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It’s not only men who are taking the pursuit of the perfect body to chemical extremes. WH investigates

the secret world of Britain’s female fi tness drug users

ROISIN DERVISH-O’KANE

WEIGHT ROOMDRUG DEALS

JACEY

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longside her bowl of protein-pimped porridge, Tanya Jones* lines up her morning dose of supplements. There are ten in total, everything from amino acids to green tea extract; an assortment of health store pills that could edge her closer to those lean, strong body goals she trains six days a week towards. Then she picks up the eleventh – a round, yellow tablet – breaks it in half and, conjouring the image of herself, streamlined and bikini-clad, knocks it back before her doubts can stop her. It had looked innocuous among her kitchen table pharmacy, but Tanya hadn’t bought the pill from her local Holland & Barrett. She’d scored it from a friend of a friend, discreetly passed between them in a wordless changing room exchange at her gym. It is an illegal anabolic steroid called Anavar, a drug known as the female friendly steroid, that is becoming a dangerous shortcut to sculpting a very modern bikini body.

Tanya’s transformation was extremely fast by anyone’s standard. ‘Once I started taking Anavar, I went from a size 14 to a size six, in about four months,’ says the 25-year-old personal trainer. ‘Before that, I was fi t but I’d

always been that tall, broad sporty type. Being in the industry, I was surrounded by petite women with perfect, lean, hourglass fi gures. It’s the look everyone is going for nowadays and I wanted it too,’ she says.

Her boyfriend, a weights room regular, already took steroids. ‘Gear’ – a catch-all term for steroids and fat-burning drugs – ‘isn’t exactly uncommon,’ she says. She asked him to sort her out, too. And so she got her hands on Anavar, which is a derivative of dihydrotestosterone (or DHT), a hormone around 10 times more powerful than testosterone, that essentially supercharges your workout and hardens muscle without adding bulk. Alongside that she took another illegal fat-burning pill called Thyroxine 3, which, disturbingly, is a thyroid disrupter. The speed of the results surprised even her. ‘I could power through workouts, deadlifting 120kg for seven reps, where I could only manage one before I started,’ she recalls. ‘Quickly my muscles were harder and more defi ned,’ she adds. ‘I remember when I was posing in the mirror and I saw a distinct line of separation down my thigh,’ she recalls, adding, ‘that’s when I knew it was working.’

‘When you see a transformation that rapid, it’s a fair guess that there’ll be some kind of drug behind it,’ says London-based strength coach Dan Wheeler, who trains women in the burgeoning fi tness modelling world. He sees a direct link between its growing popularity among regular women and the increasing number of women seeking ‘assistance’ (as it’s known on the scene) from illegal drugs.

BIKINI GOALSFor the uninitiated, fi tness modelling is sort of a female bodybuilding scene. But rather than bulked-up Jodie Marsh types, these women own a slightly more souped-up version of the body type many of us strive

MY PT SUDDENLY OFFERED ME SOME STEROIDS MID-SESSION

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for – taut toned curves, defi ned abs and steel cut thighs. The #StrongNotSkinny or #FitNotThin ideal we scroll through on social media.

Hayley Sinclair is a London-based personal trainer who has observed this phenomenon up close. ‘When I fi rst did a competition in 2014, no one was interested. Now, I have friends who have competed; married mums, really ordinary people, who weren’t massively into fi tness before. And a bikini competition is now a totally normal goal for my clients,’ she says.

The more women compete, the greater their trickle-down infl uence beyond competition day, via social media. The rhetoric is that with clean eating and perfect-form heavy lifting, all of us – even those of who aren’t blessed with Victoria’s Secret-style genetics – can achieve the goal. It’s a body ideal comprised of discipline, commitment and grit; elusive virtues in our age of easy-access and instant rewards. But delve a little deeper into it all and suddenly it gets decidedly dirty – with steroids being talked about with frightening normality.

ON THE SCENE‘It’s one of those things you don’t realise goes on until you’re in the scene,’ reveals 20-year-old Rebecca Foster*. She had started strength training with a new PT when she overheard a male gym-goer talking loudly between deadlifts about ‘gear’. ‘It didn’t take a genius to fi gure he was talking about steroids,’ she says.

