I took steroids for a decade — it had a very unwelcome effect on my nipples

Christian Bueno built his career by pushing his body past its limits — and for a while, it paid off.

A lifelong fitness fanatic and personal trainer, the 33-year-old once looked like “Wolverine,” winning bodybuilding competitions and landing brand deals thanks to his chiseled physique.

But after nearly a decade of heavy anabolic steroid use, “I wasn’t even able to take my shirt off because I literally felt like a dog who just had six puppies,” Bueno told The Post.

The culprit: gynecomastia, or the overdevelopment of male breast tissue, usually around the nipple. Among athletes, one of the most common triggers is illicit steroid use, often taken as a shortcut to bigger muscles.

Repeated cycles of the drugs throw the body’s hormones out of balance, causing glandular growth in the chest. Unlike fat, which can shrink with diet and exercise, this tissue usually sticks around — even after steroid use stops.

“When I dropped my body fat, it looked worse, because my nipples got bigger,” Bueno recalled. “It didn’t matter that I had a great body, I wasn’t confident in myself.”

After months of trying lifestyle fixes, the Queens resident went under the knife in December 2023 for a male breast reduction, a procedure that’s surged in popularity in recent years.

“Since 2020, I’ve definitely seen a steep increase in men doing consultations and going forward with gynecomastia surgery,” said Dr. Claudia Kim, chief medical officer and lead cosmetic surgeon at New Look New Life in Manhattan.

The procedure is now the most popular plastic surgery among US men, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The group reported 26,430 male breast reductions in 2024, up from 20,955 in 2019.

“I was so grateful to be in my body again, seeing and accepting myself,” Bueno said, reflecting on the first days after his surgery. “It felt like a new beginning.”

Young, stupid and strong

Bueno started bodybuilding at 20. He threw himself into a strict high-protein diet and a punishing training regimen and took gold in just his second competition.

That night, some coaches and veteran competitors told him that if he wanted to keep rising in the sport, he would need to think big — and the fastest way to do that was with steroids.

Essentially a manufactured version of testosterone, these drugs have legitimate medical purposes but are often misused as performance enhancers, quickly boosting lean muscle when paired with weight training.

“I didn’t know much about it,” Bueno said. “But these people looked like they knew what they were doing, so I followed their instructions.”

He was given steroids for free and quickly started bulking up. New clients for his personal training business poured in, he kept winning competitions and his reputation in the bodybuilding world grew.

“At first, it was easy. I was young, I was stupid and it wasn’t taxing my body,” Bueno said. “But you never see the bad side of something in the beginning.”

Cycling into trouble

Like many in the sport, Bueno was “cycling” his steroids — taking the drugs for six to 12 weeks, then going through a “cleansing” phase with other medications in an attempt to help the body restore natural testosterone production and avoid side effects.

But it was a challenge.

“Testosterone makes you feel powerful, more like a man,” Bueno said. “But when you shut down the cycle and you let the body reset itself, you don’t feel good. You feel unmotivated.”

After two years, he began skipping the cleansing phase whenever he knew he’d be on vacation or at the beach.

“When I stopped, I had to lose my size and come back to it again, and I didn’t want to do that,” he said.

Suddenly, his body, flush with steroids, felt “superhuman,” and the breaks between cleansing kept getting longer.

In 2020, eight years after his first steroid use, he got his pro card. At the time, Bueno was spending $2,000 a month on steroids, mostly sourced through the bodybuilding world, brand deals and the black market.

Their quality and side effects varied. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he developed acne and hair loss — problems he shrugged off.

But soon, he noticed his chest had become sensitive, his nipples itching.

“One day, I saw that my nipple was bigger than normal,” Bueno said, noting that his areola appeared “puffy,” a classic sign of gynecomastia.

Over time, the consequences of his long-term steroid use piled up.

“All of my hormones and my system shut down. I had no motivation, depression, anxiety,” Bueno said. “My nipples got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

An elbow injury forced him to stop training, but he still clung to steroids.

“It was the only thing that was giving me the sexual potential to live with my ex-wife,” Bueno said. “I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t want to clean, but I also didn’t want these problems.”

Facing the fallout

Finally, he decided to cleanse his body, but pandemic restrictions cut off access to the medications he usually relied on to restart natural testosterone.

Eventually, he stopped everything completely, trying to do it on his own.

“Every day was a challenge. It was easy to find the steroids, but not the cleaning stuff, so I was always thinking about jumping back in,” he said. “I didn’t like how I looked. I didn’t like how I felt.”

At a doctor’s visit, he learned that nearly all his natural testosterone production had shut down, his levels “like an 80-year-old man’s.”

It took two years for them to normalize, during which he trained regularly and took supplements like creatine and maca root to help coax his body back into production.

“I felt back to my sexual potential, the hair loss stopped and my skin was amazing again,” he said. “But the problem with my nipples was still there.”

Bueno tried everything — massages, strict dieting, even targeted fat-burning procedures — but nothing worked on his chest.

Eventually, he turned to Kim, who performed a glandular excision, carefully removing the firm lumps of tissue behind his nipples through small incisions around his areola’s.

“She gave me the option of doing general or local anesthesia, but in my case, I wanted to feel my mistakes. To learn what I did to my body,” Bueno said, noting he stayed awake during the procedure.

“Right away you could tell the difference,” he said. “The happiness of feeling comfortable in myself — being in a tight T-shirt — was great.”

Bueno, still a personal trainer, no longer uses steroids, having learned his lesson the first time around.

“You have to understand that when you do stuff like this to yourself, you are going to suffer some consequences,” he said. “It’s about what you learn from them.”

But Kim said that’s not always the case for gynecomastia patients like Bueno.

“I always tell them, if they’re going to continue to use these anabolic steroids, it can come back,” she said

While most promise they won’t touch the stuff again, “without fail, a small percentage of them come back a few years later and say they need to get it taken out again,” Kim said. “They get an earful from me at that point.”