Last month, when writing about steroids for my post “Cover Models Never Looked So Good”, I surprisingly found myself feeling nostalgic.

I moved to NYC in the fall of ’99.  In doing so, I left behind the suburban families at Sunrise Fitness and joined the hard-core bodybuilders at Steel Gym.  Overnight I went from being one of the big dudes to barely average sized.  Steel Gym was loaded with professional bodybuilders, one ex Mr. Olympia, several future contenders and at least a dozen amateurs weighing over 250 lbs. and ripped.  I had been lifting regularly for nearly seven years at that point and grown from a 145lb. fifteen-year-old to a 195lb. 22 yr old.  I had always prided myself on being all-natural but was curious about what my body would do with a little extra help.  Mostly though, I wanted the self-esteem booster of being one of the big, strong guys again and all of the attention that comes with it (although I wasn’t fully aware of this until years later).

When the local steroid dealer befriended me and offered me some gear at cost, I knew it was only a matter of time until I took the plunge with a syringe.  Six weeks later I began my first cycle: 10 ampoules of Duratest 250 and 16 ampoules of Winstrol V.

Huge beefy muscles were very much in fashion in ‘99 and I was doing my best to keep up with the Joneses.  When I went to my second job at night to bartend at the local gay bar, sterioded muscle was part of the uniform— no shirts, just slabs of beef.  I’ll never forget this one night after closing when we were cleaning up.  One of my co-workers came through the bar with a pen and paper announcing,

Who wants some juice? I’m seeing my dealer tomorrow.

It reminded me of my college days doing light construction when a co-worker would call out, “I am heading to the deli.  Anybody want anything?”

I experimented with steroids on and off for two and a half years.  My weight would fluctuate ten to fifteen pounds between cycles with 219lbs. being my heaviest.  My strength and recovery certainly improved and my mood was great, or at least, I thought so.  The testosterone made me very aggressive and there was an incident or two in which my dear friend Allen feared for his life during a disagreement with me.  And, of course, there was the time that I barreled over some little, old lady for trying to board the crowded 9 train before letting me off, which was just terrible subway etiquette on her part.  So I took it upon myself to remind her of proper traffic flow with a firm shoulder as I exited the subway car.  Some Eagle Scout I was.

As much as I loved my newfound strength, size and respect for elders, there were a few cons to my steroid use.  I had some very unattractive acne, and at times, the water retention in my forearms produced an unbearable pressure on my ulna nerve.

To make things interesting, my new testosterone use dovetailed with a new sex addiction (a topic deserving of its own future post) making for some seriously late nights.  Being a very sexual person to begin with, the testosterone put me into overdrive.  It was difficult to focus on anything other than sex and quite often getting a good night sleep was not my top priority.  Eventually I realized that being too tired for my workout defeated the purpose of me taking steroids in the first place.

As the cons grew and the pros diminished, I gradually began to step back and reevaluate my fitness path.  I wanted my body to last another century without having orthopedic surgery or joint replacement.  So I began making some major changes in my lifestyle and steroids became a thing of the past.

Steroids served a purpose at that point in my life.  They were a band-aid of sorts, giving me confidence and protection.  And they got me through until I could develop the self-esteem and courage to face my life without them.  I am grateful for this time in my life and have no regrets about it. OK, that’s not totally true.  If I could go back, I would probably settle for simply saying, “Excuse me” and rolling my eyes at the elderly woman on the subway.

During the course of writing this post, I’ve wondered why I felt so nostalgic about steroids last month, and it just dawned on me now.  I was depressed.  This fall was a rough season for me, and I was feeling pretty shitty about myself.  Steroids and sex were two things I’d used in the past to band-aid my hurt and the memory of them came flooding back.  It was strange: as far as I have come and as long as it has been, remembering the steroid use and the sex brought an uneasy comfort during a time of pain.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

Well the holiday food onslaught has begun.  Right now in my office there are no less than five kinds of festive snack treats.  No one seems to know exactly where they come from; they just appear in the break room in the morning waiting to be eaten.  While I’m not much given to conspiracy theories, I have entertained the thought that the snacks are delivered overnight by malicious imps fired by Santa and now in the employ of an underworld cabal made up of the owners of gyms and weight management systems.  Does anybody even know what Jenny Craig looks like?  A more plausible (but far less interesting) theory is that my co-workers have brought these sugary treasures to the office motivated less by the holiday sprit (although I’m sure that plays some part) and more by the desire to have them out of the house.

Now I’m sure that the covert purveyors of these things both sweet and savory believe that they are spreading holiday cheer and no doubt they are.  To those of us who can’t help but answer the siren call of a tray of brownies, however, it fills this time of year with chocolate pitfalls.  The story is very much the same in most every office: the eaters (we know who we are) make periodic trips through the break room to graze (just as we did through Swiss Colony at the mall in our younger years) and the non-eaters who have water-packed tuna on endive say things like,

Oh I never eat sweets, even as a kid I didn’t like them.

Or,

I can’t stand that fake meat. I feel awful if I eat even a bite.

— this as I hide a half-eaten Hickory Farms of Ohio Summer Sausage under my sweater and make for the door.  I leave the nut-encrusted cheese ball to throw my enemies off the track, and I haven’t even mentioned Chanukah, a holiday in which you’re actually required to eat fried foods.

Those of us who “shake like a bowl full of jelly” know that we are helpless when confronted with Pecan Log, fresh from the oven Monkey Bread or latkes, so we’ll just wait it out until the New Year when we’ll return to counting calories, carbs, points, miles, reps or whatever it is that we have to count to undo the collateral damage done to our midsections, butts and thighs by the holidays.  So until then my fellow pudgy revelers, you bring the honey-mustard and I’ll bring the Summer Sausage.  Meet you in the break room in half and hour.