Then six weeks into her new training plan, she was o� ered some. Not by the stacked roid-head who’d been waxing lyrical between lifts – but by her own trainer. ‘The gym was empty apart from me and him. We were working on my back and shoulders and when I was resting he said: “You know I deal? If you want some extra help with training and dieting, then I can sort you out,”’ she remembers. ‘He o� ered me “clen” [full name clenbuterol, an illegal fat-burning drug] because it would help me lose body fat more quickly. He said there were no side e� ects or anything from it, and reassured me that is was a medicine made for people with asthma, and therefore it was okay,’ she adds. She admits she thought about it

before eventually coming to her senses and telling him no.

The trainer was wrong of course: all these drugs have side e� ects – clen’s is a delightful ability to leave you unable to sleep and with an irregular heartbeat – but Wheeler agrees that there’s a certain type of trainer out there happy to get their clients hooked on illegal pills. ‘Trainers have egos and want to get the best results they can. Women who are new to fi tness can be naïve, and their trainers, manipulative – it’s a dangerous combination.’

ONLINE PHARMACIESThere were various anecdotes we were told when researching this feature, including one woman who gets her regular supply of Anavar passed under the counter of her local health food shop. Then, of course, there’s the internet: an anonymous world of illegal

transactions, dangerous deals and moronic advice. Online, invite-only members’ forums connect those buying and selling ‘gear’, with the intention of meeting and securing in-person deals. As Class C substances, you won’t be prosecuted for possession but it is illegal to supply, or possess or import the drugs with intent to supply. So, if you were to purchase a steroid like Anavar, the person you buy them from would be breaking the law. It’s also illegal to import or export steroids for personal use using postal, courier or freight services. ‘These websites operate like a private members’ club. You have to be verifi ed by fi ve di� erent existing members to prove that you are not the police,’ says

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MY VOICE GOT DEEPER AND I GREW HAIR ALL OVER MY BODY

Wheeler. And you don’t even have to plunge to such depths of the dark web to get your fi x. Within minutes, WH was able to size up prices and brands for a 50 days’ supply of Anavar for £29.99.

Sometimes the internet comes o� ering, even when you’re not looking for it. Ellie Thompson*, 27, from Belfast had started posting her progress on Facebook when a local trainer contacted her – commenting below her photos – with some advice for getting bikini ready. He suggested that Ellie take 30mg a day of Anavar to get the gains she was looking for. To put that into perspective: ‘That’s three times the amount I ever took,’ says Tanya. So despite Anavar supposedly being the more woman-friendly steroid due to its lesser androgenic e� ect (in short, less likely to give you a beard), soon the surge of male hormones were showing up all over the body Ellie had worked so hard to sculpt. ‘I lost the highest pitch of my voice – and grew more hair on legs and arms,’ she remembers. She was going through virilisation – the umbrella term for what happens to the female body when it’s faced with excess male sex hormones. Others include a stronger jawline, deeper voice, male pattern baldness – and painful erections. Yes, really. Dr Richard Quinton, a hormone expert at Newcastle University explains: ‘The increased blood fl ow means that the clitoris can get engorged – and women may fi nd themselves getting painful erections when they are wearing tight jeans, from where the clitoris is rubbing on them. This can happen straight away.

Ellie gave up the drugs after fracturing her shinbone forced her to take a break from training. So she luckily swerved any of the consequences born of prolonged use, which is essentially a WMD-style attack on the liver and heart; increasing the risk of artery clogging; raising blood pressure and expanding in size until ventricles get out of balance.

UNKNOWN QUANTITYAnd that’s even assuming that you’re taking what you think you’re taking. All of these pills – being illegal and all – are unregulated. ‘I have tested a number of drugs over the years and they often come back with a cheaper substitution as the active ingredient, which may have a higher androgen ratio, increasing the risk of unwanted side e� ects,’ says Dr Jim McVeigh, Director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moore’s University and the UK’s leading authority on steroid use.

Tanya, however – in the sort of lexicon that sounds like any recreational drug user searching for justifi cation – insists she takes the drugs safely and the only side e� ect she’s su� ered was soaring confi dence. Wheeler says he’s observed as much. ‘Men and women just seem to exude this confi dence. They act like they are on another path. And it’s like any other drug – once you’re in the circle, you’re in the circle – and it begins to seem completely normal,’ he says. Indeed, at the moment, Tanya is between courses of Anavar, but she has no intention of giving up any time soon. ‘As a PT, your body is your best advert, and people want to see that you are putting the e� ort into training and dieting. I used to meet potential new clients when I was on Anavar and instead of getting a picture up on their phone and saying “I want to look like her”, they would say “I want to look like you”,’ she says – adding, ‘I would take it again to get back in peak shape.’ And so the cycle continues: shady, dangerous – and anything but healthy.

*For legal reasons, all names have been changed

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