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Hi!
I’m trying very desperately to increase my weight, but particularly my muscle. Due to HIV, I underwent a period of severe wasting (went from being almost 130 lbs to 93 lbs – I may also post something on the HIV and anabolics forum, but as far as I could tell, all of the HIV+ people posting there were men, and from what I’ve heard, they have an easier time gaining muscle than we do and anabolic steroids affect us differently, so I thought I’d ask you ladies for advice first) – my doctors + I have gotten my HIV better managed, and I’ve been able to gain back a large amount of the weight (I’m currently 116lbs), but it came back as all fat, no muscle at all. While, to a certain extent, weight is weight (better to be 116 lbs than 93, even if it is just flab), lean body mass is the best thing to have in order to prevent future wasting/illness. I started lifting weights (not actually for the first time – I lifted as a teenager after my kids were born) and have gotten a lot stronger (for example, i could never do a pullup before in my life and now I can do 5) but not any bigger. I’ve gotten “firmer” (less of the “skinny-fat” thing – I was, like, the ultimate skinny-fat following my muscle wasting + subsequent weight gain), which I’ll take to mean I’ve gained a tiny amount of muscle (really not very much), but I’m lifting weights that are heavy (that is, heavy for me – certainly not for some of you gals, judging by your pictures!), in rep ranges 4-10, and not getting bigger. My doctor has offered to prescribe me anadrol. Here’s info about me and what I’m doing:
Stats: 5’7, 116lbs, BF unknown (only had it tested once + it was 14% [14-point-something – I forget exactly] but this was at a lower weight and before I started lifting). Oh, I’m 26 – if that matters.
Goals: gain muscle! I want to get up to 130-135 lbs and have a significant part of the weight gain be muscle. Or maybe I should say, I’d like to gain at least 15 lbs of muscle and I don’t really care that much if I gain some fat on top of it. Aesthetics aren’t really my number one priority, but still, I don’t really want to be virilized.
Current Training:
For the last couple weeks I’ve been doing legs/back/bis and chest/shoulder/tris – I’ll do l/b/b, day off, c/s/t, day off, and so on. this is mostly b/c I’m short on time – before that I was doing one body part per day and really working it as hard as I could.
Someone recommended to me that I switch to a more basic lifting schedule – 3x/wk basic full-body workout, only do 1 set each exercise (!) of squat, deadlift, chest press, military press, bent over rows, pull-ups (you get the point – large, compound lifts; no bicep curls!) b/c right now I’m getting very fatigued between sets + seem to have to wait several minutes between one set and the next to not still be feeling the failure from the last set (if I only wait a minute or two, either I have to drop the weight, or I can only get off a couple reps). Also, during my workouts I get famished – eating up to 3000-3500 cals during a workout only lasting a couple hours (they’re long b/c I take longer breaks b/w sets), which made someone suggest that I might be pushing my body into a catabolic state unintentionally – does this make sense to you guys? It really is the only time I’m hungry. All other times of day, I have to force feed (cachexia).
cardio = 40 minutes/week (one 15-minute session, one 25-minute session, both on the stairstepper, alternating between a high level and a lower level – probably not quite HIIT but something kind of like it, I’ve made real gains here in my aerobic capacity which is my only real goal. I do it on the stairstepper b/c of all the cardio, it seems to be the best for building up the leg muscles).
