Unseen

by Reggie Yates

  When Rodrigo welcomed me at the door, his arms were open and his face was bright. He was warm, friendly and polite. Every bit the coiffured gentleman, Rodrigo was by all accounts lovely. What was hard to ignore was the obvious surgery he wore with pride. He had that Hollywood face thing you’d usually associate with rich older women who have spent a fortune on their cheekbones and handbag dog.

  His work was very specific in its ambition to be noticed. He had surgery that looked like surgery and it didn’t stop at his face.

  Rodrigo slipped into a nearly there silk robe for an in-room massage and I didn’t know where to look. He’d had the same abdominal etching surgery as Lee and his chest area looked as if it had been carved in marble. I was so glad I hadn’t met Rodrigo with Lee as his work didn’t stop at his abs. His open silk robe placed his sculpted silicone pectorals front and centre.

  Wearing a body men fight to achieve, Rodrigo saw himself as reinvented through plastic surgery. With silicone fillers in his biceps, triceps and shoulders he looked broad and pumped. He talked me through the lypo he’d had in his back and waist as well as countless other procedures, amounting to a grand total of £210,000.

  Where the budget to actualise his physical goals actually came from was never explained and I’m annoyed to this day that I never asked. As a card-carrying cheapo, whenever I hear talk of large sums of money spent on things that bear no fruit nor return, I struggle not to turn my nose up. Desperately trying to bite my tongue, his reasoning shut me up. This was more about acceptance than attention.

  Convinced of a version of the world I’d never experienced, Rodrigo believed who he was simply wasn’t good enough and attaining beauty was his way out. ‘Some people are born blessed with natural beauty, I wasn’t. I wasn’t born this way, I made myself this way in order to be accepted by society.’

  Rodrigo was adamant the surgery was right for him; even the life-threatening infection he’d battled in a botched arm filler operation hadn’t stopped him from going under the knife again. As soon as he pulled out the photo album, pictures of his former self were exactly that. A different person entirely and one he referred to as someone else. Describing his pre-operation self as ‘this guy’, Rodrigo pointed out flaws I couldn’t see. Who he was simply wasn’t good enough, and diet and exercise apparently wouldn’t have been enough to amend the imperfections he took issue with.

  At this point I was a month into my six-week challenge and my friends were well on their way to better bodies. I was happy with my progress but couldn’t help but go harder in an effort not to be the lazy one with the worst results come reveal day. With Rodrigo still fresh in my mind, the idea of finding a quick fix still felt wrong but much more understandable. I’d never had his level of dissatisfaction with my appearance, but as things started to change for the better during the six-week push, finding a way to speed things up crossed my mind, even if I knew it was a cop-out.

  My routine had changed, my diet had changed, my wardrobe had way more spandex than I’d ever owned. Okay, maybe spandex is a slight exaggeration but I was suddenly wearing tight T-shirts, shorts and man tights to work out. I’d become that gym guy you see with headphones on silently blasting through a workout. I found myself sitting up for hours online trawling the net for tips on diet or new workouts to try in my next session.

  At this point I found comfort in knowing I wasn’t getting surgery any time soon, but had my intensity stepped up for the right reasons?

  Catching myself checking my reflection for that little bit too long after a workout one morning, I knew something had changed. I was focused on tiny details I wanted to tweak. My mate Manny was suddenly lifting heavier than I could and I was trying to catch up. What the fuck was going on? Was this about feeling better or had it become about looking better than the next guy? That fine line between controlling the results and the results controlling me had begun to blur and I couldn’t believe what was happening. I was hardly Mr Muscle by any means, but I had definitely improved and was visibly in better shape. But how far would this go?

  Thirty? I’d be lucky to get there

  I went back to Wales to meet up with Kyle for a second time. The last time we had trained together, he admitted he was striving for perfection. A couple of weeks had passed and being that bit further into my own transition, I’d started to see how I could snowball into Kyle’s continued pursuit for faultlessness.

