to, you know, prevent against catabolism, then use trend, right? There's just something like that. It's like, but anaphor also does that, and you know, so does testosterone. Also, potentially so does clambuterol, right? Like what what are we talking about here? So there's just a lot of like uh overcategorization of these things, and I think it just comes from overthinking on just unlimited data, which is like one of the reasons why I chose to not talk about certain compounds and also not disclose certain information about certain compounds in my course, because it's just like we just don't fucking know how useful it's for me to give you a r a dosing range that goes from like 200 micrograms to 500 milligrams, like a thousand range, like come on, like that's crazy, you know? Like fucking way more than at 5,000 range. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:39

So will I take anything to protect my brain?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

You're not gonna be running trend, but you will be running Nandrelone.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:45

But you just said that the other things.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

Every compound, every compound does, and you're taking fish oil, so at the doses that you take.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:51

But does fish oil protect against black?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:54

Yeah, fish oil, especially DHA dominant uh fish oil, is going to be directly influenced towards that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

Sorry about that. My cat found the hole in the fence. No, you're totally fine.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:04

You're totally fine. We were discussing a plaque buildup and use of trend, but that's not something that you're probably into doing trend.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:11

Nope. I will never do trend.

unknown 1:03:14

What?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:14

Oh, sorry, I got your hair. Um that's okay non-negotiable for me. I will never do trend. Yeah, it makes sense, right? Because there's no fucking reason to run trend. So that that that's there isn't. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

Now people I don't feel like fighting a gorilla, so why would I need to take it?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:30

Correct, correct. Yep. But in any case, I just I just wanted to say, like, listening to your story, it's very interesting. I I I learned a lot from you, and I I see how similar our experiences are and like also like how different they are in certain aspects of it. And I'm able to like catch a couple a couple of things here and there. If you had like one thing that you're like, okay, from my like the things that I've learned in bodybuilding, if you're thinking about becoming a bodybuilder or doing a bodybuilding show, here's what I would like you to know.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:58

Do your research on gear and talk to your uh trust the doctor, especially if your doctor knows that you want to do bodybuilding and you want to do steroids, talk to them.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:07

Actually have a doctor who's understanding to where you can check your blood. Having your blood work done and ran, especially when you're cycling, is one of the most important things. If I didn't have a doctor that actually genuinely cared for me, I probably would have had my liver and kidneys completely shut down and I probably went into failure and I probably would have died. It was having a doctor actually noticed my body was not okay and being open and honest and talking about what was going on to where he made me go get blood work and he was just like, You're about ready to be in liver on kidney failure. Like, you need help.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:40

So I will honestly say, looking back at everything I have gone through, do your own research and advocate for yourself and actually talk to your providers. I mean, they're not gonna turn you in, they're not gonna be like, oh my god, you're using steroids. Be open and honest because ultimately, if you have a good doctor, they want you to be safe as you pursue your goals and hit your dreams. So having the fact that you are gonna be on it, at least be on it safely.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:05

Yeah, yeah, agreed. I love that. Well, Mary Allen, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you uh taking the time to talk to us after you know us not being able to schedule this thing, just like two ADHD rabbits running after one another, just trying to make like their It's been a few months, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But uh, you know, I've I've I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I really appreciate you just taking the time to talk to us. I I believe your experience is very valuable for for our audience here. And uh yeah, how can people find you on social media?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:34

Um, I'm mainly on Instagram at MadFitFitness. So it's M-A-A-D-FitFitness, and that's how you can find me. Um, you can watch my next journey as I get ready for my show and so as I go through maintenance and repair my hormones and see what the next chapter um brings.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:50

Nice. And that's that's uh your Instagram handle is where your name comes from, right? Maddie. Your true name.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:56

My real name is Mary, but yeah, everyone calls me Maddie, and it makes me I'm just like, stop it, you fat son of a bitch!