Current Meal Plan (Note: on lifting days i’ll sometimes eat about 1500 cals more because I get famished during my workout but later won’t force myself to eat as much b/c I figure ‘I already ate so much!’ – it’s basically the same type of food though). Here’s a sample, non-lifting, day:
Breakfast:
3 russian pancakes + raspberry topping
deep fried potatoes + onions, ketchup + ranch dressing
2 or 3 bites of scrambled eggs (don’t like most eggs, but make them for my kids, eat what I can)
snack:
rest of potatoes + onions, ketchup
oatmeal cookie
lunch:
raviolis in vodka sauce
12 vegetarian meatballs (lots of soy protein)
oatmeal cookie
snack:
breyers natural vanilla ice cream w/ 3 scoops whey protein powder (nasty, but only way to get that protein)
dinner:
pad thai with wheat gluten, tofu, potatoes, onions, small amounts of green beans + broccoli
small amount of spicy shredded carrot salad
lava cake
snack:
bit of pad thai
½ lava cake
30 slices yves vegetarian pepperoni (major protein)
before bed:
oatmeal cookie
my diet varies day-to-day, but it’s generally high-carb, high cal (around 5000 per day, much higher on lifting days), fat’s pretty high, and because calories are so high, protein is probably pretty low as a percentage of total calories (like, under 10% on a lot of days), but I do manage to get well over 1 gram per pound of bodyweight. If it wasn’t obvious, I don’t eat meat, which makes protein a bit tougher, don’t really like eggs, and don’t really like the whey supplements much, though I’ll force them down. I do like the fake meat supplements, tofu, etc. I eat a ton of white carbs/sugar with fat, which I was told was the easiest way to put on fat, and it’s just the easiest way to eat period (cost-wise, taste-wise, etc.)! though my diet certainly isn’t “clean” by any standards, I do cook 99% of what I eat myself (all of the deserts, entrees, breads, toppings, salad dressings, pasta sauces, sometimes the pastas like raviolis – the only things I don’t really make myself are the processed ‘fake meats’, mostly because when I’ve tried to make my own fake meats, the protein content has come out WAY lower, and of course things like ice cream, cheese, etc. I don’t make), so I’m not getting a lot of the processed junk/preservatives/artificial flavors, etc. that comes in packaged foods – tastes better, too! I’m one of the lucky people on saquinavir/ritonavir who doesn’t have elevated triglycerides + bad cholesterol (not sure if being a woman helps, or if it’s just luck, but my MD says not everyone gets it, but that I’m still very lucky not to), so I’m not that worried about the fat/cholesterol content of my diet.
Medical Concerns:
Meds: Fuzeon, Kaletra, Invirase, Trizivir (HIV), Oxycontin 180 mg 2x day, Lyrica 225 mg 2x/day, Synthroid 300 mcg every morning (hashimoto’s thyroiditis), Topamax 200 mg 2x/day, Zofran 8mg 3x/day (sometimes I bite them in half so they’re 4mg); Lomotil every 4-6 hours as needed (not THAT much b/c of the Oxycontin), Cymbalta 30 mg 2x/day, clonazapam 2 mg 3x/day, dextroamphetamine 10 mg every 4 hours as needed (not very often), hydromorphone or Actiq 1600mcg fentanyl lollypops as needed, ketorolac 30 mg injections as needed, Halcion .25 mg as needed for sleep (take 2) – i know i’m forgetting something here, but i think i got the important ones. I can edit later if I remember.
Also: creatine monohydrate 3600 mg/day (1200 mg capsule 3x/day), one-a-day women’s multivitamin, omega-3 fatty acid supplement
Alcohol: never
Cigarettes: approx 2.5 packs/day
So my MD has suggested prescribing me anadrol, but it’s my choice of course. I really feel like he and the other HIV doctors have very little experience with giving this drug to women (and with giving anabolic steroids to women in general). And even though you ladies may not be doctors, and may not know all that much about my medical conditions or meds (or, at least I don’t expect you to; if you did, I would be very impressed!), you actually are women, you actually have built muscle, and judging from what I’ve read already on these boards, at least some of you have personal experience with taking steroids. But even for those of you who have never taken them, I’m not just going to listen to my doctor, who looks like he’s never even seen the inside of gym, without checking first with women who’ve actually been there and know what it takes for women to build muscles.
