Red Bull gives you wings! and a gut

I knew a guy that was a powerlifter. He was also in his 50's and was one of the most ripped dudes at the gym. He turned me on to a caffeine supplement that I ended up giving back to him because while it did indeed do what it said it would do on the container, which was get you amped for lifting, it also made me feel nauseous and jittery instead of simply motivated.

Turns out that this guy used that stuff in a double dose and also mixed it with 2 Red Bulls instead of water like you are supposed to. It already had sugar in it so I didn't understand the point.

I had my suspicions that my friend at the gym was juicing as well because he has that Mr Olympia type look about him that so very few gym regulars can possibly achieve but here is one thing where my friend wasn't nailing it and that was with his tummy.

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Now I used to pick on Peter (might as well use his name, i'm not going to include any images) but I wouldn't recommend that anyone else do so since he is around 260 lbs of near solid muscle but even he knew exactly why his stomach was the only part of his body that he couldn't or didn't turn into a pure power. It was because he drank Red Bull (or something similar) pretty much around the clock.

I don't think you need to be a nutritionist when you drink a Red Bull to realize that not only does it, and other energy drinks give you a shit ton of energy, but it also packs a ton of sugar or if you are in the United States, the dreaded high fructose corn syrup.

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This is basically the same amount of carbs that is in Coca-Cola. When I asked Peter if he would consider drinking 12 Cokes a day he laughed and said "absolutely not because there's so much sugar in it" and then he seemed perplexed when I confronted him with the fact that Red Bull is essentially the same thing. He explained it away about it giving him energy for the gym but since this guy's diet was otherwise extremely controlled, it was really his only vice and it showed in his mid-section too.

Also, when looking at the above nutritional information you need to keep in mind that this is for one of the small cans. The larger ones, such as the Monster Energy Drinks are considerably larger so you are probably consuming around 60g of carbs per bottle. I noticed the other day that Monster is a major sponsor of UFC and of course Red Bull sponsors all sorts of extreme sports. I can all but assure you that the actual participants in these sports probably don't ever consume Red Bull or Monster Drinks.

There are a lot of other reasons to not drink energy drinks either such as the mystery chemicals that give you a lot of unnatural energy. For me, it is always amazing that how magically not tired I will feel after drinking one of these and it has to be more than just the caffeine because i have a large coffee every morning and honestly, don't feel as though it affects me very much.

Basically there is nothing different about Red Bull than there is Coca-Cola, in fact, it is probably worse for you as it has even more sugar and some other bad stuff in there that your body can become addicted to and it's probably better if you just never drink this stuff.

It kind of works out for Peter, but if he stopped using he could probably get some abs, which is all his repertoire is really missing at this point.

I don't drink my calories unless they have booze in them, but that's just me.

_{from college athlete, to fat ass, and back - I drank beer the entire time}