  As before, Kyle wrapped himself in cling film before his workout. Only this time, he wasn’t planning to lift in the gym; he was headed to the sauna. The eighty-two-degree heated room offered Kyle the chance to burn even more calories as he curled dumbbells.

  This wasn’t fitness, this was punishment. My concern was that his body wouldn’t be able to endure this level of abuse forever. At twenty-four years old, like Kyle I’d felt invincible. Now, being that bit older and seeing things start to slow down, I questioned his thought process. I asked, ‘What’s your body going to be like at thirty?’ he replied, ‘Thirty? I’d be lucky to get there.’

  Kyle was aware of what he could be doing to his health but accepted it as the small print in his quest for the perfect body. This was a workout I couldn’t join as I was deflated and upset at what he’d become.

  Body dysmorphia is unfortunately commonly associated with younger women. Even with my limited knowledge of the condition, this felt like everything I knew it to be. Kyle was addicted to the results of training and I couldn’t see much difference between his addiction and that of someone bound to a class-A drug. He knew what he was doing was bad but he wouldn’t stop even if it killed him.

  When Kyle returned from his heated weight lifting, he knew I wasn’t impressed and explained his hunger for tougher physical challenges as being down to pressure. Kyle believed his appearance made him a different person. He saw his fitness as being a large part of his popularity. Apparently, his abs gave him friends.

  That night I was invited to meet him at his second job. As I had no idea what he did outside of the gym and building site, I was intrigued. Arriving at a bar I thought I was going to see Kyle pulling pints.

  Once I’d made it past the burly bouncer and crossed the sticky dance floor, I was directed upstairs to see him at work. Passing loud and rowdy packs of women on the staircase I should have known what I was walking into. It was only when I turned the corner into the bar’s entertainment space dominated by cackling hen parties and flashing lights that I got it.

  A lady in a shiny bodycon dress and sparkly heels purred into the mic with a broad Swansea accent. Camera phones flashed and women cheered as she introduced ‘The one, the only … Cowboy!’ and on walked Kyle.

  Plaid shirt, jeans, boots and, of course, a massive cowboy hat adorned Kyle as he strutted out to huge screams. Sliding and grinding about the stage, Kyle shed items of clothing to the beat with a huge grin. Pulling an excitable woman from the front row, he sat her on a chair and gyrated on top of her while removing his shirt. Kyle’s evening job was stripping and he clearly loved it.

  Taking a deep breath, I slipped out and cornered a few women in the stairwell to try and understand what it was about the stripper physique that they loved so much. The common theme was that the half-naked dancing boys fulfilled a fantasy. But the three women I spoke to who’d dated men with bodies just like the oiled-up ones on stage said they wouldn’t do it again. All three – now single women – saw their muscle-bound ex partners as too high maintenance. ‘You can’t be more interested in yourself than your partner.’

  Kyle’s big finish was to strip down to his man thong, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The pouch bit that cradles the man bits (I don’t bloody know the correct terminology, I’ve never bloody bought one!) was a small turkey complete with wings and a yellow beak. Popping his rear end to make the Turkey wings flap was possibly the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Horror show over and the flappy turkey image forever burnt into my mind, we grabbed a drink and had a chat on the side of the
stage. Kyle admitted that none of what I had just watched was for the women in the audience, it was more about him feeling more confident in himself. The attention he wanted wasn’t from the women that were queuing up to lick whipped cream off his hairless chest; it was more about impressing his fellow stripper mates. Apparently, the men who gave Kyle praise for his body were more of a motivator than the women who wanted to touch it. Kyle was taking his clothes off for a room full of people he didn’t even think about.

  The more time I spent with Kyle the more his unhealthy obsession worried me that I wasn’t getting the full story. He didn’t come across as someone who would go under the knife to achieve the results he desired, but I’d seen him employ a dangerous technique that he saw as a short cut. How far would he go?

