Valdir Segato, a Brazilian bodybuilder in his early 50s, has been injecting an oil-based substance into his upper body muscles for year. Despite looking like someone took an air pump and inflated his arms and chest like balloons, he continues to use the appearance-enhancing substance regularly.
As a teenager, Valdir became addicted to drugs and lost so much weight that his friends started calling him ‘Skinny Dog’. He managed to turn his life around though, and started going to the gym every day. Still, he wasn’t satisfied with the results his hard work lifting weights yielded, so when someone introduced him to the popular muscle-enhancement substance synthol, he became hooked on it. The Sao Paolo-based construction worker has been regularly injecting synthol into his biceps and pectoral muscles for years, and despite being warned that he risked having his limbs amputated if he continued to use the substance, he hasn’t been able to stop.
