AS STRANGE AS IT SOUNDS, Diego Mercado’s journey toward a crisis began at a movie theater in the Bronx when he was 16 years old. Mercado was sitting in a multiplex when he saw a dude rip off his shirt in a Twilight movie. “Like, you see that awesome aesthetic body. Like, oh man, I want that.” Right there, he decided that he had to build a six-pack, too. He wanted to have a body that everyone knew was in great shape.
So the sophomore hit the weights. At first, he worked out at Planet Fitness. But as he got more serious, he sought out a more serious gym. Star Fitness in the Bronx was hardcore—full of competitive powerlifters, bodybuilders, and other guys who made strength training part of their identity. He was reading every PubMed study on testosterone and anabolic protocols when he should have been attentive in his high school classes. Mercado immersed himself in gym culture—feeling passion and peer pressure to look the part. He was way bigger and stronger and fitter looking than he had been before, but he noticed that some of his friends who didn’t seem as committed as he was were making faster progress. He desperately wanted to make greater gains.
After learning he had low testosterone levels, Mercado wound up taking a stack of anabolic compounds without medical supervision. He became obsessive about training and dieting. Mercado was crushing two or even three sessions at the gym daily. To micromanage his food intake, he was toting a scale to the Mexican and Cuban restaurants where he worked as a server and bartender. He also was camping out on Instagram—exuberantly sharing his quest for muscularity and mainlining the fitness content of other ripped guys. His Instagram account, which he’d later scrub, was packed with images that showed his arms stretching the limits of his T-shirts and his big-screen-worthy abs.
“It felt like going from Clark Kent to Superman,” Mercado says. When he was at the gym, he suddenly felt like he was always his best self; his confidence and energy levels skyrocketed; the compliments from those around him poured in. He scuttled plans to become an engineer and focused on fitness. “I became so obsessed. It took over my life without me noticing it. I literally became a different person.”
But in July 2019, that person wound up having the scare of his life. He was out late at a club on a Saturday night with restaurant friends when he started to feel unnaturally hot. Though he’d felt hot from the steroids before, it was nothing like this. He went home and crashed but woke
