The Story So Far...

August the third, 1973, and in Treliske Hospital, Truro, a little squealing was born. My parents christened that blob of wriggly flesh Helen Epiphany Drabing and the rest is history.

Drabing? No, before you ask, I�m not related to German bodybuilder Beate Drabing; the name is a bit more common than that. My family is Cornish on one side, German on the other, though we renamed ourselves Drake (to avoid complicated anti-German feeling) between 1915 and 1973 � they reclaimed the name when I was born.

I grew up in rural Cornwall, not a huge amount of money but lots of space, which is how come I am a keen cyclist, swimmer, climber, off-road runner, and have a passion for wild countryside.

When I was fourteen, my mother was killed in a car accident. Drunk driver, late at night, stupid waste. It affected me rather badly, and I spent my teens pretty low. I stopped eating for a while, got dangerously thin, and was ultimately diagnosed anorexic.

At my lowest, I weighed only 84 pounds.

Eventually I met Paul. Paul was a boy with a thing for skinny girls, which is quirky but quite a boost when you�re doing the whole low self-image trip. He was a bit of a gymrat, and liked to show off and play strong. Boys are so unoriginal.

One day he dragged me along to the gym with him. He wanted to show off, so he got me to curl with, if I remember right, a five pound dumbbell.

When there�s nothing to you, that is a lot of weight to curl. When you have a bicep as thin as a bootlace, it gets pumped real easy.

I loved it. The feeling was so weird, so uncomfortable and yet so intensely physical, that I was hooked instantly. I was still pretty sick, mind you, but we spent all that summer in the gym, and I learned the basics while rediscovering my self-confidence. I started eating again, and when the weather got too bad for us to take the bus into town for the gym, my father dragged his old weights kit out of the attic and set up a makeshift home gym in the garage.

As I started to gain, I became hooked not only on the sensuality of the exercise itself, but also on the feeling of control I was having over my body. I could choose to work such-and-such a part and it responded, changed as I wanted it to. It�s called body-sculpting now, but discovering it myself was such a rush.

Paul stayed with me until I hit 115 pounds, and then he decided I was just a bit too meaty for him. He still liked them skinny, which annoyed the hell out of me at the time, but I found that after he had left, there was no shortage of guys queuing up to date the buff girl with the (by now locally famous) sixpack tummy.

The abs just happened. We have genes for abs, it seems, in my family. I train them obsessively to develop the potential to its freaky max.

By this time I was getting quite into the idea of going for some serious mass. I guess I find the strength and independence, the control, the sensuality of the whole thing intoxicating. My father helped again (he was a bit of a strongman in his youth) and I have been lifting heavy for the last six years. Some time in that, I went to University, and entered a couple of amateur bodybuilding competitions, did a Masters degree in Bristol and took up Shorinji Kempo.

It became clear that I wanted to go for heavy, freaky, shredded mass almost as soon as I neared my first contest. I have discipline � I can diet. I can work out. I have a very active lifestyle, cycling everywhere in a large, hilly city. I�ve been piling on the mass ever since, and other than a plateau at 145 pounds which stopped me for almost a year (and which I finally broke by going onto a brief winstrol/clenbuterol cycle, but more about that elsewhere), the gains have been constant. I am now weighing in at 168 pounds. I keep lean, below 13% bodyfat at all times and as low as 8% when running hot; lower still for contests, and I like to frighten the bodyfat immersion tank guy when he comes around.

Where next? I don�t know. I would like to go pro, but there is much more to my life than bodybuilding. Keeping the extreme shredded look is hard work, and I am glad that I currently work part-time in a gym while studying for my PhD; lots of free gym time and supplements at cost price, thankyouverymuch. I have taken up sport climbing in concert with some friends, and maybe you�ll see us � the Gravity Grrls � in coming climbing contests. I�m the big one, heh. Meanwhile I try to offer help to people stuck in the eating disorder / self image trap, and am working on a thesis regarding strain injury healing while trying to balance my books and keep generally sane.

Triumphing over anorexia? Maybe. It seems a fair few muscle girls have come down the same path. Are we suffering from �bigorexia� instead? I can�t answer for us all. I love being big, hard and strong, and I crave more power, more mass, more shredded cuts. Maybe I have swapped one image obsession for another. But at least with this one I�m healthy, fit, and happy.