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

The second trimester of pregnancy is sometimes known as the “honeymoon” phase because for many women it means less vomiting, less breathlessness, and more energy.  This is often the time when all that growth and development going on inside the pregnant woman’s body begin to manifest themselves outwardly as well, and people may start noticing that she is beginning to “show”.

Such has unfortunately not been my case.  Yes, the sickness is largely a thing of the past, and I can once again climb the three flights of stairs to my apartment without gasping or white-knuckling my way up the railings, but I doubt if anyone looking at me would think I was pregnant.  Just pleasantly plump, rounded, chunky, pudgy, roly-poly, or one of the other euphemisms for carrying excessive avoirdupois around.

It is far more likely that any former students I bump into seeing me for the first time in months would think,

Man, she’s really let herself go!

— pitying me and perhaps considering what new diet/exercise guide to suggest.  Some women deal with this visual ambiguity by plastering themselves with signs: there is clothing of all types available emblazoned with phrases like, “Bun in the Oven,” “There’s a Pea in My Pod,” or even “Does This Baby Make Me Look Fat?”, but I’ve always felt wearing such stuff smacks of defensiveness (and a little desperation).

So instead, this time I am trying to embrace the in-betweenness.  When my almost 4-year-old (who doesn’t yet know about the existence of his sibling-to-be) brought me a copy of Prevention magazine that he’d picked up while we were waiting in line at CVS the other day and said,

Mommy, I think you need this.

I was thus prepared for the worst.  The headline on the cover? GET A FLAT BELLY NOW!

Thanks, honey,” I said.

You may be right.

Jeanine Casler lives, writes, and runs in Evanston, Illinois.

Do you ever have arguments with Common Sense?  It tells you not to run that extra mile, eat that third donut, or launch yourself and your bike over that really, really steep drop, especially since you’re biking the trail all by yourself.

It should win.  And most of the time, it does.  Occasionally, though, I have arguments with Common Sense, and they sound something like this:

ME:  I want to try that really cool teeter-totter with my bike.

COMMON SENSE: Do you want your insurance premiums to rise even more?

ME:  I can keep my balance.

COMMON SENSE:  Can you ride with a broken leg?

ME:  Stop trying to ruin my dreams.

COMMON SENSE:  Dreams of visiting the emergency room?  Dreams of practicing your wilderness first aid skills on yourself?

ME:  If you’re not going to say anything nice, I’m not going to play with you.  I can make that teeter-totter, I can—

Common Sense is usually polite enough not to giggle at me too much when I visit the doctor afterward.  It just chortles a little as I wince from the pain.

To be fair, now that I have children, I listen more closely to Common Sense.  I don’t eat a box of donuts and a bag of M&Ms for lunch.  I don’t go for long rides without water.  I don’t spend too much time watching Star Trek reruns.  Often, my voice will join that of Common Sense as I try to usher my kids through teenage-hood.

But occasionally, the impish side of me breaks loose.  The lure of the challenge is too strong, whether that test involves modest attempts at breaking gravity’s hold or ambitious goals involving covering large distances.

ME:  Why yes, a nine-mile run did seem like a good idea, in spite of the fact that my arches have been hurting.

COMMON SENSE:  Plantar fasciitis isn’t fun, you doofus.

So please don’t tell this to Common Sense: sometimes, before I crash to earth, I enjoy the moment of flight, even when I know that the hospital is waiting.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

I was a shy kid in elementary school and junior high.  I hated confrontation, wasn’t competitive in sports and received little attention from my classmates outside of being made fun of and called faggot.  My experience was not unlike that of our own Allen Durgin as he relates it in “Playing for the Other Team”.

But then, at age fifteen, I discovered weight training and fell in love immediately.  My body responded swiftly and after only six months of lifting weights in my parents’ basement I had packed on twenty pounds of muscle.  It made me feel more masculine and attractive.  The attacks, both physical and verbal, diminished as my size grew, and it felt empowering to be able to wield some control in my intimidating world.  I also needed something to calm my anxieties and provide a lift during my times of depression.  I very well could have settled on pot or alcohol but instead choose endorphins as my drug of choice, quickly developing a nasty addiction.

The first realization I was becoming obsessive came at the age of nineteen.  Everything revolved around my workout.  Some days I would even skip class to take a nap in my car before lifting.  One particularly crisp December day I was driving to the gym for what was to be a perfect chest workout— I was well rested, had timed my last meal perfectly and was on course to arrive at the gym just as my blood sugar was peaking— when I noticed my temperature gauge.  The small leak I had in my radiator just blew out the last of the coolant and my engine was overheating.  I needed to pull over, wait for it to cool down and refill it with fluid, but all this would throw off the perfect timing of my chest workout.  So I ignored the needle, driving it deeper into the warning zone, praying to make it just a few more miles.  That’s when I heard the awful knock.  I had just willingly blown my engine; the block was cracked, a rod was thrown and my workout would never be.  The latter being the most painful part.

Back then I joked about how my only addiction was exercise, but in hindsight it was no joke.

I have since made great progress in my relationship with fitness.  I no longer judge the value of myself by the size or appearance of my body, and working out is one enjoyable part of my day instead of the center of it.  I now know that even seemingly healthy and socially approved habits can affect my life in unhealthy ways.  I used to focus solely on getting to the gym and not on the engine that was going to me there.  But today, I focus on the engines of health: nurturing relationships, participating in a variety of physical activities, even attending a lecture or two.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.