I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences with anadrol (yours personally or those you’ve seen other women have). I don’t quite understand why anadrol is so preferred – all of the studies I could find on giving anabolics to HIV+ women who were wasting used nandrolone, but apparently (according to my MD), they now prefer to use anadrol. There are no studies comparing the two, or as far as I can tell, any studies done on anadrol at all. Do any of you see any benefits to using anadrol over nandrolone? Or is there some other steroid that is more effective/less virilizing than either of them? I feel like the doctors are making this choice entirely based on one or two anecdotes (a patient here or a patient there might have liked anadrol or not like nandrolone – why aren’t there any freaking studies?). I’m not sure if the doses you guys would use are the same as the “therapeutic dose” that my MD would be giving me. I’ll be seeing him on wed. and I can ask exactly what dose I’d be taking, but I know that in one nandrolone study, the HIV+ women were given 100mg of nandrolone decoanate (IM injections) every other week, if that gives you any idea of what sort of dose I might be getting (of course, my MD might think that that’s too little or too much for me, and that’s not even the one he’s suggesting that I take, but just so you can compare it to the doses that bodybuilders use). The side effect I really would not like to happen to me is body/facial hair. A slightly lower voice I could deal with (my voice is so damn high, if it were lower i’d probably be less annoying to those around me!), sexual enhancement – bring it on!, and as far as menstrual irregularities/infertility go, i’m not really concerned b/c i already have 2 kids and don’t want more, and i haven’t menstruated in at least a few years anyways (docs aren’t sure exactly why: opiates suppress menstruation and i’m on a good dose of oxycontin, but about a quarter of HIV+ women have unexplained amenorrhea and that number shoots up to 40% once their weights drop under 90% - although at that point, it’s just chocked up to ‘low body weight’, so it could really be anything, but i could really care less).
I’m a bit worried because I read somewhere in one of the stickys or the links off of one of them in this forum that anabolic steroids DO cause fat loss. I don’t have the medication-induced lipoatrophy, but because of just regular wasting/weight loss, my face already looks hollowed out (I have very high cheekbones so even a little bit of fat loss in the face looks terrible) – is the fat loss from anabolics likely to be in the face? Or in the chest? It’s weird, but when I lose weight, it seems like it goes so easily from my face and my chest (I used to be a 34-36C, now I’m a 32B, although I’m embarrassed to admit it + will still wear an old 34C bra sometimes even though it’s now huge) but when I gain weight, it doesn’t really come back! And those are the places where I want it most! Is fat loss from anabolics inevitable, or can it be prevented by eating more calories?
How much weight would you expect me to gain of fat and muscle from taking anadrol (or another steroid)? Would you expect it to stay on or fall off immediately after the course? That is, would I be endlessly gaining a few lbs of muscle just to lose and then gain it again on the next course – that wouldn’t be worth it to me. Looking at my exercise + diet, is there something better I should be doing than resorting to steroids?
I’ve been taking synthroid (T4) for autoimmune hypothyroidism for almost a decade, even though I’ve never had overt symptoms of hypothyroidism other than the lab results and depression (which I don’t believe is related) – I know that bodybuilders sometimes take T4 or T3 in order to lose fat. When you stop taking it, do you gain fat? That is, if I stopped taking my T4 and went back into my naturally hypothyroid state (this is against medical advice, but just theoretically), how much fat would you expect me to gain? Do you gain any muscle too?
Do those of you who are bodybuilding eat so clean because it takes really clean food in order to build muscles, or just because you want to stay lean? I’m not really that concerned with staying lean (from an aesthetic standpoint, I’d probably like a couple more lbs of fat on me, as long as they went to the right places) – as long as I’m getting sufficient protein, taking my vitamins + creatine, does it really matter that much for purposes of building muscles if most of my carbs/fats come from less than clean sources?
I would really appreciate any advice that any of you can give me. I know I’ve sort of written a lot here. Also, if any of you ladies happen to be HIV+, i’d be particularly interested in hearing from you in how you’ve managed to build muscle/keep weight on – I understand though if you don’t want to reveal your status in an open forum, but please do contact me through a private message – I won’t reveal your status.
