Shrek
Fucked up Kunce
Mike Matarazzo’s Second Chance
(The following story is excerpted from the July, 2005 issue of FLEX magazine.
In it, champion IFBB bodybuilder Mike Matarazzo discusses his recent heart surgery
and his use of performance enhancing drugs.)
I used to believe that I was 100% healthy, but those days are gone, and I'm angry, because I did it to myself.
How?
Oh, god, where do I begin? I'd have to say that everything that led to my heart problem began the minute I started getting serious about competitive bodybuilding. In order to get bigger, I'd eat five, six, seven pounds of red meat a day, no vegetables. And I'd stay away from fruits because of their sugar.
Worst were the chemicals. I have so many memories of being alone in a hotel room the week, five days or two days before a contest, and doing unspeakable things to my body—steroids, growth hormones, diuretics—anything and everything that we as bodybuilders do to achieve a certain look. The greatest danger, though, is that, while dieting and training stay the same through the years, there's a compulsion to experiment more wildly with chemicals. Every day, guys are on the phone asking who's using what, where are they getting it, how are they mixing it? There are guys out there who are being paid big money by pros to mix special concoctions for them. I remember being all over the world, a few nights before a contest, putting chemicals into my body, knowing I was hurting myself, but I did whatever it took to attain a “look.”
If I could go back in time, those things never would have happened. I would have gone back to driving a truck. I have no doubt in my mind that the primary cause of my problem—the biggest thing—was the chemicals. It was the steroids, the growth hormones, the diuretics. We take Cytomel to lose fat, knowing it's an incredibly powerful thyroid drug, and that's only one of the many, many drugs out there taken by everyone, from amateurs to the highest level in the world.
I wouldn't in a million years change a lot of the aspects about bodybuilding, but that's the one aspect I'd discontinue if I had a second chance.
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