  As a kid, the only guys I knew that went to the gym were the beefhead doormen who drank down the pub with my uncle George, or wannabe tough guys on my estate. Muscles generally meant meathead, as at that time it was the Hulk Hogans of this world who were bronzed and buff.

  Things have definitely changed. The gym isn’t a boys’ club anymore and the spit and sawdust style muscle factories are few and far between. As well as working out being associated with a particular sort of man, the bigger you are, the more it’s understood that steroids are a necessary evil. Anabolic steroids are a synthetic form of testosterone taken to increase stamina and improve muscle growth. Legal for personal use whether injected or taken as tablets, their popularity was far greater than I’d assumed.

  I visited Turning Point, a central London charity offering clean needle exchange mainly for heroin and crack users. But three years ago, they added a drop-in for steroid users too. Shown around by team leader Roy, he talked about the huge change in who was coming through the door.

  The steroid drop-in had gone from predominantly men in their late thirties who’d been training for decades, to young men in their early twenties. Most disturbingly, some of those young men weren’t even gym users, these were naïve guys chasing the physical results associated with injecting.

  At the time of filming, estimates put the number of steroid users in the UK at around half a million, and Roy was candid in his explanation of what he dealt with daily. He reckoned that only 10 per cent of users he helped were people who knew how to inject properly. The rest wouldn’t even know what to do with the needles they’d receive. Some would inject the parts of their bodies they wanted to grow bigger thinking local administration worked.

  With continued abuse, steroids put users on a hormonal rollercoaster causing testicles to shrink. With the wrong combination of chemicals, a user’s sex drive could be obliterated entirely.

  It’s always been a women’s problem

  Travelling north, I visited a gym in Huddersfield with a reputation for its hardcore clientele. This was every bit the grunt-filled machismo pit you’re thinking of. Bellows of a personal best being broken were matched by the sound of metal smashing against metal. This was a real gym for real men and I regretted my choice to wear a pink Acne topcoat the minute I walked in.

  The changing room was cold, dirty and basic. It didn’t have a sauna, Jacuzzi or any of the additionals I was used to at my local, but it did have needle bins. A sign on the wall indicated a zero-tolerance policy for usage, but the contradictory bins indicated the owners knew they couldn’t stop what clearly appeared to be the inevitable.

  I walked into the gym itself to meet Dave or, as he’s known by his friends, the Freak. On his back, Dave was lifting with his legs while cradling his bald head in his hands. Bright red and shaking, he was pushing his body to the limit and, after noticing his arms, I was glad he wasn’t pushing me.

  I shit you not when I say the man had arms the size of my head. They looked like lion legs and even his little muscles had muscles of their own. As he squeezed out his last rep, a blood vessel on the top of his head burst and blood made its way across his scalp. I didn’t know what to do so, as usual, I did what I always do when I’m nervous. I talked to the guy.

  Nonchalantly wiping the blood away, Dave fobbed the bleeding off as being a blood pressure thing. It had happened before and wasn’t even a concern. From the age of nineteen, Dave had spent his life in the gym. Now in his mid-forties, his only break had been a twelve-year hiatus due to an injury.

  What Dave referred to as an ‘injury’ sounded to me like a reason to never return to a gym ever. Dave was forced to take a twelve-year break from working out as he tore his right pectoral muscle clean off.

  Formally a champion body builder, Dave used steroids regularly and is now a counsellor teaching younger athletes about their safety. Referring to himself as pro education rather than pro use, Dave believes they’re not the demon they’re made out to be. He saw social media as the main culprit for the rise in usage among younger guys. ‘Men have never had to deal with image issues, it’s always been a women’s problem.’

  Dave introduced me to Craig who’d started training at nine years old. Lifting weights as a child, Craig developed a need for better results in his teens. Joining the army at nineteen and up to his eyeballs in testosterone, Craig started using steroids. With the dangerous mix of natural teenage hormones, adrenaline and aggression as a result of the job and steroids, Craig blew his top and ended up spending twelve months behind bars for fighting.