Thanks so much! -Erin
I’m trying very desperately to increase my weight, but particularly my muscle. Due to HIV, I underwent a period of severe wasting (went from being almost 130 lbs to 93 lbs – I may also post something on the HIV and anabolics forum, but as far as I could tell, all of the HIV+ people posting there were men, and from what I’ve heard, they have an easier time gaining muscle than we do and anabolic steroids affect us differently, so I thought I’d ask you ladies for advice first) – my doctors + I have gotten my HIV better managed, and I’ve been able to gain back a large amount of the weight (I’m currently 116lbs), but it came back as all fat, no muscle at all. While, to a certain extent, weight is weight (better to be 116 lbs than 93, even if it is just flab), lean body mass is the best thing to have in order to prevent future wasting/illness. I started lifting weights (not actually for the first time – I lifted as a teenager after my kids were born) and have gotten a lot stronger (for example, i could never do a pullup before in my life and now I can do 5) but not any bigger. I’ve gotten “firmer” (less of the “skinny-fat” thing – I was, like, the ultimate skinny-fat following my muscle wasting + subsequent weight gain), which I’ll take to mean I’ve gained a tiny amount of muscle (really not very much), but I’m lifting weights that are heavy (that is, heavy for me – certainly not for some of you gals, judging by your pictures!), in rep ranges 4-10, and not getting bigger. My doctor has offered to prescribe me anadrol. Here’s info about me and what I’m doing:
Stats: 5’7, 116lbs, BF unknown (only had it tested once + it was 14% [14-point-something – I forget exactly] but this was at a lower weight and before I started lifting). Oh, I’m 26 – if that matters.
Goals: gain muscle! I want to get up to 130-135 lbs and have a significant part of the weight gain be muscle. Or maybe I should say, I’d like to gain at least 15 lbs of muscle and I don’t really care that much if I gain some fat on top of it. Aesthetics aren’t really my number one priority, but still, I don’t really want to be virilized.
Current Training:
For the last couple weeks I’ve been doing legs/back/bis and chest/shoulder/tris – I’ll do l/b/b, day off, c/s/t, day off, and so on. this is mostly b/c I’m short on time – before that I was doing one body part per day and really working it as hard as I could.
Someone recommended to me that I switch to a more basic lifting schedule – 3x/wk basic full-body workout, only do 1 set each exercise (!) of squat, deadlift, chest press, military press, bent over rows, pull-ups (you get the point – large, compound lifts; no bicep curls!) b/c right now I’m getting very fatigued between sets + seem to have to wait several minutes between one set and the next to not still be feeling the failure from the last set (if I only wait a minute or two, either I have to drop the weight, or I can only get off a couple reps). Also, during my workouts I get famished – eating up to 3000-3500 cals during a workout only lasting a couple hours (they’re long b/c I take longer breaks b/w sets), which made someone suggest that I might be pushing my body into a catabolic state unintentionally – does this make sense to you guys? It really is the only time I’m hungry. All other times of day, I have to force feed (cachexia).
cardio = 40 minutes/week (one 15-minute session, one 25-minute session, both on the stairstepper, alternating between a high level and a lower level – probably not quite HIIT but something kind of like it, I’ve made real gains here in my aerobic capacity which is my only real goal. I do it on the stairstepper b/c of all the cardio, it seems to be the best for building up the leg muscles).
