A gym fanatic suffered a near-fatal heart attack on a night out after becoming addicted to the effects of taking a cocktail of steroids.

Ryan Harriss, from Harlow, Essex, collapsed on a night out with friends six months after first taking the performance-enhancing drugs.

Once in hospital, doctors discovered the then 22-year-old's heart had swollen to the point it was much larger than normal, and his blood pressure had gone off the scale.

They warned Mr Harriss he would die if he continued to place his heart under the strain of taking the drugs.

There and then he vowed never to touch steroids again. 

Mr Harriss first began the drugs after seeing how well they had worked for friends he trained with at the gym. While he had been working hard, he wasn't seeing the same results as others. It was when friends told Mr Harriss that he would never achieve the results he wanted without the help of steroids, that he experimented for the first time.

After starting taking anabolic steroids, Mr Harriss admits he became addicted to how his body reacted.

'The difference was instant,' he told MailOnline. 'I started noticing the gains immediately. You are supposed to do steroids in courses, but I saw myself getting bigger and bigger. My arms toned up, my chest and back muscles were more defined and I went from a pretty average body to hench in a few weeks.'

Determined to get bigger and bigger, he began to up the dosage.    

'I started to do lots of different types of steroids - They call it stacking,' he told MailOnline. 'I didn't really stop or give my body any kind of a break. I'd started to get chest pains quite frequently, but I just ignored them and kept going to the gym. I didn't want to lose my new physique.' 

Six months after first starting to take the drugs, Mr Harriss was on a night out, having a few drinks when he collapsed.

'I became breathless,' he told MailOnline. 'I started getting really hot and was sweating. My chest went so tight and I got that feeling you hear about in my arm. It is hard to explain. I didn't know what was happening to start with, it was similar to a panic attack. But as my chest got tighter and tighter I realised what was happening to me. Everything went blurry and that's all I remember, I blacked out.'

When he woke up in a hospital bed, his girlfriend was holding his hand and crying.

'The doctors came in and informed me that I'd had a heart attack,' he recalled. 'They said my the rate my heart was beating, I was lucky to be alive.’

'It was horrifying,' he continued. 'I have never experienced anything like it in my life and pray I never do again.'

Mr Harriss has stuck to his word, in the last two years not one steroid has been injected into his body.