  With everything he’d experienced, Craig still used and he put it down to the addictive nature of the results. Pulling out his smartphone, Dave showed me just how easy it was to buy steroids online. Within seconds he had hundreds of sites to choose from and without any real effort found boxes of the stuff for sale at a price cheaper than protein powder from your average high-street chain.

  Steroids had always been taboo in my eyes as a teenager, but that would have been smashed had I been living my teenage years now. The information and access available now makes it almost too easy to buckle under the pressure to use.

  While steroids are legal to possess for personal use, it’s illegal to sell or supply to users. So how are there so many sites selling online? When I meet people who are operating outside of the law producing an illegal substance, I’ve always wondered just how much they care about the quality of product and more importantly the user.

  At the time of filming, three illegal labs had been shut down that year alone. If caught, the self-styled chemists can get up to fourteen years in prison. I visited one such ‘lab’ that was actually a suburban garage set up to look like a high-school chemistry lab.

  The baseball caps and tracksuits confirmed my suspicion that the ‘chemists’ responsible for the product were kids. The ease of production was mindblowing. This group of young men who clearly had no qualifications to produce this level of chemical for public consumption was turning out batches by the boatload. With a customer base of over 50,000, this group of wannabe Walter Whites were making a lot of money mixing chemicals in a garage. With the negatives to steroid use so public, this group of chemists saw themselves as only responsible for producing a safe product. What the users do with it, they believed, was up to them.

  So where did this leave the vulnerable or easily influenced young men who just wanted results? If the makers weren’t responsible, how long would it be before someone as obsessed as Kyle started using? I decided to meet up with Kyle one last time as his desperation to be better felt as though it could only really lead him in one direction.

  After watching him work out in the most unbelievable ways, I knew I had to be upfront about my worries and, surprisingly, Kyle was honest with me. He admitted to injecting in the past. I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was. What was worse was that he was currently using a course of steroids in tablet form. His reasoning was the tablets would help him strip fat and excess water. I had to ask what the pills were actually for and as soon as he answered I could see a flash in his eyes that even he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.

  Kyle claimed to be using a type of tablet intended for asthmatics that in some cases would be used for livestock. Kyle
had the pills in his bag and I asked him to show me the packet. The pills he’d bought were covered in Chinese lettering and nothing on the packet was English. With no idea of recommended dosage or an expiry date, he had literally no idea what he was putting in his body.

  The perfect mix of annoyed and frustrated, I had no right to tell this grown man what to do but I desperately wanted to scream in his face ‘WAKE UP’. After an uncomfortable silence, he managed to drag me from my funk with an announcement I never saw coming.

  Kyle told me to keep the pills as he’d decided he wouldn’t use them anymore. Having had family berate him for years about, in his words, his obsessive behaviour, my questioning of him as an outsider made him think twice about what he’d been doing with his life. He’d decided after our clash at the sauna to change and not a moment too soon.

  There are more and more people pushing for perfection but the problem I have is the reasoning. I started working out wanting to feel better, but as my six-week challenge came to a close I also wanted to look better just as much, if not more. My biggest fear now was losing track of my relationship with fitness, allowing it to ironically become something unhealthy. I didn’t want to stop exercising or eating well as what I was drawn to was the change in lifestyle and, as a result, the endless list of positives that came from that.

  I only really discovered and fell in love with the gym in my thirties, and given what I’d been exposed to and experienced in the making of Dying for a Six Pack I’m relieved it didn’t happen fifteen years earlier. Who knows what I might have done.

  CHAPTER 4

  A SLUM FOR SOME

  In July 2016, critic Anna Leszkiewicz wrote a piece in the New Statesman with the headline ‘Does Reggie Yates have the weirdest career in television?’ Thankfully, the thoughtful piece was generous in its praise, charting the broad spectrum of work in my career culminating in my most recent documentaries.