Current Meal Plan (Note: on lifting days i’ll sometimes eat about 1500 cals more because I get famished during my workout but later won’t force myself to eat as much b/c I figure ‘I already ate so much!’ – it’s basically the same type of food though). Here’s a sample, non-lifting, day:
Breakfast:
3 russian pancakes + raspberry topping
deep fried potatoes + onions, ketchup + ranch dressing
2 or 3 bites of scrambled eggs (don’t like most eggs, but make them for my kids, eat what I can)
snack:
rest of potatoes + onions, ketchup
oatmeal cookie
lunch:
raviolis in vodka sauce
12 vegetarian meatballs (lots of soy protein)
oatmeal cookie
snack:
breyers natural vanilla ice cream w/ 3 scoops whey protein powder (nasty, but only way to get that protein)
dinner:
pad thai with wheat gluten, tofu, potatoes, onions, small amounts of green beans + broccoli
small amount of spicy shredded carrot salad
lava cake
snack:
bit of pad thai
½ lava cake
30 slices yves vegetarian pepperoni (major protein)
before bed:
oatmeal cookie
my diet varies day-to-day, but it’s generally high-carb, high cal (around 5000 per day, much higher on lifting days), fat’s pretty high, and because calories are so high, protein is probably pretty low as a percentage of total calories (like, under 10% on a lot of days), but I do manage to get well over 1 gram per pound of bodyweight. If it wasn’t obvious, I don’t eat meat, which makes protein a bit tougher, don’t really like eggs, and don’t really like the whey supplements much, though I’ll force them down. I do like the fake meat supplements, tofu, etc. I eat a ton of white carbs/sugar with fat, which I was told was the easiest way to put on fat, and it’s just the easiest way to eat period (cost-wise, taste-wise, etc.)! though my diet certainly isn’t “clean” by any standards, I do cook 99% of what I eat myself (all of the deserts, entrees, breads, toppings, salad dressings, pasta sauces, sometimes the pastas like raviolis – the only things I don’t really make myself are the processed ‘fake meats’, mostly because when I’ve tried to make my own fake meats, the protein content has come out WAY lower, and of course things like ice cream, cheese, etc. I don’t make), so I’m not getting a lot of the processed junk/preservatives/artificial flavors, etc. that comes in packaged foods – tastes better, too! I’m one of the lucky people on saquinavir/ritonavir who doesn’t have elevated triglycerides + bad cholesterol (not sure if being a woman helps, or if it’s just luck, but my MD says not everyone gets it, but that I’m still very lucky not to), so I’m not that worried about the fat/cholesterol content of my diet.
Medical Concerns:
Meds: Fuzeon, Kaletra, Invirase, Trizivir (HIV), Oxycontin 180 mg 2x day, Lyrica 225 mg 2x/day, Synthroid 300 mcg every morning (hashimoto’s thyroiditis), Topamax 200 mg 2x/day, Zofran 8mg 3x/day (sometimes I bite them in half so they’re 4mg); Lomotil every 4-6 hours as needed (not THAT much b/c of the Oxycontin), Cymbalta 30 mg 2x/day, clonazapam 2 mg 3x/day, dextroamphetamine 10 mg every 4 hours as needed (not very often), hydromorphone or Actiq 1600mcg fentanyl lollypops as needed, ketorolac 30 mg injections as needed, Halcion .25 mg as needed for sleep (take 2) – i know i’m forgetting something here, but i think i got the important ones. I can edit later if I remember.
Also: creatine monohydrate 3600 mg/day (1200 mg capsule 3x/day), one-a-day women’s multivitamin, omega-3 fatty acid supplement
Alcohol: never
Cigarettes: approx 2.5 packs/day
So my MD has suggested prescribing me anadrol, but it’s my choice of course. I really feel like he and the other HIV doctors have very little experience with giving this drug to women (and with giving anabolic steroids to women in general). And even though you ladies may not be doctors, and may not know all that much about my medical conditions or meds (or, at least I don’t expect you to; if you did, I would be very impressed!), you actually are women, you actually have built muscle, and judging from what I’ve read already on these boards, at least some of you have personal experience with taking steroids. But even for those of you who have never taken them, I’m not just going to listen to my doctor, who looks like he’s never even seen the inside of gym, without checking first with women who’ve actually been there and know what it takes for women to build muscles.
