The Romano Factor

The Most Powerful Drug in the World

If you spend enough time in a gym, you’ve come to accept some insufferable behavior among young muscleheads who are a bit too pumped up about being someone who refers to themselves as “bodybuilders.”

One manifestation is the question one inevitably asks another who’s looking blown up by about 10 pounds: “Bro! You’re jacked! What are you taking?”

It’s pretty much accepted around many gyms that any noticeable mass gain must be the result of some secret concoction of steroids and androgens. Hence the ubiquitous question. For better or worse, the answer is likely “sustanon and tren.” While that’s not technically a bad thing, it’s nevertheless out of order.

First, the sustanon/tren stack is the fail-safe get-big combo. If you’re eating right and don’t grow on sustanon and tren, you’re not going to.

Take two bodybuilders of similar size, weight, and body type with similar training styles and intensities. They’re both taking 250 milligrams of sustanon and 100 milligrams of trenbolone acetate every other day (1,400 milligrams total every 8 days). Bodybuilder A has a specific diet. Bodybuilder B is just turned loose to graze. Twelve weeks later, they’re compared side by side.

Experience tells me Bodybuilder A could be noticeably bigger, leaner, and a couple of kilos heavier, with full muscle bellies, veins everywhere on top of some cuts, and hints of striations. Bodybuilder B could be many kilos heavier, but look like a fire hydrant.

Bodybuilder A ate 300 grams of poached tilapia, half a cup of rice, and half an avocado (or a meal of similar macro composition) every three hours. Bodybuilder B spent a lot of time at the Chinese buffet, following the age-old but grossly incorrect “stuff yourself while you’re on juice” plan.

I’ve witnessed this often: two bodybuilders of similar stature and composition, taking the same amount of potent drugs, ending up looking totally different. Bodybuilder A could also be markedly stronger than Bodybuilder B, who might’ve been slightly stronger 12 weeks prior. All things being equal, hormones and intense training protocols will always be profoundly overtaken by a force more powerful than chemicals …

Food.

The nutrient profiles of the foods we eat represent the most powerful assemblage of drugs known to man. For bodybuilders, merely manipulating macronutrient content can markedly increase—or decrease—performance, body fat, and lean muscle gains regardless of what other drugs they may be taking.

The opposite isn’t true; while you can certainly enhance food’s effects with drugs, drugs won’t give you the performance and/or physique improvements made with food.

If you look at the successful elements of building lean mass and/or enhancing performance on a pie chart, steroids, androgens, various peptides, growth hormone, supplements, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, etc. comprise about 20 percent of the pie. The other 80 percent is diet. No other aspect of physique development is as impactful as managing the most powerful substances that you put into your body—food.

If you’re really devoted to the bodybuilder lifestyle, you live it one meal at a time, every three hours, starting right after your morning cardio and continuing up to an hour before you turn in for the night. Your macronutrient ratios are carefully calculated, and every meal you eat—off-season or not—is weighed, measured, and usually eaten out of Tupperware. If that’s how you live your life (with a cheat meal once a week), you’ll always be muscular and lean.

The correct dialogue between the two characters above should be: “Bro! You’re jacked! What are you eating?”

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