I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences with anadrol (yours personally or those you’ve seen other women have). I don’t quite understand why anadrol is so preferred – all of the studies I could find on giving anabolics to HIV+ women who were wasting used nandrolone, but apparently (according to my MD), they now prefer to use anadrol. There are no studies comparing the two, or as far as I can tell, any studies done on anadrol at all. Do any of you see any benefits to using anadrol over nandrolone? Or is there some other steroid that is more effective/less virilizing than either of them? I feel like the doctors are making this choice entirely based on one or two anecdotes (a patient here or a patient there might have liked anadrol or not like nandrolone – why aren’t there any freaking studies?). I’m not sure if the doses you guys would use are the same as the “therapeutic dose” that my MD would be giving me. I’ll be seeing him on wed. and I can ask exactly what dose I’d be taking, but I know that in one nandrolone study, the HIV+ women were given 100mg of nandrolone decoanate (IM injections) every other week, if that gives you any idea of what sort of dose I might be getting (of course, my MD might think that that’s too little or too much for me, and that’s not even the one he’s suggesting that I take, but just so you can compare it to the doses that bodybuilders use). The side effect I really would not like to happen to me is body/facial hair. A slightly lower voice I could deal with (my voice is so damn high, if it were lower i’d probably be less annoying to those around me!), sexual enhancement – bring it on!, and as far as menstrual irregularities/infertility go, i’m not really concerned b/c i already have 2 kids and don’t want more, and i haven’t menstruated in at least a few years anyways (docs aren’t sure exactly why: opiates suppress menstruation and i’m on a good dose of oxycontin, but about a quarter of HIV+ women have unexplained amenorrhea and that number shoots up to 40% once their weights drop under 90% - although at that point, it’s just chocked up to ‘low body weight’, so it could really be anything, but i could really care less).
I’m a bit worried because I read somewhere in one of the stickys or the links off of one of them in this forum that anabolic steroids DO cause fat loss. I don’t have the medication-induced lipoatrophy, but because of just regular wasting/weight loss, my face already looks hollowed out (I have very high cheekbones so even a little bit of fat loss in the face looks terrible) – is the fat loss from anabolics likely to be in the face? Or in the chest? It’s weird, but when I lose weight, it seems like it goes so easily from my face and my chest (I used to be a 34-36C, now I’m a 32B, although I’m embarrassed to admit it + will still wear an old 34C bra sometimes even though it’s now huge) but when I gain weight, it doesn’t really come back! And those are the places where I want it most! Is fat loss from anabolics inevitable, or can it be prevented by eating more calories?
How much weight would you expect me to gain of fat and muscle from taking anadrol (or another steroid)? Would you expect it to stay on or fall off immediately after the course? That is, would I be endlessly gaining a few lbs of muscle just to lose and then gain it again on the next course – that wouldn’t be worth it to me. Looking at my exercise + diet, is there something better I should be doing than resorting to steroids?
I’ve been taking synthroid (T4) for autoimmune hypothyroidism for almost a decade, even though I’ve never had overt symptoms of hypothyroidism other than the lab results and depression (which I don’t believe is related) – I know that bodybuilders sometimes take T4 or T3 in order to lose fat. When you stop taking it, do you gain fat? That is, if I stopped taking my T4 and went back into my naturally hypothyroid state (this is against medical advice, but just theoretically), how much fat would you expect me to gain? Do you gain any muscle too?
Do those of you who are bodybuilding eat so clean because it takes really clean food in order to build muscles, or just because you want to stay lean? I’m not really that concerned with staying lean (from an aesthetic standpoint, I’d probably like a couple more lbs of fat on me, as long as they went to the right places) – as long as I’m getting sufficient protein, taking my vitamins + creatine, does it really matter that much for purposes of building muscles if most of my carbs/fats come from less than clean sources?
I would really appreciate any advice that any of you can give me. I know I’ve sort of written a lot here. Also, if any of you ladies happen to be HIV+, i’d be particularly interested in hearing from you in how you’ve managed to build muscle/keep weight on – I understand though if you don’t want to reveal your status in an open forum, but please do contact me through a private message – I won’t reveal your status.
Thanks so much! -Erin
